OpenAI’s ‘Sky’ sounds a lot like ScarJo, according to voice researchers

Researchers at Arizona State College discovered that Scarlett Johansson’s voice does certainly sound like “Sky,” OpenAI’s currently discontinued GPT-4o voice, according to NPR, which commissioned the comparability. After utilizing AI fashions developed to investigate vocal similarities to check Sky to roughly 600 different actresses, the lab reportedly discovered Johansson’s voice was “extra just like Sky than 98% of the opposite actresses.”

However the fashions additionally “usually” discovered that the voices of Anne Hathaway and Keri Russell resembled Sky’s greater than did Johansson’s. Visar Berisha, the professor who led the evaluation, advised NPR that Johansson’s voice is “comparable, however doubtless not an identical” to that of Sky.

One similarity was reportedly that if Sky had a vocal tract — the throat, mouth, and nasal passages that form a given voice — it could be simply so long as Johansson’s. However the fashions additionally discovered that Sky’s voice was just a little higher-pitched and extra expressive than Johansson’s, whereas Johansson’s is “barely extra breathy” than that of OpenAI’s mannequin, the outlet writes.

Berisha advised The Verge by way of e-mail that the “black field” nature of AI fashions like these used on this evaluation makes it “obscure exactly what vocal similarities and variations the mannequin is figuring out” or why they may deem one voice extra comparable than one other. Berisha’s different work contains OriginStory (PDF), an FTC challenge-winning microphone that watermarks voice recordings as human-created. OpenAI didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.

Each OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and CTO Mira Murati have denied that Sky is meant to sound like Johansson. After its GPT-4o demo earlier this month — after which Altman revealed a one-word post that merely learn “her” — Johansson said that Altman had requested her to lend her voice to the mannequin, which she declined, and that he tried once more as not too long ago as two days previous to the demo.

Replace June 2nd, 2024, 8:07AM ET: Added remark by ASU professor Visar Berisha and clarified wording on comparisons between Sky and Johansson.