AI Makes You Say Things You Never Said?
Imagine you hear yourself saying awful things that you’re positive you never said. Well, it’s now a reality.
Voice actors are ringing alarm over the use of their voices for inappropriate content.
A new panorama by Forbes offers a disturbing insight into how AI is being used for purposes that can be described as nasty.
Take Allegra Clark, a voice actor who works in the gaming industry. Recently, she
saw a video featuring Beidou, a swashbuckling ship captain from the video game Genshin Impact whom she’d voiced. And it struck her as Beidou was participating in a sexually suggestive scene and saying certain things in Clark’s voice that she had never recorded.
She didn’t need to.
The creators of this specific video had an easy way out. They used a tool called ElevenLabs, which offers to “Create lifelike voiceovers for your content or use our AI voice generator as an easy-to-use text reader.”
Another voice actress, Abbey Veffer, whose voice has been featured in games like Genshin Impact and The Elder Scrolls, faced a similar situation. In February, someone cloned her voice for vile purposes, creating an X (Twitter) handle that featured Veffer’s voice saying racist and violent things.
Such instances raise a host of questions and not just moral ones. Even if actors’ voices are used for exclusively entertaining purposes.
Tim Friedlander, the president of the National Association of Voice Actors
(NAVA), says that AI generated voices became widespread after Apple Books launched digital narration of audiobooks with a suite of soprano and baritone voices early this year.
Clark, for example, was concerned her client might see it and think she had participated in it — which could be a violation of her contract.
Scammers are also apparently using voices to extort money from people by impersonating their loved ones. One journalist even used ElevenLabs’ tool to create an AI-generated version of his voice to successfully log into his own bank account.
Yet, combatting these new developments isn’t an easy task. Some services like
AI voice generators Uberduck and FakeYou.ai are eliminating hundreds of voice actors' voices from their public spreadsheet at the request of actors and more.
However, this is not so in Clark’s case when ElevenLabs refused to take any action, saying that it’d only do so if the clip was “hate speech or defamatory,” adding that it wasn’t responsible for any violation of copyright.
The situation is also part of the bigger problem, elucidated by the recent SAG-AFTRA protests. Although they came to a halt, the bitter taste of what the AI future holds for the entertainment industry is still in the air.
Previously, GN shed light on AI in the film industry.
