It's probably the CEO just clumsily stumbled into the comparison.

He was probably not personally aware she was contacted, and it just so happened that his dumb movie reference hit a nerve.

The alternative is that he knew they were ripping off Scarlett Johansson and then publicly compared them. Which seems too stupid to be true.

I think we should retire the phrase “too stupid to be true” at this point. I think many of these CEOs are just as stupid as the rest of us, except they have a special interest in something really profitable.

I didn’t really think it sounded much like Johansson, but it looks like OpenAI decided to pull the voice(?). They are in a better position to evaluate their liabilities (or the PR cost of having the perception that are ripping her off, whether or not it is right). Hopefully they’ll add it back, Johansson doubles down, and then we can get a court case to satisfy everybody. Both entities have plenty of money to spend on this, having them battle it out seems like a real win. (It would have been a real shame if a small no-name voice actor without the cash to fight OpenAI felt copied instead).

> The alternative is that he knew they were ripping off Scarlett Johansson and then publicly compared them. Which seems too stupid to be true.

People, even Silicon Valley CEOs, doing things that seem “too stupid to be true”, happens a lot more than most people think.

Washington Post rated this the sixth stupidest thing a tech CEO has done recently: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/05/21/chatgpt...

The problem is, a lot of conspiracy thinking relies on people being publicly stupid and careless, then privately extremely cautious and careful. The Washington Post looks at what was happening internally when the voice was created, and finds that the casting call didn’t ask for anyone who sounds like Johansson, and the actress wasn’t told to sound like her or imitate anything from Her. People say, “That doesn’t mean anything, maybe they were just keeping their intent hidden!”

OK, but then they openly blast it all over Twitter? If you’re so open about what you’re trying to do with everyone in the world, yet you didn’t bother mentioning to the voice actress who’s supposedly going to implement this?

Those tweets were made on May 13th and 14th, so they’re pretty clearly in reference to 4o, and the effort to make the chat seem more lifelike (similar to the AI in the movie “Her”). The Sky voice came out last year, and it doesn’t seem like anyone at the company referenced “Her” when it did (from what I can find).

The voice chat didn’t seem to be particularly well publicized. People mention how after the 4o announcement, many people started voice chatting for the first time (and mistaking it for 4o voice chat) because they hadn’t realized the voice chat was there before.