With technology executives and government officials voicing concerns about the unregulated use of artificial intelligence (AI) posing a threat to human jobs, singers and voice artists have also joined the fray demanding regulation as they fear they will be made redundant by the technology.
Mario Filio, a Mexican artist who has done voiceovers for Hollywood star Will Smith, the Obi-Wan Kenobi character in Star Wars and the party-loving lemur King Julien in the animated movie “Madagascar” said: “We’re fighting a very big monster.”
With the campaign slogan “Don’t steal our voices,” more than 20 voiceover artists, associations and unions from Europe, the US and Latin America have formed a coalition named United Voice Artists, representing faceless voiceover artists and narrators of commercials, movies, audiobooks and video games — fearing that they will be replaced by machines, or even cloned by AI without consent.
The group said: “The undiscriminating and unregulated use of [AI] is a risk that could lead to the extinction of an artistic heritage of creativity and wonder, an asset that machines cannot generate.”
The group maintained that its members include the US National Association of Voice Actors (NAVA) and Latin America’s Organization of United Voices.
“Our voices are our livelihood,” NAVA vice president Carin Gilfry said in a statement last month.
“And if we don’t have control over how those voices are used, we can’t make a living,” she added.
These artists were already fighting with text-to-speech technology that turns written words into synthetic voices.
Now AI has renewed fears as machine learning technology can compare a voice sample with millions of existing ones, identifying patterns to generate a similar one.
“It’s fed by voices that we’ve been providing for years,” said Dessiree Hernandez, president of the Mexican Association of Commercial Announcers.
“We’re talking about the right to use your voice without your consent,” she added.
Replaced by AI?
Different platforms allow human-sounding text-to-speech services for a part of what they pay to other voiceover artists.
According to one platform, it does not intend to replace human voiceovers but to offer a quicker and cheaper alternative.
Though the artists are still being hired, voice actors are wary that companies are using their voices to build up their archives.
The artists are seeking tools to track their voices in the face of sophisticated piracy and calling for regulation to prevent recordings of their voices from being used to develop AI without their permission. They also are asking for setting up support quotas for human voiceovers, said Colombian voice artist Daniel Soler de la Prada.
“In the future, audiences could hear a famous actor’s voice in several languages but with the intonation of a dubbing artist,” Filio said.
While that could generate employment and benefits for the public, voice artists “need to charge what’s fair,” he added.
Mexican voice artist Maclovia Gonzalez said that “she would only sign a contract with an AI company if it provided enough information about how the content would be used.”
“I want to be part of this revolution, but not at any price,” she said.
Art Dubbing, a company that has received several requests from clients to use synthetic voices, faces a dilemma: “Adapt or disappear,” said its Mexican founder, Anuar Lopez de la Pena.
Filio for his part said that he stopped recording for many clients for fear of hurting his colleagues’ livelihoods.
But he is skeptical that AI will replace voice actors completely because the machines have “no soul,” he added.
