In the film Her, a lonely writer called Theodore Twombley falls in love with the disembodied voice of Samantha, a digital assistant played by the actor Scarlett Johansson. “I can’t believe I’m having this conversation with my computer,” Twombley tells Samantha. “You’re not. You’re having this conversation with me,” Samantha coos.

The genius of Spike Jonze’s script is its exploration of the borderlands between the artificial and the real. But the science fiction film, released in 2013, has acquired ironic resonance today after OpenAI launched its latest GPT-4o multimodal artificial intelligence chatbot, seemingly mimicking Johansson’s voice.

Johansson said she had declined OpenAI’s requests to use her voice, adding that she was “shocked and angered” to discover the company had deployed one “eerily similar” to her own. She called for greater transparency and appropriate legislation to ensure that individual rights were protected. OpenAI paused the use of the voice, which it later explained belonged to another unnamed actor.