OpenAI’s ChatGPT voice demo has turned into a high-profile test of where celebrity identity, synthetic audio, and product marketing collide. At the center is Sky, a voice OpenAI presented in a product demo last week and later paused after Scarlett Johansson objected.
Johansson said the voice was “so eerily similar to mine that my closest friends and news outlets could not tell the difference.” OpenAI says Sky is “not an imitation of Scarlett Johansson but belongs to a different professional actress using her own natural speaking voice.”
How the Sky dispute began
In the demo, OpenAI showed a synthetic but expressive voice for ChatGPT called Sky. Many viewers connected it to Samantha, the AI girlfriend voiced by Johansson in the 2013 film Her.
Johansson was among those who noticed. According to her statement, she hired legal counsel and sent letters to OpenAI demanding an explanation. OpenAI then halted use of Sky on Sunday and published a blog post saying the voice was not meant to imitate her.
Johansson’s statement, released Monday, said she was “shocked, angered, and in disbelief” after hearing the voice. She also said Sam Altman had asked her last year to voice ChatGPT, and that he reached out again two days before last week’s demo in an attempt to change her mind.
It is unclear whether Johansson will take additional legal action. Her counsel in the dispute is John Berlinski, a partner at Los Angeles law firm Bird Marella, who represented her in a lawsuit against Disney claiming breach of contract, settled in 2021. OpenAI’s outside counsel on the matter is Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati partner David Kramer, who is based in Silicon Valley and has defended Google and YouTube on copyright infringement cases.
Why copyright may not be the main issue
OpenAI is already facing lawsuits from artists and writers who claim the company breached copyright by using creative work to train AI models without first obtaining permission. But experts quoted in the source article said Johansson’s dispute would likely follow a different legal path.
The reason is simple: a person cannot copyright a voice. Brian L. Frye, a professor at the University of Kentucky’s College of Law focusing on intellectual property, said the issue would be “right of publicity.” He added, “She’d have no other claims.”
Right of publicity laws protect people from having their name or likeness used without authorization. James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and internet law at Cornell University, believes Johansson could have a strong argument. “You can't imitate someone else's distinctive voice to sell stuff,” he says.
OpenAI declined to comment for the source article, but released a statement from Altman saying Sky “was never intended to resemble” Johansson. He added, “We are sorry to Ms. Johansson that we didn’t communicate better.”
The Bette Midler precedent
Several lawyers pointed to a case Bette Midler brought against Ford Motor Company and its advertising agency Young & Rubicam in the late 1980s. After Midler declined offers to perform one of her songs in a car commercial, the company hired one of her backup singers to impersonate her sound.
Jennifer E. Rothman, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the 2018 book The Right of Publicity: Privacy Reimagined for a Public World, described the issue this way: “Ford was basically trying to profit from using her voice.”
Rothman said the key point was not whether the company used Midler’s actual voice. What mattered was that someone was instructed to sound confusingly similar to her. In her view, listener confusion can matter more than whether the original performer’s audio was directly used.
That distinction could be important in any Johansson case. Rothman also drew a line between imitation and creating something “in the style” of someone else. “No one owns a style,” she says.
Why experts disagree on the strength of a claim
Not every legal expert sees a potential Johansson claim as clear-cut. Colorado law professor Harry Surden wrote on X on Tuesday that any right of publicity claim from Johansson against OpenAI would be fairly weak because, in his view, the similarity between Sky and Johansson was only superficial under relevant case law.
Frye also expressed doubt. He said OpenAI did not say or imply that it was offering the real Scarlett Johansson, only a simulation. In his view, using her name or image to advertise the product would create a clearer right-of-publicity problem, while merely cloning the sound of her voice probably would not.
Still, uncertainty remains. Surden added, “Juries are unpredictable.” Frye also said right of publicity is an “esoteric” area of law, with no federal right-of-publicity laws in the United States and only a patchwork of state statutes. “It’s a mess,” he says, though Johansson could bring a suit in California, which has fairly robust right-of-publicity laws.
The marketing trail could matter
OpenAI’s defense could be complicated by context around the demo. On the day of last week’s demo, Altman posted one word on X: “her.” That was widely interpreted as a reference to Her and Johansson’s performance. Altman also wrote in a blog post that day, “It feels like AI from the movies.”
To Grimmelmann, those references make it harder to argue that the resemblance was simply accidental. “They intentionally invited the public to make the identification between Sky and Samantha. That's not a good look,” he says. “I wonder whether a lawyer reviewed Altman's ‘her’ tweet.”
That issue is sharpened by Johansson’s claim that OpenAI tried to recruit her twice to provide a voice for its chatbots. For some observers, those facts make OpenAI’s insistence that Sky was not meant to resemble Samantha difficult to accept.
David Herlihy, a copyright lawyer and music industry professor at Northeastern University, called it “a boneheaded move” and “A miscalculation.” Purvi Patel Albers, a partner at Haynes Boone who often takes intellectual property cases, suggested the controversy itself may have served OpenAI’s visibility. “What’s the point? I say it’s publicity,” she said.
For AI companies, the dispute shows how synthetic voices can raise legal and reputational questions even when a company says it used a different actor. The central question is not only what a model can generate, but what the public is led to hear.