Even further - they hired multiple female and male voice actors to create various voices that people can choose from. There isn’t one ChatGPT voice that would have either gone to this actress or Johansson. People are making the assumption that if Johansson agreed, Johansson’s voice would have replaced the Sky voice option, but there’s no evidence that this would have happened. It’s likely that Johansson’s would have been just another voice option, in addition to Sky and all the other options available.

If they had 1,000 voices I would definitely be onboard with that interpretation, especially if they then went on trying to contact dozens of famous people for their voices.

But it’s a small number of voices who all sound distinct. So it seems unlikely they wanted to released two similar voices in that context. Especially when it specifically sounds like the voice actor in a film as an AI.

It was recorded first, but not used publicly beforehand.

If they had released the voice they could have argued they wanted something different, but by waiting and going with Sky after the negotiations failed it’s a different matter.

No, I don't think you can walk this back:

they tried to get Scarlet to do the voice and after she declined OpenAI found someone

This is exactly the question the Washington Post set out to answer, and the answer is "no": that didn't happen.

There’s no walking back. My initial post said: “used Sky from the beginning” If they had released Sky’s voice publicly before contacting Scarlet it would have been a different situation, but they made the decision afterwards.

Simply recording Sky’s voice beforehand doesn’t imply a different intent. This isn’t animation where you’re trying to match two mediums and you want the actors recording first. Having a similar voice to work with would have been useful internally to know if they wanted to pay what it might cost to use her voice.