Scarlett Johansson
Actor
One of the world’s highest-grossing actors — and, after OpenAI shipped a ChatGPT voice she says sounded “eerily similar” to hers in 2024, one of the most prominent voices demanding deepfake and likeness legislation.
In her words
When I heard the released demo, I was shocked, angered and in disbelief that Mr. Altman would pursue a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine that my closest friends and news outlets could not tell the difference.
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.
Biography
Scarlett Johansson (born 1984) is an American actor whose films — from Lost in Translation to Marvel’s Black Widow — have made her one of the highest-grossing box-office stars in history. In Spike Jonze’s 2013 film Her she voiced Samantha, an AI a lonely man falls in love with — a role that would collide with real life a decade later.
The “Sky” voice fight
In September 2023, Sam Altman asked Johansson to voice ChatGPT; she declined. In May 2024, OpenAI demoed GPT-4o with a flirty voice called Sky that listeners widely compared to Samantha — and Altman posted the single word “her” on X. Johansson said Altman had approached her agent again just two days before the demo, and released a blistering statement saying she was “shocked, angered and in disbelief.” OpenAI paused the Sky voice, insisting it belonged to a different actress and was never intended to imitate her.
The episode was not her first: in late 2023 her lawyers pursued an AI app that used her likeness in an ad without consent. In February 2025, after a deepfake video put her face in a viral AI clip responding to Kanye West’s antisemitism, she urged the U.S. government to prioritize AI-safety legislation, warning that “the potential for hate speech multiplied by AI is a far greater threat” than any single misuse of her image.
Johansson has never campaigned against AI research as such — her fight is specifically about consent, likeness, and identity. But the Sky affair made her a defining test case for what happens when the world’s most advanced AI lab collides with a performer who says no.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/scarlett-johansson