Elon Musk likened OpenAI’s use of voice for ChatGPT to Scarlett Johansson’s voice being something out of the TV series Black Mirror .

” Black Mirror in real life ,” Elon Musk wrote on social network X in response to a post about the controversy. Previously, the famous 39-year-old American actress criticized OpenAI and revealed that she had turned down an offer to voice the company’s AI chatbot.

Elon Musk has been publicly unhappy with OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman. Elon Musk, along with Sam Altman and others, founded OpenAI as a non-profit organization in 2015, focusing on the safe and transparent development of AI. Elon Musk left the OpenAI board in 2018, citing conflicts of interest. Specifically, the billionaire wanted to become CEO of OpenAI, but Sam Altman and the other co-founders did not agree.

Since then, Elon Musk has been a frequent critic of OpenAI and Sam Altman, and filed a lawsuit against both companies in late February 2024, accusing the companies of betraying their original mission of developing responsible artificial general intelligence (AGI). AGI is super-intelligent AI, so advanced that it can do many tasks as well as or better than humans.

In July 2023, Elon Musk founded his own AI company called xAI and launched the chatbot Grok in November 2023 to compete with ChatGPT.

OpenAI has struggled since the launch of GPT-4o, its latest multimodal AI language model capable of real-time voice conversation, interacting with both text and images.

The May 14 demonstration of GPT-4o showed OpenAI employees chatting with ChatGPT, whose voice sounded exactly like Scarlett Johansson’s in the 2013 Spike Jones film Her , in which a man falls in love with an AI chatbot voiced by Scarlett Johansson.

Scarlett Johansson said she was “shocked, angry and in disbelief” that OpenAI used a synthetic voice in ChatGPT that “uncannily resembled her voice”.

The U40 actress said that Sam Altman offered to hire her in September 2023 to voice ChatGPT 4.0. However, Scarlett Johansson turned down the offer for “personal reasons”.

“Two days before the ChatGPT 4.0 demo was released, Mr. Altman contacted my agent and asked me to reconsider,” Scarlett Johansson revealed.

The actress said she had hired legal counsel and that OpenAI “reluctantly agreed” to remove Sky’s voice after her attorney sent two letters to Sam Altman.

“At a time when we are all grappling with deepfakes and the protection of our likenesses, our work, our identities, I believe these are questions that need to be addressed. I look forward to addressing them in a transparent manner and through appropriate legislation to help ensure that individual rights are protected,” Scarlett Johansson wrote.

In a statement shared with Insider, Sam Altman apologized to Scarlett Johansson for not communicating better, but insisted that Sky’s voice was not meant to mimic hers. OpenAI said it worked with professional voice actors to create a series of AI voices, including Breeze, Cove, Ember, Juniper, and Sky.

OpenAI wasn’t the only target of Elon Musk’s X jabs on May 21. The social media mogul compared Microsoft’s new AI feature, Recall, to an episode of Black Mirror, saying he would “definitely turn it off.”

Recall tracks everything done on a computer, from web browsing to voice chat, creating a history stored on the computer that users can search when they need to remember something they did, even months later.

Turmoil at OpenAI

In addition to the Scarlett Johansson incident, OpenAI faced another problem when many senior executives left after GPT-4o’s launch.

On May 15, Ilya Sutskever (co-founder and former chief scientist of OpenAI) announced that he would leave the company.

Ilya Sutskever said he is working on a new project that “means a lot to me personally and I will share details at the right time”.

On X, Sam Altman praised Ilya Sutskever as “one of the greatest minds of our generation, a guiding light in the field of AI, and a dear friend.”

“OpenAI would not be what it is today without him. While he has meaningful personal work to pursue, I am forever grateful for what he has done here and committed to completing the mission we started together,” wrote Sam Altman.

Jakub Pachocki will be the new Chief Scientist of OpenAI. Previously, Jakub Pachocki was the Director of Research at OpenAI and led the development of the large language model GPT-4 with OpenAI Five.

Ilya Sutskever played a key role in the dramatic firing and rehiring of Sam Altman in November 2023. At the time, Ilya Sutskever was a member of OpenAI’s board of directors and voted to fire Sam Altman. However, most OpenAI employees threatened to quit if they did not bring Sam Altman back into the CEO role.

Days later, Ilya Sutskever reversed the decision, signing a letter from employees asking OpenAI to reinstate Sam Altman and expressing regret for his “involvement in board activities.”

After Sam Altman returned as OpenAI CEO, Ilya Sutskever was removed from the OpenAI board and his position at the company became unclear.

Although Sam Altman claimed to “bear no ill will toward Ilya Sutskever and want to continue our working relationship,” OpenAI’s CEO once admitted to The Verge that he was “hurt and angry” over being fired by the former board of directors.

Internally, Ilya Sutskever was seen as an AI “visionary” and his “academic” style was not well-liked by engineers like Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman. However, Sutskever’s contributions were still respected by many employees.

On May 17, Wired reported that OpenAI had disbanded Ilya Sutskever’s AI Risk Group. OpenAI said that researchers investigating the dangers of AI would be merged into other parts of the company.

Jan Leike, who led the AI ​​risk team with Ilya Sutskever, also announced his resignation on the evening of May 15 with a straightforward post on X: “I have resigned.”

Jan Leike shared more about his reasons for leaving and said OpenAI did not take safety seriously enough.

“Over the years, safety culture and processes have taken a back seat to flashy products,” Jan Leike wrote in a lengthy series of posts on X on May 17.

In his writings, Jan Leike said he joined OpenAI because he thought it would be the best place to research how to “navigate and control” AGI.

“However, I disagreed with OpenAI leadership on the company’s core priorities for quite some time, until we finally reached a dead end,” Jan Leike wrote.

The former OpenAI director argues that the company should focus most of its attention on issues of “security, surveillance, readiness, safety, adversarial capabilities, targeting, privacy, social impact, and related topics.”

Jan Leike reveals his former team, which researched how to make AI systems align with what’s best for humanity, was “going against the wind” at OpenAI.

“We are long overdue in seriously considering the implications of AGI. OpenAI must become a safety-first AGI company,” he wrote.

Jan Leike ended his X series with a note to OpenAI employees, encouraging them to change the company’s safety culture.

“I am counting on you. The world is counting on you,” he wrote.

Sam Altman responded to Jan Leike’s thread on X. “I really appreciate Jan Leike’s contributions to OpenAI’s research and safety culture, and am sad to see him leave. You’re right, we have a lot of work to do and are committed to doing it. I’ll have a longer post in the next few days,” wrote Sam Altman.

In addition to Jan Leike and Ilya Sutskever, Diane Yoon (former vice president of human resources) and Chris Clark (director of nonprofit and strategic initiatives) also left OpenAI, according to The Information. Last week, two other researchers working on AI safety left OpenAI. One of the researchers said he had lost confidence that OpenAI would “act responsibly in developing AGI.”