A Town The Recession Never Hit

The friendly rasp of ChatGPT’s ‘Sky’ voice is getting the AI company into hot water. Last week, OpenAI launched ChatGPT 4o, a new model of its chatbot assistant that converses in almost real time. Users could choose from five voices, including Sky, whose friendly intonation had a slight rasp vaguely reminiscent of Scarlett Johansson—an actor who, not coincidentally, had voiced an AI assistant in Her, a 2013 film that follows a man who falls in love with his computer’s operating system.

Scarlett Johansson said Monday that she was “shocked, angered and in disbelief” when she heard that OpenAI used a voice “eerily similar” to hers for its new ChatGPT 4.0 chatbot, even after she had declined to provide her voice. Earlier on Monday, OpenAI announced on X that it would pause the AI voice, known as “Sky,” while it addresses “questions about how we chose the voices in ChatGPT.” The company said in a blog post that the “Sky” voice was “not an imitation” of Johansson’s voice, but that it was recorded by a different professional actor, whose identity the company would not reveal to protect her privacy. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] But Johansson said in a statement to NPR on Monday that OpenAI’s Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman had asked her in September to voice the ChatGPT 4.0 system because he thought her “voice would be comforting to people.” She declined, but nine months later, her friends, family and the public noticed how the “Sky” voice resembled hers. “When I heard the released demo, I was shocked, angered and in disbelief that Mr.

(SARASOTA, Fla.) — Trump Media and Technology Group, the owner of former President Donald Trump’s social networking site Truth Social, lost more than $300 million last quarter, according to its first earnings report as a publicly traded company. For the three-month period that ended March 31, the company posted a loss of $327.6 million, which it said included $311 million in non-cash expenses related to its merger with a company called Digital World Acquisition Corp., which was essentially a pile of cash looking for a target to merge with.

Enlarge (credit: ullstein bild / Getty Images News) Federal authorities have arrested a 23-year-old Taiwanese national and charged him with running an online market that sold $100 million worth of illicit narcotics, including fentanyl, cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, LSD, and ketamine. The authorities said that for almost four years, Rui-Siang Lin operated and owned the Incognito Market, an online marketplace on the dark web that users worldwide visited to buy and sell illegal narcotics.

It was one of about 50 winners across the country.

The pages of fine print that skiers and snowboarders must agree to when hitting the slopes in Colorado — waivers of liability — do not protect ski resorts when resorts violate state laws or regulations, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled Monday. The ruling, handed down in the case of a 16-year-old girl who fell from a ski lift at Crested Butte Mountain Resort and was paralyzed two years ago, likely ends a years-long push by the ski industry to use waivers to shield resorts against almost all lawsuits, even in cases where ski areas violated state law, experts said. “It’s a sea change, in terms of ski areas’ responsibilities and consumers’ ability to be protected from ski areas’ negligence,” said Evan Banker, a personal injury attorney at Denver firm Chalat Hatten & Banker.