Every single thing in your second paragraph is directly contradicted by the article at hand, yet you say them like they are established facts as opposed to things you just made up.
WaPo's reporting states that the individual in charge of the interaction, Jang, modeled it after Hollywood movies, and worked with a film director specifically to accomplish this goal. And the executive responsible for the artistic decisions, CTO Murati, was conveniently not made available for WaPo to interview.
OpenAI has no credibility here, given its extensive history of dissembling as a company. If Her and SJ weren't the driving inspiration for the Sky voice, they would have made Murati available to explicitly refute those claims. Her absence speaks volumes.
And OpenAI dropping Sky immediately speaks even louder. It means that somewhere there is a smoking gun that would destroy them in court. [Edit: it turns out the smoking guns were already public: in addition to the CEO's Her tweet, his co-founder Karpathy explicitly linked the voice product to SJ. Game. Set. Match.]
