Not many technologies have caused as much controversy in this rapidly changing world as AI voice cloning has. For two New York voice artists, Paul and Lana, the reality of how AI could be exploited became deeply personal when they discovered that their voices had been stolen, cloned into AI, and were being sold-possibly hundreds of thousands of times-without permission or proper compensation.
That all started last summer when the couple was driving along, listening to a podcast about the Hollywood writers strike and how AI may affect voiceover artists. That’s when things got creepy: The host of the podcast introduced an AI entity that would be discussing the effects of AI on the entertainment industry – but what made the moment disturbing was that the AI was using Paul’s voice. Shocked and confused, Paul and Lana dived deep into the world of AI text-to-speech products. That is when they came upon a company using an AI clone of Paul’s voice called Lovo.
Voice cloning is the technology that can capture and replicate a person’s voice, tone, accent-even the subtle speech characteristics-with uncanny accuracy. Though this technology has been of immense use in scores of sectors, such as marketing and e-learning, without consent it throws up a huge ethical dilemma. “Paul and Lana learned about the technology behind the voices and filed a class-action lawsuit against the company, alleging it had illegally cloned and sold their voices.
The problem originally stemmed from a freelancing job that Paul had undertaken in 2019, where he recorded what he thought were general radio advertisements that would never be aired. Six months later, another request came through for researching speech synthesis. The husband and wife were informed that the audio recordings would not be utilized for anything else. But this “research” became the blueprint of commercial AI artifacts, where their voices became stolen.
This case underlines critical legal and ethical issues of publicity rights, where one’s identity-such as the voice-cannot be taken advantage of without proper licensing. Without clear contracts and formal agreements in place, the line between research, innovation, and exploitation can get blurry.
But as the technology of AI continues to get better and more sophisticated, creative professionals like Paul and Lana become the most susceptible to it. Is voice cloning-a couple of years ago-considered a future innovation? The artists as a whole were deeply concerned because they strove to protect their artistic work and livelihood. In the world where creative industries fast forward to integrating Artificial Intelligence into their activities, the line that divides innovation from exploitation continues to thin out.
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