After Actress Scarlett Johansson said she was “shocked, angered, and in disbelief” when OpenAI’s latest chat bot GPT-4o spoke in a voice “eerily” similar to hers.
| Photo Credit: Reuters
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OpenAI pulls back its voice feature
After Actress Scarlett Johansson said she was “shocked, angered, and in disbelief” when OpenAI’s latest chat bot GPT-4o spoke in a voice “eerily” similar to hers, the Microsoft-backed company has pulled back the voice feature. OpenAI’s Sky voice sounded similar to Ms. Johansson’s voice from the 2013 film Her, in which she plays the role of a fictional AI assistant
In a statement to NPR, the Hollywood star said CEO Sam Altman had earlier approached her to licence her voice for the chatbot his company was building. An offer she declined.
Following her statement and a legal letter to Altman on how the company came up with the Sky voice, OpenAI said it will halt the use of Sky voice in its chatbot. OpenAI further said it believed that AI voices “should not deliberately mimic a celebrity’s distinctive voice” and that the voice of Sky belongs to a “different professional actress”. The company, however, refused to share the name of the professional for privacy reasons.
Deepfakes are the biggest threat to female influencers
An alarming 94% female influencers on Instagram fall victim to deepfake pornography with the risk increasing 15.7% for every 10,000 followers an influencer gain. Additionally, the possibility of falling victim to deepfake pornography increases as an influencer gains more followers. And individuals with a following of over 100 million have a susceptibility rate of 79%.
Overall, while 84% of social media influencers reportedly fell victim to deepfake pornography, 90% of them were found to be females. The problem of deepfakes was also found to impact social media influencers depending on the platform they used. Influencers on Instagram, due to its visual centric approach, were found to be the most vulnerable with a 94% chance of them being targeted.
Microsoft’s AI chatbot gets “recall” function
Microsoft wants laptop users to get so comfortable with its artificial intelligence chatbot that it will remember everything you’re doing on your computer and help figure out what you want to do next. With this in view, the software giant plans to integrate a new feature called Copilot into the Windows operating system for PCs, where Microsoft already has the eyes of millions of consumers.
The new features will include Windows Recall, giving the AI assistant what Microsoft describes as “photographic memory” of a person’s virtual activity. Microsoft promises to protect users’ privacy by giving them the option to filter out what they don’t want tracked and keeping the tracking on the device.