When OpenAI debuted its new voice assistant technology this month, it immediately drew comparisons to the 2013 Spike Jonze sci-fi film “Her.”

As it turns out, the likeness may have been too close for comfort.

Actor Scarlett Johansson, who voiced the computer program in “Her,” said she hired lawyers after discovering OpenAI released a ChatGPT voice that sounded eerily similar to hers without her granting permission.

In a Monday statement, Johansson said she was approached by OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, in September to voice the ChatGPT 4.0 system, but she declined to participate. Altman had pursued Johansson to lend her voice to the app because “he felt that my voice would be comforting to people,” Johansson said in her statement.

But after she declined, she was angered and shocked to hear a voice used in a demo by OpenAI that sounded like hers. Two days before the demo, Johansson said that Altman contacted her agent asking the actor to reconsider.

In the movie “Her,” Johansson plays “Samantha,” the disembodied voice of a computer who provides friendship and, eventually, love to a lonely man played by Joaquin Phoenix.

“In a time when we are all grappling with deepfakes and the protection of our own likeness, our own work, our own identities, I believe these are questions that deserve absolute clarity,” Johansson said in a statement. “I look forward to resolution in the form of transparency and the passage of appropriate legislation to help ensure that individual rights are protected.”

OpenAI on Monday said it is pausing the use of the voice known as “Sky,” which some people say sounds like Johansson.

“We’ve heard questions about how we chose the voices in ChatGPT, especially Sky,” OpenAI posted on X on Monday. “We are working to pause the use of Sky while we address them.”

Altman seemed to invite parallels to the film in his announcement of the interactive voice feature, saying in a blog post that it “feels like AI from the movies.” “Her” was nominated for multiple Oscars, with Jonze winning the Academy Award for original screenplay.

On May 13, Altman posted the word “her” on X, which many observers interpreted as a direct reference to the Oscar-winning movie.

Despite the striking sonic resemblance, OpenAI said that Johansson did not actually provide the voice of Sky, one of multiple voice options available on the app. Rather, another actor was using her own “natural speaking voice,” OpenAI said in a Monday blog post.

“We believe that AI voices should not deliberately mimic a celebrity’s distinctive voice,” the company said.

Altman in a statement said that the company had cast the voice actor behind Sky’s voice before it had reached out to Johansson.

“The voice of Sky is not Scarlett Johansson’s, and it was never intended to resemble hers,” Altman said in a statement. “Out of respect for Ms. Johansson, we have paused using Sky’s voice in our products. We are sorry to Ms. Johansson that we didn’t communicate better.”

The controversy comes at a time when concerns have been raised within the entertainment industry about whether copyrighted material is used to train AI models.

OpenAI has said its large language models, including those that power ChatGPT, are developed through information available publicly on the internet; material acquired through licenses with third parties; and data its users and “human trainers” provide.

The company has said it believes training AI models on publicly available materials on the internet is “fair use.”

But some media outlets, including the New York Times, have sued OpenAI, concerned about how its stories are used by the tech company.

Sony Music Group is in the process of sending out hundreds of letters to AI developers and music streaming services, including OpenAI and Google, warning them to not use its artists’ music to train generative AI tools without its permission. Actors and writers also have raised concerns about AI’s impact on their livelihoods.

Talent agencies are being proactive in protecting their clients against unauthorized use of their likeness and voice. Century City-based Creative Artists Agency is helping clients through the Vault, which scans clients’ bodies and records their movements and voices to create a digital version of them to protect against copyright infringement.

Johansson is a client of CAA. CAA declined to comment.

OpenAI said that the voices for ChatGPT — called Breeze, Cove, Ember, Juniper and Sky — are from voice actors who went through an audition process. More than 400 people applied. Some of the characteristics OpenAI was seeking include “a voice that feels timeless” and “an approachable voice that inspires trust.”

The selected actors came to San Francisco to record their voices in June and July of 2023, and their voices were added in September of that year, the company said. The company said the actors were compensated with “above top-of-market rates” and that they were aware of the intentions and scope of the project.

“To protect their privacy, we cannot share the names of our voice talents,” OpenAI said.

Red Lobster, the seafood chain whose cheddar biscuits and bottomless shrimp specials have long captivated the American palate and pocketbook, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection Sunday.

The behemoth of casual dining, which abruptly shuttered dozens of locations last week, has floundered in recent years, beset by managerial missteps, the impact of a sale to a private equity firm a decade ago and, most recently, its inability to bounce back after pandemic closures battered the restaurant industry.

In a court filing, the Orlando, Fla.-based company said it has more than 100,000 creditors and between $1 billion and $10 billion in estimated liabilities. The chain said it saw a net loss of $76 million during the last fiscal year alone.

“This restructuring is the best path forward for Red Lobster,” Chief Executive Jonathan Tibus said in a statement.

The chain said its remaining locations — about 580 across the U.S. and Canada, as well franchise locations in a handful of other countries — will operate as usual throughout the bankruptcy process.

Despite its dire situation, the chain painted itself in court papers as a diminished but still powerful company.

“Today, Red Lobster is the largest casual dining seafood chain in the United States,” the filing says — with “the largest” underlined for emphasis. The chain purchases 20% of all North American lobster tails sold, it said, and more than 15% of the world’s supply of rock lobster.

But the company acknowledged that its performance has deteriorated in recent years. In the bankruptcy filing, it says that the number of customers each year has dropped by nearly a third since 2019.

Several factors contributed to losses last year, the company said, including market forces, such as inflation, and above-market rates paid for rent at several locations.

For years, Red Lobster, which was founded in 1968 in Lakeland, Fla., was owned by Darden Restaurants, the company that owns Olive Garden and LongHorn Steakhouse. In 2014, Darden sold the chain to Golden Gate Capital, a San Francisco private equity firm, for more than $2 billion.

As part of that sale, Red Lobster agreed to spin off its real estate assets in a sale-leaseback transaction, requiring the chain to pay rent for locations it once owned. Last year, Red Lobster shelled out more than $190 million in lease obligations, according to the bankruptcy filing.

Another serious misstep: last year’s “Ultimate Endless Shrimp” promotion for $20.

During a presentation last year, Ludovic Garnier, chief financial officer of Thai Union Group, a seafood conglomerate that eventually took over the equity firm’s stake in Red Lobster, blamed the shrimp deal in large part for an operating loss of about $11 million during the third quarter.

Debtors are investigating the circumstances surrounding the promotion, bankruptcy records show.

While a single bungled promotion wouldn’t fell a company unless it was already teetering, the all-you-can-eat deal was a blunder, experts say.

Red Lobster launched the promotion as consumers were on the hunt for a good deal, said Jim Salera, a research analyst at Stephens who tracks the restaurant industry. Instead of accomplishing what the company had hoped for — enticing swaths of people who would buy pricey drinks, desserts and other add-on charges or those who would become brand loyalists — the promotion was viewed by many consumers as a challenge, Salera said.

“People were literally going in to just eat the endless shrimp and maybe a Diet Coke,” he said. “They’re really not engaging with the brand; they’re engaging with the price point.”

Exxon Mobil can’t say it wasn’t warned.

Having opted to continue its lawsuit against two activist investor groups even after they withdrew a shareholder proposal the company management opposed, the giant oil company had gotten flayed by shareholder advocates for its bullying.

Now the big shoe has dropped: CalPERS, the largest public pension fund in the nation, announced Monday that it will vote against all 12 Exxon Mobil board members, including CEO Darren Woods, at the May 29 annual meeting.

CalPERS says it’s acting because it judges the company’s campaign against the two investor groups to be “designed to punish” investors who “dared to speak truth to power.”

The pension fund says, “the repercussions of the lawsuit could be devastating….If ExxonMobil succeeds in silencing voices and upending the rules of shareholder democracy, what other subjects will the leaders of any company make off limits? Worker safety? Excessive executive compensation?”

The announcement is a major step up from the pension fund’s earlier comments about its intentions. Michael Cohen, the CalPERS chief operating investment officer, had earlier said only that the fund was considering voting against Woods.

Voting against the entire board and publicly urging other investors “to do the same,” appreciably raises the stakes for Exxon, at least theoretically. CalPERS — the California Public Employees’ Retirement System — is an institutional investor to be reckoned with. The $496-billion fund owns about $1 billion in Exxon Mobil shares.

Exxon Mobil’s lawsuit “is a real problem for us as share owners,” CalPERS CEO Marcie Frost said during a press conference Monday. “We believe that our voice matters, that we should be able to provide proxy solicitations asking the company to be more transparent in certain areas.”

Exxon called CalPERS’ action “a poor fiduciary decision.” The company said through a spokesperson, “It’s unclear why CalPERS is spending their time and energy defending the abuse of a shareholder process…Far from having a chilling effect on shareholder proposals, our efforts are intended to get clarity on the rules to foster an environment for open and meaningful shareholder dialogue. If anything, CalPERS’ vote against our entire board appears to be an attempt to ‘chill’ shareholder voices.”

As I reported last week, in February Exxon Mobil sued the U.S. investment firm Arjuna Capital and Netherlands-based green shareholder firm Follow This to keep a shareholder resolution they sponsored from appearing on the agenda of its annual meeting. The resolution was a plain-vanilla environmental proposal urging the company to work harder to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions of its products and to be more transparent about the impact of its business on the climate.

Days after the company sued, the shareholders, calculating their relative strength against the oil behemoth, withdrew the proposal and pledged not to refile it in the future. That rendered the lawsuit moot — but the company has refused to drop it.

What makes the lawsuit seem especially cynical is that the investors’ proposal, like all such proposals, are not binding on management — they’re advisory only. Moreover, as Frost pointed out, similar proposals in 2022 and 2023 failed to garner majority support from shareholders, winning only 10.5% of votes in 2022 and 27% last year.

“Exxon won,” Frost said.

It’s unlikely that CalPERS’ action will result in the board’s ouster. As CalPERS CEO Marcie Frost noted during a press conference Monday, no alternative slate of directors has been named for the upcoming annual meeting, so it would be “very difficult to say we’re turning over this board.”

But she said the fund’s vote is “more than symbolic” — it’s more about “sending the appropriate messages to this about their responsibilities in governance; if they don’t want to deal with governance they should step aside.”

Although CalPERS supported a slate of activist board members nominated in 2021— three of the four nominees won board seats — the fund said it is voting against the entire board because it is “allowing Chief Executive Officer Darren Woods to pursue a reckless and destructive effort.”

Frost said CalPERS isn’t contemplating taking a more aggressive action against Exxon Mobil, such as divesting its shares. “The problem with divestment when you’re CalPERS is that you completely lose your voice. The moment you don’t own shares, you can’t sign on to other owners’ proposals, you can’t take action to say we don’t believe that executive compensation is commensurate with the performance of the company.”

Exxon Mobil asserts in its lawsuit that the investment funds’ proposed resolution breached standards set forth by the Securities and Exchange Commission governing the propriety of such resolutions — it was related to “the company’s ordinary business operations” and closely resembled resolutions on similar topics that had failed to exceed threshold votes at the 2022 and 2023 annual meetings. Both standards allow a company to block a resolution from the meeting agenda, or proxy.

That may be so, but the conventional practice is for managements to seek approval from the SEC to exclude such resolutions by requesting what’s known as an agency “no action” letter.

CalPERS says that would have been “the better option” than a lawsuit. It’s not as though the SEC had set a high bar to issuing “no action” letters — the pension fund observes that the agency has approved two-thirds of those requests so far this year. Frost conjectured that, given the poor showing of similar proposals in the recent past, the SEC probably would have allowed the company to exclude the latest proposal from the annual meeting proxy.

Exxon Mobil’s rationale for continuing the lawsuit is that the proposal rules “must be enforced or the abuse by activists masquerading as shareholders will continue threatening the system.”

Frost questioned the company’s position. She described Exxon Mobil’s goal in the lawsuit as obtaining “clarity around the ordinary business” standard. But “to me it doesn’t feel like ‘clarity’; it feels like diminishment” of shareholder voices. As for the company’s insinuation that the system is broken, she said, “the system is working, if you use the system.”