How actors are losing their voices to AI

Greg Marston, a British voice actor with more than 20 years’ experience, recently stumbled across his own voice being used for a demo online.

Marston’s was one of several voices on the website Revoicer, which offers an AI tool that converts text into speech in 40 languages, with different intonations, moods and styles.

Since he had no memory of agreeing to his voice being cloned using AI, he got in touch with the company. Revoicer told him they had purchased his voice from IBM. 

In 2005, Marston had signed a contract with IBM for a job he had recorded for a satnav system. In the 18-year-old contract, an industry standard, Marston had signed his voice rights away in perpetuity, at a time before generative AI even existed. Now, IBM is licensed to sell his voice to third parties who could clone it using AI and sell it for any commercial purpose. IBM said it was “aware of the concern raised by Mr Marston” and were “discussing it with him directly”.

“[Marston] is working in the same marketplace, he is still selling his voice for a living, and he is now competing with himself,” said Mathilde Pavis, the artist’s lawyer who specialises in digital cloning technologies. “He had signed a document but there was no agreement for him to be cloned by an unforeseen technology 20 years later.”

Thousands of other voiceover and performance artists face the same dilemma as Marston as companies race to commercialise generative AI — artificial intelligence systems that can quickly output humanlike text, images and content.

Over the past year, voice synthesising technology has become more accurate, widely available and easy to produce, leading to new business models around AI cloning. Artists whose work relies on their voices and faces are finding their livelihoods threatened through potentially exploitative contracts, data-scraping methods and alleged scams, resulting in a rapid erosion of their work and their rights. 

Pavis said she has had at least 45 AI-related queries since January, including cases of actors who hear their voices on phone scams such as fake insurance calls or AI-generated ads. Equity, the trade union for the performing arts and entertainment industry in the UK, is working with Pavis and says it too has received several complaints over AI scams and exploitation in the past six months. 

“We are seeing more and more members having their voice, image and likeness used to create entirely new performances using AI technology, either with or without consent,” said Liam Budd, an industrial official for new media at Equity. “There’s no protection if you’re part of a data set of thousands or millions of people whose voices or likenesses have been scraped by AI developers.”

Laurence Bouvard, a London-based voice actor for audio books, advertisements and radio dramas, has also come across several instances of exploitative behaviour. She recently received Facebook alerts about fake castings, where AI websites ask actors to read out recipes or lines of gibberish that are really only vehicles to scrape their voice data for AI models. 

Some advertise regular voice jobs but slip in AI synthesisation clauses to the contracts, while others are upfront but offer a pittance in return for permanent rights to the actor’s voice. A recent job advertisement on the creative jobs marketplace Mandy.com, for instance, described a half-day gig recording a five-minute script on video to create AI presenters by tech company D-ID.

“This technology has already been used to help companies such as Microsoft with their training videos,” the recruitment advert said. “The dialogue is censored so the technology couldn’t be used to say anything explicit or offensive,” it added.

In return for the actor’s image and likeness, the company was offering individuals a £600 flat fee. D-ID said it paid “fair market prices”. It added that the particular advertisement was withdrawn and “does not reflect the final payment”.

“Keep in mind that, without training data, AI would not exist,” Bouvard said at an event organised recently by the Trades Union Congress in Westminster. “And yet, without asking permission or providing appropriate compensation . . . the AI companies are snatching our voices, our performances and likenesses, training their algorithms on our data to produce a product that is meant to replace us.” 

She added, “Under current legislation, there is nothing we performers can do about it. This isn’t just about protecting jobs: it’s also about protecting what it means to be an artist.”

Marcus Hutton, who has been a voice actor for three decades, has been compiling a list of performance-synthesis or AI companies and has found more than 60, many of whom have sizeable venture capital funding. For instance, London-based ElevenLabs this month raised $19mn in a round co-led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participants including Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger and Oculus co-founder Brendan Iribe. 

“You have to see it as it is: a wholesale financial transfer from the creative sector to the tech sector. That’s very clear: money is moving out of our pot and into their pot,” Hutton said. “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.”

ElevenLabs said it was working with voice actors and their representatives to understand how platforms like theirs could create more commercial opportunities for the sector. The company said: “We believe AI companies and creative communities can work together to ensure these technologies create new . . . routes to revenue, whilst enabling content creators to produce even better and more globally accessible content.”

Around 94 per cent of workers in the creative industries earn under £33,280 a year, the UK’s median full-time pay, according to a survey conducted by Equity. That pay level leaves them vulnerable in any negotiations. In an industry that already uses unscrupulous contracts against artists, the introduction of AI has weakened their position further, according to lawyer Pavis.

Revoicer, the AI voice company, said Marston’s voice came from IBM’s cloud text-to-speech service. The start-up bought it from IBM, “like thousands of other developers”, at a rate of $20 for 1mn characters’ worth of spoken audio, or roughly 16 hours.

Legally, artists have little recourse. Data privacy laws are the only legislation that cover AI, and the UK government has stated its desire for light-touch IP regulation that allows AI innovation to prosper. 

“The [UK] copyright act has not been touched in any major way for at least 25 years. It kind of predates the internet,” voice actor Hutton said. “The only rights performers have at the moment are consent. But in our line of work, you have to consent. If you don’t consent, you don’t work and you don’t eat. So it’s a very asymmetric bargaining position.” 

Equity, which counts Hutton and Bouvard as members, has been calling for new rights to be encoded into the law, explicitly on time-limited contracts, rather than the industry standard of signing rights away in perpetuity. It also demands that the law include the need for explicit consent if an artist’s voice or body is going to be cloned by AI. Two weeks ago, the union put out a “toolkit” providing model clauses and contracts on the use of AI that artists and their agents can refer to. 

“I’m a working, jobbing actor . . . probably one of the last generation of everyday working actors who managed to buy a house or bring up children without being enormously famous,” Hutton said. “It’s depressing, but I just cannot see how it is sustainable any longer.”