There Are No Girls on the Internet, as a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget Tad and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet. Welcome to There Are No Girls on the Internet, where we explore the intersection of technology, social media, and identity and all of those things intersected in a major way this week with Scarlett Johanson and Open AI. So let's talk about it.
Full disclosure, I was already working on putting together an episode rewatching Spike Jones's twenty thirteen movie Her, starring Scarlett Johansson's voice as an AI assistant. I really wanted to compare and contrast what the movie thought AI integration with our life would be like and what it actually has been like ten years later. I'm really excited that the movie Her is part of the public conversation right now
because it's one of my favorite movies. If you haven't seen it, I don't want to give too much away, but Scarlet Johansson is the voice walking Phoenix's AI software. The movie imagines a future where AI is less like theory and more like a real human. People in the Her universe fall in love with AI. They have friendships and real meaningful relationships with AI. And that's partly because AI sounds like a real human person who speaks to you and behaves like a person would, not like a
robotic voice. And as I was preparing for that episode, the whole thing was Scarlett Johansson really blew up. And the more I thought about it, honestly, the matter I got Last night, I was getting ready for bed, and I was sort of angrily brushing my teeth, and I found myself thinking about this yet again, and the kind of chorus in my mind that I kept saying over and over to myself was that these tech guys just think they own whatever woman they want. Because to me,
this is not even really about Scarlett Johansson. It is about what happens when consent in technology is violated again and again and again, and how it erodes the trust that we should be able to count on being at the center of our tech experiences, and how it reinforces that the most powerful companies in our world who are shaping our collective futures, consistently demonstrate that they cannot be trusted to simply respect people, especially when those people are women. Okay,
so here's what's going on. Open Ai, the company that makes chat GPT and a major player in the AI space, has been flirting with integrating voice technology to chat geept since around last year, But last week open Ai finally revealed a new conversational interface for Chatgypt that they called Sky yep. Just like a lot of voice technology, Sky has the voice of a woman, but Sky also has a voice that is really similar to the one that Scarlett Johansson used to play the AI assistant called Samantha
in the movie Her. But then open ai suddenly disabled this feature over the weekend grand Opening Grand Closing. And this comes after open AI's head Sam Altman, who you might remember we made an episode about he was fired for something we don't totally know what, but it seemed to be related to his lack of honesty, and then he was rehired and is now basically doing whatever the
hell he wants. Well, Sam Altman was talking up this integration and comparing it to the movie Her and talking about how we'd finally have AI that felt like a real human that you could be friends with, which is a plot line right out of the movie which spoiler alert. I do think that some of these tech geniuses might actually be low key misunderstanding the takeaway from the movie.
But anyway, so shutting down this new voice technology after sam Altman was driving so much anticipation about it, everybody myself included, was like, what is going on? Like what's
the story there? So then on Monday we get the real team, which is that Scarlett Johansen told why or did a statement that open ai actually reached out to her to ask her to be the actual voice of their new conversational interface and she declined twice, and that open ai and I basically just used her voice anyway, or at least a voice that sounds a lot like her voice and open Ai sam Altman even tweeted a reference to her work in the movie Her when announcing
that new chat JPT voice interface, So there isn't really a ton of plausible deniability on his part even Okay, so this is what sky open AI's not. Scarlett Johansson's voice integration sounds like I.
Don't have a personal name, since I'm just a computer program created by open ai, but you can call me assistant.
What's your name? And here is Scarlett Johansson as the voice of the AI Samantha from the movie Her.
Well, right, when you asked me if I had a name, I thought, yeah, he's right. I do need a name, but I wanted to pick a good one, so I read a book called How to Name Your Baby, and out of one hundred and eighty thousand names, that's the one I like the best.
Well, you read a whole book in the second that I asked you what your name was in.
Two one hundreds of a second.
Actually, wow, it sounds pretty similar to me, and scar Ja agrees. Here's what she told Wired in a statement. Last September, I received an offer from Sam Altman, who wanted to hire me to voice the current chat GPT four point zero system. He told me that he felt by my voicing the system, I could bridge the gap between tech companies and creatives and help consumers to feel comfortable with the seismic shift concerning humans and AI. He said he felt my voice would be comforting to people.
After much consideration and for personal reasons, I declined the offer. Nine months later, my friends, family, and the general public all noted how much the newest system, named Sky sounded like me. When I heard the release demo, I was shocked. And angered and in disbelief that mister Altman would pursue a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine that my closest friends and news outlets could not tell the difference.
Mister Altman even insinuated that the similarity was intentional, tweeting a single word her a reference to the film in which I voiced a chat system Samantha who forms an intimate relationship with a Hue. Two days before the chat GPT four point zero demo was released, mister Altman contacted my agent, asking me to reconsider before we could connect
the system was out there. As a result of their actions, I was forced to hire legal counsel, who wrote two letters to mister Altman and open Ai setting out what they had done and asking them to detail the exact process by which they created the Sky Voice. Consequently, open Ai reluctantly agreed to take the sky Voice down. In a time where we are all grappling with deep stakes and the protection of our own likeness, our own work, our own identities, I believe these are questions that deserve
absolute clarity. I look forward to resolution in the form of transparency and the passage of appropriate legislation. To help
ensure that individual rights are protected. So I really applaud Johanson here, and I think this is the first time that there has been a legal dispute over a sound alike that is, as far as we know, not AI generated, and I think it could set a precedent for this kind of thing going forward, especially or voice actors and creative professionals who can't afford lawyer's feeds or a big lawsuit if their likeness or voice is used this way without their consent. Her statement is also just a good
reminder that Johansson has been here before. She is one of the most targeted celebrity figures for AI deep faked images. So finding out that open AI actually asked Scarlett Johanson to work on this twice and when she said no, they just found a sneaky workaround to do it anyway enrages me. It enrages me as a voice professional, It enrages me as a creative and it enrages me as
a woman. You know, when I say on the show that the exploitation of women is baked into technology in a lot of ways from the ground up, that these are features and not bugs. This is a great example of what I mean. It matters that a company like open ai would build their anticipated voice system in a way that has the exploitation of a woman baked into
its earliest foundation, and this is not happenstance. It colors how they see women and other marginalize people as just available to take from in service of them making money to create their vision, a vision that by design ignores and exploits us. Like, don't these people understand that no means no. I should say that open Ai says that they did not actually steal her voice, but I also want to say that I want one hundred percent do
not believe them at all. Here's open ai statement. We support the creative community and worked closely with the voice acting industry to ensure we took the right steps to cast chat GPT's voices. Each actor receives compensation above top of market rates, and this will continue for as long as their voices are used in our products. We believe that AI voices should not deliberately mimic a celebrity's distinct voice.
Sky's voice is not an imitation of Scarlett Johansson, but belongs to a different professional actress using her own natural speaking voice. To protect their privacy, we cannot share the names of our voice talents. So here's my opinion about what's actually going on. I believe that they probably did work with a human voice actor, and they probably intentionally picked a voice actor that sounded a lot like Scarlett Johansson, and I think they had this person ready to go,
whether or not Scarlett Johansson agreed to do this or not. Like, I don't think they really cared about actually having Scarlett Johansson's permission, and they were going to either use this sound alike or use Scarlett Johansson's real voice. Because in addition to his single word Her tweet, Sam Autman, the head of open ai, also said that the new AI
voice technology quote feels like AI from the movies. Open AI's chief technology officer, Mira Murradi, said that that was all a coincidence, but even still, it's like they want
to have it both ways. They obviously want us the public to be associating their new technology with the AI and the movie Her, and they're clearly trying to capitalize on that for this rollout, But they want to have all of that and benefit from all of that without actually having the consent from the real human woman behind the voice in the movie that they're referencing. As Bethany Frankel might put it, it is a cheater brand. Let's
take a quick break eder back. So I'm not an attorney, so I can't really speak to the legal frameworks at play here, but I do think it is a good opportunity to talk about consent in technology. So in my opinion, looking at the facts and the timeline, I believe open Ai picked a voice actor that sounded a lot like Scarlett Johansson to be able to complete this vision that they had been hyping up that merges creativity and technology
for their voice tech. And I think they were betting that legally they were in the clear because they were using a sound alike, But beyond what might happen in a lawsuit, to me, this is the classic story of someone trying to cover their ass after they weaseled out of getting consent. Like the question that OpenAI is asking is probably would we lose a lawsuit? The questions that they're not asking is is this ethical? Are we crossing the boundaries of what this person said they don't want
to do? Or questions like are we further damaging the trust between the technology that we make and that we want using it. And these are important questions that they should be asking, because once that trust is damaged, it is not easy to win back. And the entire thing makes me incredibly uncomfortable because I can't not see that we're talking about a woman whose body is being used
to financially benefit people who are mostly men. And these people who are mostly men have appointed themselves the architects of our future and have shown themselves to be the kind of people who are not interested in clear affirmative consent. I can't help but think that they feel as entitled to the body and likeness of a woman as they do to everyone's data and information online that they use to train their AI without consent for their own profit.
It's about entitlement, and why would anybody watching trust these people. If open ai thinks like their statement says that this was done working with the creative voice talent industry and meant to be done in a respectful way, I think it's fair to say that as an industry, we are not buying it. We're smart enough to see these tricks and know that if this is how you're moving that none of us should trust you, and I think that open ai really needs to understand and internalize why we
are also skeptical. It's because of their own behavior. This is a natural consequence of their actions. Scores of writers and artists and creative professionals have already had to sue open ai, specifically for using their intellectual property to train their AI without their permission, and a big bulk of the Hollywood Writer Strikes was about AI stealing the work of creative professionals and then being used to replace those
same creative professionals. Like open ai doesn't get to act all shocked that people are then naturally skeptical of their
intentions and there just is a better way. On the podcast I make with the Mozilla Foundation called IRL that explores ethics in AI, we spoke to artists Matt Dryhurst and Holly Herndon who are building AI consent systems at haveiben trained dot com that allows people to search popular AI training data sets to see if their work shows up in them and makes it easy for people to opt out of having their work used to train AI models.
Holli is a musician and she built this publicly available version of her own voice that anybody can play with. So they're both big advocates of what can be created using AI when consent is at the forefront. In a piece for Art Review called AI art in the Problem of Consent, they underscore the importance of the intersection of AI and creativity being grounded in consent writing. My hope is that a new era of abundant media will affirm this social value of art and artists, And this is
why establishing new protocols of consent is so vital. I am a deep believer in AI augmented expression and have no desire to limit experimentation or enshrine outdated IP laws. I would simply like to avoid what a world looks like in the absence of consent. When consent is absent, beautiful relationships and connections are stymied that could instead have been nurtured. I hope the dress rehearsal of an AI art future we are witnessing highlights what an opportunity we
have to finally fix those damned broken links. And I think that's exactly what we have here. Trust has been eroded, consent has been violated, and those links have been broken. So what's next, while Scarjo is not backing down and Homegirl is notoriously not afraid of a lawsuit. This is the woman who mounted a legal contract dispute against Disney, a notoriously litigious company, and walked away with a settlement. So I don't see Scarlet Johansson's team backing off without
a fight. Open AI did pause the use of Sky and apologize directly Johansson, saying we are sorry to Johansson that we didn't communicate better, and I want to get into all of this more in our episode breaking down her. But even the conversation about them wanting to use Scarlet Johansson's voice tells me a lot about how open ai
is thinking about technology in this moment. It's like they want to give us the illusion that they're finding thoughtful ways to link creativity, connection, and technology in our futures, which is why they're trying to reference Johansson's voice from her, a movie that is at its core about sad, lonely creative people surrounded by technology and searching for connection. But it's just that, like a shallow, empty movie reference, open
AI cannot actually give us connection or community. The best they can do is a movie reference that uses a smooth, stolen voice to kind of mimic those things if you
don't look at it too closely. Sam Autman told Scarlet Johansson that using her voice would give people comfort and ease around this technology, people who maybe were a little bit anxious about how quickly AI technologlogy has proliferated, and it's like they can't actually sort out a way to make technology that gives people a genuine reason to feel
comfort about it. They can only offer a quick workaround, and worse, in trying to reference this, tech leaders are showing that they think it's okay to do all of this without a strong foundation of consent. They think they have rights to whatever woman's body or whatever woman's voice they want without permission. And none of this bodes well for the kinds of futures they're going to use technology
to try to create. And if these are the people who have appointed themselves to build all of our futures, then for everyone's sake, they have got to be better. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech, or just want to say hi, You can reach us at Hello at tengodi dot com. You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tengody dot com. There Are No Girls on the Internet was created by me Brigitad. It's
a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed creative. Jonathan Stricklet is our executive Pretty Tarry Harrison is our producer and sound engineer. Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, check out the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.