Voice Over Career Suicide – AI, TTS, VO Contracts, & More
Today, we talk with Robert Sciglimpaglia, noted VO attorney and voice actor, who warns us how to avoid bad voice over contracts regarding AI, text to speech, synthetic voices, and more.
We recently told the story of one voice actor who’s own voice she discovered on an AI voices website without her knowledge.
Rob explains how Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, and Google have been building voice databases for years, how companies like Revoicer are operating legally and ethically, and most importantly, how to protect yourself from discovering your own voice on an AI site.
Joining us from his hotel room, he's made the time to do this on the road from Orangeburg, South Carolina, one of the leading entertainment attorneys and voice actors in the voice over space, Rob Sciglimpaglia. And for those who don't know Rob, Rob was actually the attorney that represented Bev Standing in her action against Tiktok. And I guess that was last year, two years ago now.
PS: Rob, thanks for making time for us today, man.
RS: Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
PS: Absolutely. It's our thrill. So the reason that you and I are talking today is we had on Remie Michelle Clarke from Dublin, Ireland, and Remie shared the story of coming to awareness that her voice had been somehow lifted and was being sold. The website that she found her voice on was called Revoicer dot com. We also learned from Remie that she had done some AI voice work for a little company called Microsoft and that's when you reached out to me, Rob, and said, "Hey, this sounds familiar in some way." So tell us why this rang a bell for you.
RS: It sounds very familiar because a few years ago I was reviewing all these contracts that... because the big four, Microsoft, Apple, Google and Amazon were creating voice banks with voice actors. And this is like the second phase. The first phase, what they would do, what they were doing was taking people off the street and hand them a $50 gift card.
And then having them going to record a whole bunch of sentences and things like that. And so then they realized they were getting garbage in, garbage out, so they weren't getting real good synthetic voices. So they moved on to voice actors. I was looking at a lot of reviewing a lot of those contracts back during that period of time, you know, 2018, 2019, 2020, around there.
PS: Now, this is going into the pandemic.
RS: Yeah, just right around when the pandemic started. But that's when they started going really, really heavy. 2018, 19, 20. You know, I don't know when they crossed over exactly to start using voice talent, but, you know, basically what the contracts they were asking talent to sign, they would give them you know between like two and five grand and they would say, you have to you know, we're going to send you scripts.
You have to read 2000, 3000, 4000 lines, whatever it is. And right in the contracts, it would say you're waving your rights. These files, these may be used in a manner you don't want to in the future. They'll be used by third parties. And, you know, Microsoft started their..Azure... I don't know how you.
PS: Azure. I've always said Azure.
RS Azure. That's that's their database. And that database feeds all these other little... Revoicers and other little...
PS: That's their cloud service. Mm hmm.
RS: Exactly. So when you're when they were agreeing to do the jobs, they were agreeing that that's how it was the usage it was going to be. It was going to be used for A.I. and wherever and however it's very explicitly stated right in the contract, there's no there's no doubt about it.
I had even tried to negotiate some of those contracts for some of the talent that knew the risk that they were taking, and we were trying to get them more pay. And I remember one of the responses I got from one of the smaller little companies out of China that were doing the Azure database.
And, you know, I had asked for like ten grand or something like that for the talent. I remember the response that we got was, “Ha ha.”
PS: So there's no... if I'm if I'm following this correctly, there's no... if you've signed that contract with Microsoft, there's no recourse to be able to renegotiate that contract later with them. But there... if I'm following correctly, there seems to be some recourse with the end user, the Revoicer dot com in Remie's case. Is that correct or am I messing that up?
RS: No, because it says in the contract that's what Microsoft is going to use that for. They're going to use it for other databases. They're going to use it for creating a voice. They're going to use it for third parties, to sell to third parties. And you have no right to go after those third parties or to Microsoft because you're accepting a payment, whatever the payment was.
So... those contracts, and I wrote an article about this on Voice-Over Xtra, I told the talent... I called the contracts career suicide. You're committing career suicide if you do this. And I would tell you, I would always tell talent, look, I'm not going to tell... I don't know what your financial situation is. I don't know if you need the money, but just know your voice may show up somewhere that you don't agree with in the future if you sign this and you do this job, you know, and most of the talent didn't sign the contracts, they said, okay, I'm not going to do this.
Some talent still did it. And I'm not surprised now that this is... there's going to be a lot more of this that comes up that you're going to see. You're going to have a lot more stories like this. In fact, I saw one on LinkedIn today saying... similar story. "Oh, my voice is being used by another third party for AI."
PS: Yeah, it's just we've been getting beat up by these stories in the last three or four or five weeks.
RS: Yeah. Because now now this is when they're actually... now they're done building databases. When they were building the databases they had no idea what their business plan was. They didn't know how they were going to make money on this or exploit the voices. Now they're starting to get business plans into place. And now that the technology has gotten a lot better because you've got text speech, you've got speech to speech, which are two distinct things, AI has gotten a lot more lifelike, a lot more human.
So it's... now this is where they're starting to implement their business plans. So now you're going to start seeing these things, you know, in speaking to the to the companies, in fact, a couple of the companies actually called me and I went over there, I went over their contracts with them to tell them what was fair to voice actors.
So there's a few of them out there that I know. Well, there's there's actually there's actually quite a few out there that are thinking about the ramifications of how it can affect voice actors and how they can work with them, you know, But some of them don't... didn't care.
PS: Is it possible, let's say, you know, you're a you're an audiobook narrator, you've got a lot of long form content out in the marketplace that in theory, any company with any technological savvy could lift those files. Do most voice actors have enough material out there that an AI voice could be created just from the material that's in the marketplace?
RS: Okay, so are you ready to get scared now?
PS: Sure.
RS: Are you scared yet? Are you ready to get really scared?
PS: I'm going to go grab my teddy bear.
RS: Now, the technology exists, but they only need a really small sample of your voice, 10 or 20 seconds or 30 seconds or something like that. And I don't know the exact amount, but it's a very small sample. And that sample can be taken from anywhere, can be taken from YouTube. It could be taken off the Internet, it could be taken out of files that you sent in.
And actually, the technology is being used in the film film business because a lot of the ADR now that's being done is being done where they're not called actors in that they're just taking the soundtrack that they've recorded for the film and using it and to film, you know, to do the ADR. So that's how the technology is being used in a positive way.
I think that's a positive way to use it. The big four were the ones that were making the databases, so they're getting as many voices as they could into their own database, their own proprietary database for them. That's why they're having you sign the contracts, because those are their that becomes their property, right? So like, if someone were to lift your podcast, say, or my voice off of this and use their voice in AI, I that would be illegal.
They can't lift our, our, our voices and use them without our permission, without our consent. So that was why those big, big four, haven't they had the campaign to have contracts signed so that, you know, they had their own proprietary voices so they could do whatever they want with them, they could sell them, they could sell to the smaller like so like, say, one of these the smaller technology like a Revoicer if they suppose they wanted to start some kind of database, a text to speech database or speech speech database, they can go to one of those four and get the license from them.
And that's what they do.
PS: And we had an instance of this come up in very recent months. Findaway Voices which is now owned by Spotify, has had an arrangement which has since been, maybe completely, maybe not completely suspended where they were providing voice files to of all folks, Apple. And SAG-AFTRA, the union, stepped in and lit a bunch of people's hair on fire and now Findaway Voices/Spotify and Apple have said that they've suspended all of that technology, all of that activity, all the way back to the beginning for union voice actors. Do you know, Rob, if that also that suspension also covers nonunion voice actors?
RS: I don't know. But the Findaway's situation's different, so I need to make the distinction. Okay. The Findaway Voices situation and the AI cloned voice situation are two very different situations. So in the Findaway contracts, there was a little clause that said the files that you're recording can be used to train other voices, train synthetic voices or train AI voices.
So you're not actually cloning your voice and using your voice, but they're doing... so like, say, a Siri. They want to make Siri sound more human. So they would use the file system to copy how humans speak and how humans emote to so that Siri would train off of those, learn off of those files. And that's how...
PS: And that to me is the most insidious part of all of this because that skill is at the core of what we do as voice actors and performers.
RS: Right. You know, the laws are obviously... there needs to be some kind of legislation that gets put into place. And there is legislation that's that's being proposed in all 50 states and the federal government in order to to regulate how AI is used. If a criminal wanted to take part of your voice, use it to call your bank, you know....
PS: Well, now the banks now... the banks have voice authentication now. So, you know, a deep fake can impersonate your voice and get access to your to your money. So this is not this is this becoming not just an issue for for voice actors, for writers, for, you know, whomever. This is now becoming an issue for the public in general. And we've got to start wrapping heads around this.
RS: Right. And that still is illegal, which is good. It still is illegal for someone to use your your voice without your permission. That's... you can't... they can't use your likeness without your permission. So those things are legal. I'm not really concerned about straight theft because that, the law still can deal with. It's more of this: How do you deal with the Internet... taking five words of one article and five words of another article, two words in another article, putting it together and making it an article... or three words of your voice and three words of my voice and five words, another narrator's voice nnd then, you know, teaching Siri, some are human, you know, how do you deal with that?
PS: So now for the folks that haven't passed out, out of abject fear, if you're still with us, what can we as individual freelancers, what can we do first individually to make sure that we're at least taking, let's start with the reasonable, steps to protect ourselves from this sort of crap happening to us.
RS: So the way you protect yourself as a voice talent, number one, read your contracts. Make sure that you're not... If you can keep copyright of your files, ownership of your files, that's the best way to protect yourself. Because you mentioned Bev standing at the beginning. That was how we went after Tiktok because there was no contract that Bev signed.
And so I just registered her the files that she recorded in our studio register with the Copyright Office and we sued TikTok for copyright infringement. And that's how that's how that case went.
PS: So this in in some respects, this resembles broadcast, the way we sell and license broadcast voice over now. There's a specific end date and a specific use, correct?
RS: Right. Correct. It should be the same thing that... you approach it the same way, because AI is really just a cloned you. So if you just license it the same way that you... you just protect your own live voice, then it's the same protections that you're going to have for your cloned voice server, making sure someone doesn't clone your voice and use it without your permission.
The National Association of Voiceover Artists (NAVA)... They have a a section on their website about AI and how to protect yourself. And I wrote the rider for them.
PS: We put the link to that here. And I want to mention too , Rob, you don't have to be a member of NAVA to access that material. The rider, there's also a contract template on the site at NAVA.
RS: Let me just talk about speech to speech a little bit because that's where right now that's where voice talent...that's another area where voice talent can take advantage of this technology. Speech to speech is... Text to speech is where you have synthetic voice. You type in the text on your computer, and then the synthetic voice says, what's typed in, right?
Speech to speech is where an actor performs the script and then the synthetic voice, whoever it is, it could be anybody's voice you want it to be, is put it over the top of the of the actor's performance, right? So it's like motion capture, same kind of thing. So, you know, motion capture is big now for actors, right?
They do the motion capture for animation. So just like that, speech to speech is big now for voiced talent. I see a lot of speech speech jobs, Respeecher is the company, is the main company that does those jobs and they pay decent money to voice talent, you know, thousands, tens of thousands dollars to voice talent to you know, like if they want to create a speech from, for instance, a professor from the twenties, they have some of his audio.
You only need a little clip. And this is where it's beautiful with this new technology. You only need 30 seconds or so, or a minute of that of that... the way that that professor spoke. And then they'll they'll write the script, they'll write the speech, and they'll have the actor perform it. Like you go in a studio and you record it just like you do any other voiceover job.
And then it's not your voice. That's the end result.
PS: So the lessons that I've taken away today are, number one, read your contracts and if you have any doubt, I would imagine you need to contact somebody that's well versed in this stuff like you, like a seasoned entertainment attorney.
And number two, you know, I think the other takeaway is let's just not hit the panic button yet. Yes, we have to protect ourselves and yes, we have to advocate for ourselves and and push for legislation that's going to protect us. But at the same time, there's going to be some opportunity that's going to come up because of these new technologies and we need to be open to them. We need to be adaptable to them. And I think generally, and this goes for life overall, you need to have a generally positive attitude.
Trust and verify is probably the the whole… the whole conversation that we've had, right? Trust and verify.
RS: Yeah. I mean, I could see, I could see the opportunity now, which is why I'm that's why I'm very optimistic about what's going happen in the future because I can see that there's talent that are being hired to implement these technologies. And what I, I... where I see talent is closing the door on it saying I don't want to know anything about AI and I'm not going to do anything about it.
I think that... I think it's a little short sighted. They really should at least find out what's out there and learn about it before making that decision and automatically thinking that AI's going to replace them because it's not the case, in my opinion. And the other thing I want... I want to say about protecting yourself, it's also very important when you speak to an attorney, speak to an attorney that understands AI because it's very specific.
I hear attorneys talk about copyright all the time when they talk about it. And it's... they're two different things. If there's an attorney that's doing entertainment law that's not up on artificial intelligence, that's not the attorney to talk to. I'm not promoting my services. I'm just saying when someone's going out to look, you know, what... to make sure that the contract is going to protect them, make sure they understand what it is and, you know, the future of it.
PS: Rob Sciglimpaglia from Orangeburg, South Carolina. Thanks for spending time today with us.
RS: No problem. Thanks.