I’m a voice actor. This is my worst fear.
Having your voice stolen by AI is not just terrifying to me because my voice is my job, it’s also terrifying because THAT IS MY VOICE. That is my literal voice. How I communicate day to day. My biological instrument that I play. It’s not yours to take! It’s not a toy for you to play with! You can use that to pretend to be me and I have no way of definitely getting it removed from the AI database now WHY would you do that to someone what is wrong with you???
A colleague of mine, who voiced an UNDERAGE character, had her voice stolen for a song with adult content. She reported the song multiple times, but trolls kept reposting it. the caption read (paraphrasing) ‘haha, we can do whatever we like, we don’t care if voice actors lose their jobs, it’s funny so we’ll keep doing it.’ that is the mentality of these people. They genuinely don’t care about the impact it has on the victim. My colleague could be impersonated for fraud, her voice could be used for ANYTHING, those clips she never recorded could lose her work in the future or be used to smear her and she has no recourse at all. The FUCK is wrong with these people.
Not to mention that AI voices were trained on voice clips stolen from the internet without the owners’ knowledge or consent, or that they’re already being used to replace human actors and their years of training with a worse, amoral alternative. It’s just another tool for the rich to get even richer.
All you need to clone someone’s voice with AI is eight seconds of clear audio. If you have any videos on social media, on YouTube, on TV, your voice can be stolen. This software should already be banned but the fuckwits in charge couldn’t legislate their way out of a paper bag so here we are.
STOP USING AI VOICES.