- OpenAI approached Scarlett last fall, and she refused.
- Two days before the GPT-4o launch, they contacted her agent and asked that she reconsider. (Two days! This means they already had everything they needed to ship the product with Scarlett’s cloned voice.)
- Not receiving a response, OpenAI demos the product anyway, with Sam tweeting “her” in reference to Scarlett’s film.
- When Scarlett’s counsel asked for an explanation of how the “Sky” voice was created, OpenAI yanked the voice from their product line.
Perhaps Sam’s next tweet should read “red-handed”.
OpenAI first demoed and launched the “Sky” voice in November last year. The new demo doesn’t appear to have a new voice.
I doubt it would take them long to prepare a new voice, and who’s to say they wouldn’t delay the announcements for a ScarJo voice?
A charitable interpretation of the “her” tweet would be a comparison to the conversational and AI capabilities of the product, not the voice specifically, but it’s certainly not a good look.