In the 2013 Oscar-winning movie Her, Joaquin Phoenix plays a lonely Los Angeles man who falls hopelessly in love with Samantha, an AI-powered virtual assistant voiced by Scarlett Johansson. “You seem like a person, but you’re just a voice in a computer,” he tells her in their first conversation.
Flash forward to 2024, and that scenario is closer to reality than ever—uncomfortably so for Johansson, who this week accused the artificial intelligence company OpenAI of creating a virtual assistant voice that sounds “eerily similar” to her own. In a statement Monday, the Hollywood star revealed that the disturbing realization came after she had repeatedly declined offers from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to license her voice for the company’s latest chatbot, “Sky.”
The tech tycoon has denied any connection between Sky’s voice and Johansson’s. But the question remains: why was Altman so gung-ho about using the Marvel actor’s voice in particular—instead of simply taking no for an answer the first time she rejected his offer and hiring some other Hollywood star? Cassandra Kulukundis, a casting director on Her, thinks she has the answer.
