Over the weekend, Colin Jost was forced to tell a joke about his wife, Scarlett Johansson, during Saturday Night Live’s season finale. As part of his annual joke swap with Weekend Update coanchor Michael Che, in which they read punch lines neither has seen before airtime, Jost reluctantly read from a cue card: “ChatGPT has released a new voice assistant feature inspired by Scarlett Johansson’s AI character in [the 2013 movie] Her, which I’ve never bothered to watch because without that body, what’s the point of listening?”
On Monday, Johansson made it clear that the topic was no laughing matter by releasing an open statement claiming that an OpenAI chatbot’s voice sounded “eerily similar to mine” despite her prior refusals to work with the company. She alleged that back in September, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman approached her about voicing the company’s personal assistant, arguing that “my voice would be comforting to people” as the world grappled with the role of AI in society.
“After much consideration and for personal reasons, I declined the offer,” Johansson said. “Nine months later, my friends, family and the general public all noted how much the newest system named ‘Sky’ sounded like me.” The Oscar nominee said the released demo left her “shocked, angered and in disbelief.”
Hours before Johansson’s statement was released, OpenAI disabled use of the chatbot, citing “questions about how we chose the voices in ChatGPT” on X (formerly Twitter). Altman has since denied that there is any connection between Johansson and the Sky voice. “We cast the voice actor behind Sky’s voice before any outreach to Ms. Johansson,” he said in a statement shared with multiple outlets. “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.”
Johansson said in her statement that “two days before the ChatGPT 4.0 demo was released,” Altman contacted her agent, “asking me to reconsider,” a request she had not addressed by the time of the chatbot’s public debut. In a blog post on Sunday, OpenAI said that “voices should not deliberately mimic a celebrity’s distinctive voice” and that Sky “is not an imitation of Scarlett Johansson but belongs to a different professional actress using her own natural speaking voice.” The company declined to share the performer’s identity out of respect for her privacy.
As the tumultuous relationship between AI and Hollywood continues to unfold, Johansson said she has now hired legal counsel, requesting that Altman and OpenAI “detail the exact process by which they created the ‘Sky’ voice.” She continued, “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. I look forward to resolution in the form of transparency and the passage of appropriate legislation to help ensure that individual rights are protected.”
Altman’s love for Spike Jonze’s romantic sci-fi film Her—in which a man falls in love with Johansson’s Samantha, the female voice of his computer’s operating system—is well-documented. After previously calling it his favorite movie, Altman seemingly nodded to his inspiration by posting the word “her” on X hours after unveiling Sky. Vanity Fair has reached out to Jonze’s reps for comment.