Scarlett Johansson vs. the AI that cloned her voice
ChatGPT can write your emails, your essays, your news articles. But what happens when it starts talking like Scarlett Johansson without her permission?
That’s the question at the heart of a brewing legal battle between the A-list actress and OpenAI. ScarJo claims that OpenAI’s new chatbot assistant “Sky” uses a voice “eerily similar” to her own, which she famously deployed as Samantha, the alluring AI in Spike Jonze’s “Her.” The catch? She turned down OpenAI’s request to use her real voice months prior.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman insists it’s all a big coincidence. But his eyebrow-raising tweet of a single word— “her”—after the voice’s debut suggests otherwise. Imitation may be flattery, but in this case, it could also be theft. Johansson’s voice is her trademark, honed over a Hollywood career. If any company can replicate that without compensation, what does that mean for an artist’s right to their own instrument?
As the ultimate keeper of receipts Hunter Harris put it: “Scarlett Johansson loves the law to a Legally Blonde degree, to an Aaron Sorkin character degree. Scarlett Johansson is always gonna see you in court.”
But this dust-up is bigger than ScarJo. As Charlie Warzel writes in The Atlantic, it exemplifies the “raw deal” of generative AI, which is built on data scraped from the internet, often without creators' consent. OpenAI and its ilk operate with “manifest-destiny philosophy”—the belief that their world-changing tech transcends petty concerns like IP law.
It’s not the first time. Rewind to 1990: Crispin Glover sued Universal for replacing him with a prosthetically-enhanced doppelganger in “Back to the Future II” after a pay dispute. The case raised early red flags about digital likeness rights. (As Glover’s lawyer Doug Kari put it at the time: “Things may happen in the future that will make this important. We need to draw a line.”) Decades later, with AI-powered voice cloning and deep-fakery on the rise, that line is blurrier than ever.
The Glover incident was a warning of the identity-blurring scandals to come in an age of digital reproduction. Glover, like Johansson today, was asserting a right to control how his likeness could be used by the entertainment machine. Now OpenAI has created an AI that can clone a human voice—tics and all—in real-time. There are additional implications, too: Celebrities licensing AI voice doubles. Politicians deploying campaign bots. Scammers stealing identities. The line between real and fake speech is vanishing.
![The most interesting thing to me about this Scarlett Johansson fiasco is that regardless of whether her likeness was theirs to use or not, we have all completely leap frogged over the fact that they did infact give an AI real-time speech using the voice of a real person, complete with giggles, breathing, and interruptible stammering … the drama around the celebrity likeness is a red herring IMO The most interesting thing to me about this Scarlett Johansson fiasco is that regardless of whether her likeness was theirs to use or not, we have all completely leap frogged over the fact that they did infact give an AI real-time speech using the voice of a real person, complete with giggles, breathing, and interruptible stammering … the drama around the celebrity likeness is a red herring IMO](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5ee157b7-420e-4359-868e-426bd8d8a006_1192x430.png)
So while the tech may be new, the questions are not: What does it mean to have a voice? What is the value of authenticity and originality? When does imitation cross over into theft? How do we protect the ineffable spark of human creativity from being reduced to a data set?
Johansson’s lawsuit, like Glover’s, is a proxy war for the uniqueness of the individual in the machine age. Our voices, faces, styles—they can all be digitized, replicated, exploited at scale. The law can’t keep up.
But these cases also highlight the enduring power of the creative voice. Even the most sophisticated AI is still just parasitic on human-crafted IP. Strip away our words, our inflections and you’re left with a Potemkin village—an uncanny simulacrum devoid of true originality. They can mimic our voices with eerie fidelity, but they can’t match the originality, the lived experience that makes a voice truly resonant (or Rayne Fisher-Quann’s ‘Secrets Reading’ sell out before I could snag tickets). That’s the province of flesh-and-blood creators. For now, at least.
—Carly
Never thought I'd see Johansson's name next to AI, so this was a fun read. I appreciate the exploration, Carly. Hope you're well this week. Cheers, -Thalia