This definitely isn’t the AI in “Her.”
Scarlett Fever
Famed Hollywood actor Scarlett Johanson is taking legal action against an AI app developer for stealing her voice and likeness for an online ad, Variety reports.
And no, we’re not talking about her role in the 2013 dystopian drama “Her,” which featured her as a disembodied voice assistant called “Samantha” with whom the movie’s protagonist, played by Joaquin Phoenix, falls in love.
No, it’s about a 22-second ad posted to X-formerly-Twitter by an AI image-generating app called Lisa AI: 90s Yearbook & Avatar, which allows users to create AI avatars or apply artistic filters to images. The ad shows the “Black Widow” star’s face in several AI-generated images and mimics her voice as well.
It appeared briefly on October 28 and has “since vanished from the internet,” per Variety, though the publication was able to review a copy.
The app’s developers clearly didn’t get Johansson’s consent first. Kevin Yorn, a representative for Johansson, confirmed to Variety that she was not a spokesperson for the app.
“We do not take these things lightly,” he told the publication. “Per our usual course of action in these circumstances, we will deal with it with all legal remedies that we will have.”
Fighting Back
It’s the latest instance of a celebrity fighting back after their face or voice was used against their consent to train an AI. Just last month, Tom Hanks warned his followers on social media someone was using his AI likeness to promote a “dental plan.”
“BEWARE!!” the actor wrote in an Instagram post. “There’s a video out there promoting some dental plan with an AI version of me. I have nothing to do with it.”
Last month, English actor and broadcaster Stephen Fry said that “it’s fucking weird time to be alive” after having an AI be trained on extensive clips of his voice without his consent.
And the way the technology is progressing, we’ll likely see a lot more cases like it, from an AI voice clone of the late Johnny Cash singing Taylor Swift’s “Blank Space” to Facebook’s blonde, 21st-century Jane Austen.
Whether public figures like Johansson will end up having legal recourse, however, remains to be seen.
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