Johansson sounds a warning about AI

Scarlett Johansson was Samantha, but she is not Sky.

- VINAY MENON

Not wanting to tangle with Scarlett Johansson — who recently sued Disney over a contractual dispute and got the behemoth to settle — OpenAI has “discontinued” the chatbot voice of Johansson sound-alike Sky.

Confused? Just wait until someone you know gets emotionally attached to the disembodied voice of a chatbot. As in “Her,” the 2013 film in which Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) falls in love with Samantha (voiced by Johansson).

That movie was creepy. Now it seems eerily prescient.

But the words Johansson used this week were “eerily similar.” She was referring to Sky, one of the voices featured in OpenAI’s new ChatGPT 4o. As she noted in a statement: “When I heard the released demo, I was shocked, angered and in disbelief that Mr. Altman (OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman) would pursue a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine that my closest friends and news outlets could not tell the difference …”

It’s amazing how the humans foisting artificial intelligence upon the world can be so dumb. The company denied Sky is a Johansson sound-alike. Come on. When I first heard Sky, I looked over my shoulder expecting to see Joaquin in beige chinos drawing devil horns on a photo of Colin Jost.