A New Era of Voice Theft
Imagine making a living off your voice – a distinct and recognizable quality that is unmistakably you. Now imagine discovering that your voice has been cloned and is being sold for commercial use, without your knowledge or consent. That’s exactly what happened to Greg Marston, a British voice actor with a career spanning more than two decades.
Marston stumbled upon his own voice being used in a demo on Revoicer’s website, a platform offering an AI tool that translates text into speech in 40 languages with various intonations, moods, and styles. A little confused and a lot perturbed, Marston reached out to the company, only to be told that his voice had been purchased from IBM.
Signing Away a Voice
Rewind to 2005, Marston had signed a contract with IBM for a job he’d recorded for a satnav system. An industry-standard contract, it had the clause of signing away his voice rights into perpetuity. This was a time when generative AI was still a futuristic dream. Now, in a world where AI technology is increasingly becoming a reality, IBM is legally allowed to sell his voice to third parties who can clone it and commercially exploit it.
Marston is now in the peculiar situation of competing with his own digital clone. Despite the legality of it all, it’s clear that the contract he signed didn’t account for advancements in technology that could clone his voice.
The Voice Cloning Gold Rush
Marston isn’t alone. Thousands of voiceover and performance artists are finding themselves in the same predicament as companies scramble to capitalize on generative AI. This technology, capable of producing humanlike text, images, and content, has seen significant improvements in accuracy, accessibility, and ease of production over the last year.
This rapid advancement, however, has opened a Pandora’s box of issues for artists who rely on their voices and faces for their livelihoods. Exploitative contracts, data-scraping methods, and alleged scams are threatening their work and rights while also creating a deeply unsettling landscape of voice theft.
The Fight for Rights
The performing arts and entertainment industry’s trade union, Equity, has seen a surge in complaints over AI scams and exploitation in the past six months. Similarly, Mathilde Pavis, Marston’s lawyer who specializes in digital cloning technologies, has dealt with at least 45 AI-related queries just this year.
The current legislation offers performers little protection against such exploitation. The UK government’s desire for light-touch IP regulation that promotes AI innovation leaves artists at a disadvantage. Equity is pushing for new rights to be encoded into the law, specifically for time-limited contracts and the requirement of explicit consent if an artist’s voice or body is to be cloned by AI.
This isn’t just about protecting jobs, it’s about protecting the essence of what it means to be an artist. Because at the end of the day, it’s not just a voice being stolen, it’s a piece of someone’s identity, their brand, and their livelihood.
In response to the growing concerns, some companies are working with voice actors and their representatives to understand how platforms like theirs could create more commercial opportunities for the sector. But is that enough?
The Future of Voice Acting
It’s depressing to think that we might be witnessing the last generation of working actors who can make a living without being enormously famous. With AI companies snatching our voices, performances, and likenesses without appropriate compensation or consent, the future of voice acting appears to be hanging in the balance.
The tech industry’s gain is the creative sector’s loss. Money is moving out of the pot of performers and into that of tech companies. There is a danger every time a performer steps up to a mic or in front of a camera that they could be contracted out of their AI rights.
As technology continues to evolve at a rapid pace, it’s high time we revisited our legal and ethical standpoints to ensure our voices, quite literally, are not stolen from us.
