ChatGPT launching talking AI that sounds exactly like Scarlett Johansson in “Her” — on purpose?

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted the word "her" on social media after a demo that sounded just like the Spike Jonze movie.

The dystopian future is now.

Audiences who watched OpenAI’s livestream demonstration on Monday might have noticed something puzzling about the company’s new talking AI: it sounds suspiciously like Scarlett Johansson’s virtual character Samantha from Spike Jonze’s Her.

The company unveiled its new model, GPT-4o, which has real-time conversation capabilities that allows users to talk to it like a person.

The talking ChatGPT bot speaks with a warm, feminine voice with a slight rasp and a fairly unsettling level of enthusiasm, resulting in a vocal tone that sounds virtually identical to Johansson’s. The voice also has a playful sense of humor — during the demonstration, it tells engineer Mark Chen “You’re not a vacuum cleaner” to critique his comically intense deep breaths, and it also says “I got too excited” after it responds to a question too quickly.

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Chen also asks ChatGPT to tell a story about robots in love — a concept Jonze thoroughly explores in his film. The demonstration also shows that ChatGPT can interact with real-time visuals by looking through a smartphone camera. At one point, engineer Barrett Zoph shows the hand-written note “I <3 ChatGPT,” which prompts the AI to say, “Aww, I see ‘I love ChatGPT, that’s so sweet of you!” Later, it says, “You’re making me blush!”

Maybe the parallels to Jonze’s film — in which Joaquin Phoenix plays a lonely divorcée who becomes romantically attached to his AI assistant — are purely coincidental. OpenAI CTO Mira Murati told The Verge that the voice wasn’t intentionally designed to sound like Johansson. “Someone asked me in the audience this exact same question, and then she said, ‘Ah, maybe the reason I didn’t recognize it from ChatGPT is because the voice has so much personality and tonality,’” Murati said.

But that assertion seems questionable with the knowledge that OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, has cited Her as one of his favorite movies. "I like Her,” he said last year. “The things Her got right — like the whole interaction models of how people use AI — that was incredibly prophetic.”

In a blog post after Monday’s demo, Altman wrote, “The new voice (and video) mode is the best computer interface I’ve ever used. It feels like AI from the movies; and it’s still a bit surprising to me that it’s real.”

Additionally, Altman tweeted one word after the demo: “her.”

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The Johansson-esque voice, Sky, is one of five that are available to users, and these voices have been available with previous versions of the technology. So again, maybe it’s a coincidence.

But maybe it’s not.

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