OpenAI CEO responds to jokes that GPT-4o sounds like Scarlett Johansson

The CEO of OpenAI has responded after social media users joked about new AI programme GPT-4o sounding an awful lot like Scarlett Johansson.

As film fans will know, Johansson provided the voice of the AI model in the 2013 film Her. The Spike Jonze movie stars Joaquin Phoenix as a man who enters into a relationship with a virtual AI assistant named Samantha.

The comparison has been made between the film and the new artificial intelligence model, GPT-4o, after it was unveiled this week.

Chat-GPT was first introduced in 2022 and the new model has been launched, with clips showing it interacting with users by listening, observing users and speaking to humans.

The product announcement video from OpenAI bills the new model as “a step towards much more natural human-computer interaction”.

The promo clips show the GPT-4o model observing what the user was wearing – an OpenAI hoodie – as well as changing the emotion of its voice when telling a story.

The voice has been compared to the 2013 film by social media users and it’s received such a reaction that even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman made reference to it online.

One person who tweeted was tech designer Brett Goldstein who said: “Open AI’s new model is insane, Her is real.”

Altman, referencing the topic online, simply posted: “Her.”

Altman has previously discussed the film Her, and claimed that the movie got a lot right in its depiction of AI.

"I like Her. The things Her got right - like the whole interaction models of how people use AI - that was incredibly prophetic," Altman said while speaking to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff back in 2023.

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