“I’m different from you,” the advanced artificial intelligence chatbot named Samantha tells Joaquin Phoenix’s protagonist in her low, sultry voice in director Spike Jonze’s 2013 hit film Her. “This doesn’t make me love you any less. It actually makes me love you more.”

The question of just how different AI models are from humans occupies the core of Her and has recently come to dominate the contemporary debate over our interactions with increasingly human-like machines, as we’ve explored on many occasions.

But a new aspect of “different” has emerged in an even more recent AI-related dispute:  a kerfuffle between movie star Scarlett Johansson—the voice of Samantha in Her—and OpenAI over ChatGPT’s new personal assistant voice that the actress alleges closely resembles her own.

NPR reported this past week that Johansson’s lawyers had sent OpenAI several letters demanding the company explain the process through which it created a voice it called “Sky.” The Marvel superstar said she’d been invited nine months ago by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to license her voice for the company’s person assistant. Altman reportedly said her voice would enable people “to feel comfortable with the seismic shift concerning humans and AI.”

After considering Altman’s offer, Johansson ultimately demurred, but the OpenAI CEO exhorted her to reconsider. After she didn’t respond, Sky debuted on May 13 as part of GPT-4o, the company’s “newest flagship model.” Altman, apparently a big fan of the Jonze film, tweeted, simply, “her.”

At that point, the actress’s team sprang into action. “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,” she told NPR. (Judge for yourself here how similar the voices sound.)

And in response, OpenAI agreed to take Sky down. “We cast the voice actor behind Sky’s voice before any outreach to Ms. Johansson,” Altman said in a statement to NPR. “Out of respect for Ms. Johansson, we have paused using Sky’s voice in our products. We are sorry to Ms. Johansson that we didn’t communicate better.”

The immediate skirmish has concluded, but the larger conflict over how humans and AI interact, over whether our machines merely imitate or may actually transcend us, persists. 

On one hand, OpenAI, with Her’s Samantha, concedes that humans and robots are different but believes they can have human-like levels of cognition and even, potentially, emotion. Sky “says more about our imagination, our storytelling as a society than about the technology itself,” OpenAI’s chief technology officer Mira Murati said in a separate NPR interview. “The way we developed this technology is not based on the movie or a sci-fi story. We’re trying to build these machines that can think and have robust understandings of the world.” This side of the debate genuinely sees machine technology as transformative and even human like. Autonomous, you might even say.

On the other hand, the actress who actually voiced Samantha contends that not only are humans and robots not all that distinguishable but the robotic voice OpenAI has promoted derives from—if it isn’t identical to—her own human one. “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.” Johansson told NPR. Today’s automatons, in this view, merely mimic and exploit the humans who design them.

Whose view will prevail in this long-running and unresolved war? Nobody knows, but many more such battles seem inevitable.

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