OpenAI is once again navigating the murky waters of copyright within its AI models, as actress Scarlett Johansson threatens legal action against the company for allegedly copying her voice after she refused to license it.

Johansson claims OpenAI CEO Sam Altman twice asked her to voice a new AI assistant powered by its latest AI model GPT-4o. She declined. 

But when OpenAI demoed a voice called “Sky” last week, Johansson said it sounded “eerily similar to mine.”

Altman added fuel to the fire by posting on X the word “her” on the same day as the release, a potential reference to the 2013 sci-fi film in which Johansson voices an AI assistant, which the CEO said last year was his favorite movie.

Johansson’s lawyers sent two letters to OpenAI asking it to detail the process by which it developed the voice, NPR reported. 

The inquiries prompted OpenAI to suspend its use of “Sky” over the weekend “while we address” questions, the company said. It has denied any connection between Johansson and the new voice assistant, claiming the voice “belongs to a different professional actress.”

Actors union SAG-AFTRA offered its support to Johansson on Tuesday and said it was calling for federal legislation to protect the voices and likenesses of its members.

This isn’t Johansson’s first case of potential AI replication. She took legal action against an AI app called Lisa AI: 90s Yearbook & Avatar last November, claiming it used her name and likeness in an ad without permission, per Variety.

At the same time, OpenAI continues to ramp up its licensing agreements in a bid to avoid further legal action. On Wednesday, it struck a deal with News Corp to use the media conglomerate’s consumer-facing news and archives to answer queries and train its models.

Big tech companies are integrating AI into more of their advertising products, while at the same time ramping up controls for marketers so they can better protect their brand identities in an increasingly automated industry.

Google announced Tuesday it will enable advertisers to upload a brand reference asset within Product Studio, which houses its AI-powered asset generation tools, to be used alongside text prompts when generating different product scenes. It said this will facilitate the creation of “more on brand” content. Advertisers can also share their brand guidelines, such as their fonts and colors, alongside image reference points within Performance Max to inform asset generation.

Keeping generated assets “on brand” was mentioned several times throughout a press briefing ahead of the company’s annual Google Marketing Live event, suggesting that brand consistency can be challenging to control when creating assets with AI. 

Meta earlier this month rolled out an AI-powered image variation tool for advertisers that only works when an existing, human-made brand asset is uploaded, rather than generating creative purely from a text prompt. The tool acknowledges that advertisers don’t want all of their entire creative to be generated by AI — rather, they see it as a tool for asset variation, which can be especially useful for personalized ads.

Google and Meta’s AI updates represented incremental improvements to their existing AI toolbox, rather than major new investments.

TikTok, on the other hand, unveiled a slew of new tools at its TikTok World product summit on Wednesday, including a creative AI suite called Symphony which facilitates content and creative development, including script writing and video production, using AI. 

It is also using machine learning to predict and automate the process of pairing brands with the right creative assets and audiences based on their budgets and goals, while bringing automated bidding, budgeting, ad management and creative to TikTok Shop.

• Comcast’s streaming bundle of Peacock, Netflix and Apple TV+ will cost $15 per month for all Xfinity customers. Comcast Cable CEO David Watson said the new bundle, called StreamSaver, will save customers more than 30% the cost of individual subscriptions. It will be rolled out on May 29 for Xfinity customers in the U.S.

• Microsoft announced an AI assistant called Team Copilot, a real-time translation feature on Edge and AI meeting notes on Teams, at its annual Build conference this week. On Monday, it unveiled a new line of Surface laptops that run over 40 AI models locally to power a fully integrated AI experience for users. This includes the ability for AI to keep a log of users’ activity across apps and websites to help them find specific information from their sessions. 

• Google is threatening to pull funding it provides to the U.S. news industry via its Google News Initiative should California pass a bill proposing to tax tech giants for extracting personal information about users, Axios reports. The tech giant last month warned it would pull investments in California in response to another bill that suggests taxing big tech companies for links to news content.

• Nvidia more than tripled sales to $26 billion in its first quarter and net profit jumped from $2 billion a year prior to $14.9 billion as the chip maker prospers from the explosion of generative AI.

• Amazon Publisher Services beta launched a new measurement solution called Signal IQ that measures signal performance over time using third-party ad IDs, as well as a cloud-based header-bidding marketplace called Transparent Ad Marketplace to all U.S. and Canadian streaming TV publishers. It also rolled out the general availability of Amazon Publisher Cloud for streaming TV and web publishers.

• A new solution from CTV ad platform BrightLine automates the creation of interactive ad units for different streaming platforms from a single, self-serve portal.

• Vidmob’s new Diversity Reports product employs AI to analyze how diverse a brand’s ad campaigns are by reviewing skin tone, physical presentation and age. 

• WPP has integrated Anthropic’s Claude AI model family, including Opus, Sonnet and Haiku, into its internal tech platform, WPP Open. It said integrating the models will enable the agency network to “enhance the quality of client work and improve the efficiency of tasks.” The models have been integrated through Amazon Bedrock, which offers companies the ability to tap models from different AI companies via a single API. WPP has also integrated OpenAI’S GPT-4 and DALL-E 3, Google’s Gemini family and Imagen 2, and Stability AI’s SDXL 1.0 into WPP Open. It announced a £250 million ($318 million) annual technology fund in January.

• OpenAI struck a deal with Reddit that includes access to the social network’s Data API to train its AI models on user conversations on the platform. Reddit will also work with OpenAI to integrate AI-powered features on its platform. 

• Reddit also named Kantar its preferred brand lift measurement partner.

Weekdays, when most of us are meant to be working, are the best days to post on social media across all platforms, according to Sprout Social’s 2024 report.

The report, based on nearly 2 billion social engagements across the company’s 34,000 customers, claims that posts on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays have the highest levels of engagement across the board, with Sunday being the worst day.

For Facebook, mid-mornings during weekdays are high engagement periods, while Instagram’s sweet spot is between 10am to 2pm. The best period for TikTok posts is between 4pm to 6pm on Tuesdays and Fridays, and LinkedIn posts see high engagement on Tuesdays and Wednesdays between 10am and 12pm.

• Wearable AI startup Humane is reportedly exploring a sale following its underwhelming launch, Bloomberg reports.

• Stability AI is also rumored to be discussing a sale with at least one potential buyer, per The Information.

• Growth services provider Trilliad acquired Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Pardot consulting firm Sercante.

The Rebooting’s Brian Morrissey offers a contrarian view of Google’s search shift and the impact it will have on publishers in this week’s newsletter. He argues that Google is “focusing on consumers” and publishers “are not entitled to traffic to their vacuum review pages ginned up by an SEO chop shop.”“Regular people will find this more compelling than wading through an affiliate link smorgasbord,” he writes.