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Meredith Whittaker isn’t holding back on OpenAI.
in Interview with TechCrunch In an article published on Friday, Whittaker was asked what he thought about allegations that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman asked Scarlett Johansson to provide the voice for the company’s AI assistant, and then released a Johansson lookalike for the company’s products after Johansson declined.
“It’s like edge lord ramblings. It’s so disrespectful. It’s completely unnecessary,” Whittaker told TechCrunch.
She continued, “And it really peels back the veil of this myth that you’re all serious people at the pinnacle of science, creating the next deity, but it’s clear that this culture is a dorm room tirade fueled by a bunch of ‘yes men’ who think every joke you tell is funny, and who are being paid to do so. And there’s no one around to grab these leaders by the shoulders and say, ‘What the hell are you doing?'”
OpenAI did not immediately respond to Business Insider’s request for comment on Whitaker’s interview.
Earlier this week, Whittaker weighed in on the matter on X (formerly Twitter).
In response to an account that reposted Johansson’s statement accusing OpenAI of stealing her voice, Whitaker wrote on Tuesday.“The edge-lord disrespect, unprofessionalism, and strategic missteps that are typical of real-world decision-making in the AI industry speak far louder than any voluntary safety pledges.”
“In fact, these pledges primarily serve to highlight how far apart words and actions are,” Whittaker continued.
OpenAI launched its artificial intelligence voice option, “Sky,” last week in conjunction with the company’s announcement of its new GPT-4o large-scale language model, and people immediately began noticing the similarity of the voice to Johansson’s, particularly in her performance in the 2013 film “Her,” in which she played the AI assistant the protagonist falls in love with.
Johansson released a statement on Monday alleging that Altman had previously approached her to voice Skye but that she had turned him down.
Altman is stated in a blog post OpenAI maintained that it had not intended for Skye’s voice to resemble Johansson’s, and that the voice came from another actress it had hired. One word description of X After product launch: “Her”
OpenAI said it had suspended the use of Sky voice in its products.