A Hollywood Star Draws a Line
Scarlett Johansson isn’t just debating technology in the abstract — she’s calling out a specific AI voice that, in her words, sounds a lot like her. In a recent public statement, she accused a major AI company of releasing a digital assistant whose voice was so similar to hers that friends, family, and even media outlets thought it actually was her. For an actor whose livelihood depends on her voice and image, this wasn’t a fun coincidence. It felt like a boundary had been crossed.
The Job Offer She Turned Down
This story didn’t start with outrage; it started with an invitation. Johansson says that last year the company’s CEO personally reached out, asking if she’d be willing to voice their new AI assistant. He reportedly told her that her voice could “bridge the gap” between tech and creatives and help people feel more comfortable with AI. After thinking it over, she declined — not out of hostility, but for personal reasons. She made a clear choice: no, I don’t want my voice fronting your AI.
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A Second Ask… and Then a Surprise
According to Johansson, that wasn’t the end of it. Just days before the assistant’s launch, she says her agent got another call: would she reconsider? Before she could respond, the product went live anyway — with a voice the company named “Sky.” When she finally heard the demo, she says she was “shocked, angered, and in disbelief” at how closely it resembled her own. Her inner circle listened too and immediately thought she had secretly taken the job. She insists she didn’t.
Meet Sky: The Voice That Sounded Too Familiar
Johansson describes the Sky voice as strikingly familiar — not just in tone, but in cadence and feel. That’s why this hit so hard: it wasn’t strangers on the internet grasping at similarities, it was people who have known her for years saying, “This sounds like you.” For an A-list performer, that’s not flattering; it’s destabilizing. Your voice is part of your identity, part of your brand, and part of your legal rights. If a synthetic assistant can sound so close that people can’t tell the difference, what does that mean for control over your own persona?
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The One-Word Tweet That Poured Gas on the Fire
As if things weren’t tense enough, there was also the tweet. Around the time Sky was unveiled, the CEO posted a single word on social media: “her.” For most users, it looked like a cheeky nod to Johansson’s role in the 2013 film Her, where she voiced an AI companion that forms an intimate bond with a human. To Johansson, that post felt like an insinuation that the similarity to her voice was no accident. Coming right after she had declined the offer, it turned what might have been dismissed as coincidence into something much harder to ignore.
Why This Is Bigger Than One Celebrity’s Feelings
It’d be easy to frame this as a simple beef between a movie star and a tech company — but Johansson herself is pointing to something much larger. She’s raising questions about consent, control, and likeness in an era when AI can convincingly mimic not just how we look, but how we sound. Actors, voice artists, and musicians spend years crafting a recognizable “signature.” If that can be imitated at scale without their sign-off, what happens to their value, their privacy, and their ability to say no?
Deepfakes, Cloned Voices and a New Kind of Theft
Johansson also ties her experience to the growing wave of deepfake abuse — from AI-generated explicit images of public figures to fake political videos and cloned voices used in scams. Technology that once seemed like sci-fi is now cheap, fast, and disturbingly easy to weaponize. In that context, a familiar-sounding AI assistant isn’t just a quirky product decision; it’s part of a wider trend where our identities can be copied, remixed, and deployed without us ever stepping into a studio.
Calling for Transparency, Not Just Apologies
After Sky launched, Johansson says she hired legal counsel and demanded clarity on how the voice was created. The company has since paused use of Sky and insisted the voice belongs to a different professional actor, not meant to mimic anyone. Still, Johansson is pushing for more than a PR statement. She wants transparency: who recorded what, how was it trained, and what internal safeguards exist to prevent a system from landing too close to a specific, recognizable person. For her, this isn’t about winning a headline war — it’s about setting concrete standards.
“Who Owns a Voice?” Is Not a Hypothetical Question
At the heart of this drama is a deceptively simple question: who owns a voice? Not in the poetic sense, but in the legal and economic sense. If a model can be tuned to sound “like” a famous person without technically using their recordings, is that allowed? Should it be? Where’s the line between inspiration and impersonation? Johansson is effectively saying the law hasn’t caught up yet — and until it does, high-profile test cases like hers may be the only way to force governments to pay attention.
What Comes Next for Creators and AI
Johansson ends her statement with a wider call: she wants stronger legislation to protect individuals’ likenesses — their faces, their voices, their creative work — in a world where AI can blur those boundaries overnight. She’s not alone; technologists, lawmakers and other public figures are also calling for rules around deepfakes and synthetic media before the damage becomes unmanageable.
Whether you see this as a bold stand or an overreaction, one thing is clear: this won’t be the last time a famous voice collides with a synthetic one. As AI keeps getting better at sounding human, the people whose real voices built entire careers are starting to talk back — and they’re not whispering.
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