‘Her’ Casting Director Weighs in on Scarlett Johansson’s OpenAI Row

In the 2013 Oscar-winning movie Her, Joaquin Phoenix plays a lonely Los Angeles man who falls hopelessly in love with Samantha, an AI-powered virtual assistant voiced by Scarlett Johansson. “You seem like a person, but you’re just a voice in a computer,” he tells her in their first conversation.

Flash forward to 2024, and that scenario is closer to reality than ever—uncomfortably so for Johansson, who this week accused the artificial...