Meredith Whittaker isn’t holding back against OpenAI.
In an interview with TechCrunch published on Friday, Whittaker was asked what she thought about allegations that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman asked Scarlett Johansson to provide her voice for the company’s AI assistant and then, after Johansson declined, released a voice for their product that sounded similar to the actor.
“It’s just like … ‘Edge Lord’ bullshit. It’s so disrespectful. It’s so unnecessary,” Whittaker told TechCrunch.
She continued: “And it really tears the veil on this mythology that you’re all serious people at the apex of science building the next Godhead, when it’s very clear that the culture is dorm room high-jinks egged-on by a bunch of ‘Yes men’ who think every joke you say is funny, because they’re paid to do that, and no one around there is taking this leadership by the shoulders and saying ‘What the fuck are you doing!?'”
OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider on Whittaker’s interview.
Earlier in the week, Whittaker took to X, formerly Twitter, to voice her opinions on the topic.
In response to an account reposting Johansson’s statement accusing OpenAI of ripping off her voice, Whittaker wrote on Tuesday, “The edge lord disrespect, unprofessionalism, strategic blundering typical of actual decision making in the AI industry speaks infinitely louder than all the voluntary safety pledges ever could.”
“In fact,” Whittaker continued, “Those pledges serve mainly to highlight how far the walk is from the talk.”
OpenAI unveiled the “Sky” artificial intelligence voice option last week alongside an announcement about the company’s new GPT-4o large language model. People immediately began noting the voice’s similarity to Johansson’s, particularly her performance in the 2013 film “Her,” where the actor played an AI assistant that the main character falls in love with.
On Monday, Johansson released a statement alleging that Altman had previously approached her about voicing Sky, which she declined.
Altman has said in a blog post that OpenAI did not intend for Sky’s voice to resemble Johansson’s, and that the voice belongs to a different actress the company hired. But Altman had posted a single-word statement on X after the product’s launch: “her.”
The company has paused using the Sky voice in its products, OpenAI said.
