OpenAI Should Have Gone Way Beyond Scarlett Johansson

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Let's get this out of the way: OpenAI's voice assistant doesn't sound that much like Scarlett Johansson. The movie star has alleged that, though she rebuffed multiple attempts by Sam Altman, the company's CEO, to license her voice for the product that it demoed last week, the one it ended up using was "eerily similar" to her own. Not everyone finds the similarity so eerie--to my ear, it lacks her distinctive smoky rasp--but at the very least, the new AI does appear to imitate the playful lilts and cadences that Johansson used while playing Samantha, the digital assistant in the 2013 film Her. That's depressing--and not only because OpenAI may have run roughshod over Johansson's wishes, but because it has made such an unimaginative choice.