In May 2024, OpenAI demonstrated a new conversational voice mode for ChatGPT built on GPT-4o, fronted by a warm, flirtatious voice named Sky. To many listeners the voice evoked Scarlett Johansson, who had played an AI assistant in the 2013 film Her, a comparison OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman seemed to invite when he posted the single word “her” around the launch. The resemblance turned a product demo into a debate about consent and likeness.
On May 19, 2024, OpenAI paused the use of Sky and published a post, “How the voices for ChatGPT were chosen,” explaining how the five ChatGPT voices were produced. The company described a months-long process working with professional voice actors, talent agencies, and casting directors, narrowing roughly 400 candidates down to five. On the specific controversy, OpenAI stated that “Sky’s voice is not an imitation of Scarlett Johansson but belongs to a different professional actress using her own natural speaking voice,” adding that it could not share the actors’ names to protect their privacy. The company said that “out of respect” for Ms. Johansson it had paused using Sky’s voice in its products.
Per the conventions of this library, only OpenAI’s own account is treated as primary here. Johansson issued a public statement saying she had been approached by OpenAI, had declined, and was shocked when she heard the released voice; that statement exists only through press coverage and is therefore not quoted in this entry. What can be said from the first-party record is narrow but real: OpenAI maintained the voice was a different actress, and it nonetheless withdrew Sky once the actress objected.
The episode is a small but instructive anecdote about the new frontier that generative voice opens up. A voice that is not a copy of anyone in particular can still be heard as someone in particular, and “it isn’t actually her” turned out to be an insufficient answer. As synthetic voices become a default interface for AI products, the question of how close a resemblance is too close, even without any literal cloning, became a live business and legal problem rather than a hypothetical one.