One of the scariest aspects of being a voice actor in modern times is AI, artificial intelligence, synthetic voice, and text to speech. Most of the discussion has been around the question of, “Well, what happens when AI steals our work?”

The scarier question to me is what happens when A.I. has your voice?

Joining us from Dublin today is the Irish voice actor and author Remie Michelle Clarke with her story of how she beleives her voice was stolen directly by artificial intelligence and the difficulties she's had in pursuing the people that have taken her voice.

PS: Remie, thanks so much for sharing your time with us today.

RMC: Thanks so much for having me, Paul.

PS: Well, let's get into it. All of this, your entire odyssey down this road, and I don't want to give too much away now, all started with a phone call. Tell us what happened.

RMC: So a sound engineer who I've worked with for the majority of my career, which is going on two decades now almost, gave me a call and said, look, I've got this business idea and it's kind of around A.I. and voice, and I wanted to know how it worked for you. You know, working, creating an A.I. voice and, you know, was it worth your while?

And, you know, was it was it financially viable for you? You know, did you get a lot of work? Did you get a lot of bookings? And I went, you know, in what capacity? What are you talking about? And he said, Well, I find you on this site called Revoicer.com. And I just said, Oh, hang on a second.

What, what was that, Revoicer? You know, I'd never heard of them.

PS: So this was kind of unexpected because as I understand, you've done A.I. voice work for Microsoft, right?

RMC: For Microsoft, yes.

PS: But not for Revoicer.com.

RMC: No, I'd never heard of them before. I didn't even know they existed.

PS: Wow.

RMC: So, you know, I asked him, “Are you sure it was me?” And he said, “I'm pretty sure I've worked with you for nearly two decades. I know your voice.” So I got him to send me the link, and I went and went on to their page, which is, you know, at this big page, full and full of information and different voices.

And I eventually found the voice that he had said was my voice. And the name was Olivia. And the picture was a picture of a middle aged Asian lady with long gray hair, but it was advertised as neutral Irish, I believe. Great for audiobooks.

PS: Makes perfect sense.

RMC: It all worked really well together. So I clicked on it and I said, Well, that's unmistakably my voice.

"Hello, my dear ones, My name is Olivia. I have a soft and caring voice. I can record voiceovers for audiobooks, educational videos and even make a soft sell. I recorded thousands of voiceovers for kids videos, but I can do any other type of voiceover that you need."

Now, it's not a perfect likeness. It's, you know, it's been tampered with somewhat. It's maybe a little bit lower and there's a lack of clarity. It's well, it's robotic. It's a robotic voice.

PS: What's your first thought?

RMC: My first thought was, what am I going to do about this? So I knew somebody who worked in copyright law, media law. And I contacted her and she gave me a little bit of advice about it and just said, you know, it does sound like there's a problem. Definitely. But unfortunately, there are a few things in the way with things like this.

First of all, you have to find out where they are. Secondly, you have to be aware that your voice is not a copyrightable asset. You can only claim performance theft or performance rights around something like voice work because it's not seen as creating something new. It's an interpretation or a performance of copy written word. So there's that aspect to it, even though in my view, I own my voice, you know, it's my voice, it's my identity, it's my livelihood.

Under European law, and in any case, it's not mine. So there are lots of things that are thrown up here, you know, territories, copyright. Basically, the law as it stands doesn't seem to support artists, some voice artists in the face of AI. And now I have to say I'm not a lawyer, you know, I'm sure I have a very sort of loose grasp on what legalities are involved with this.

But it definitely seems to me from who I've spoken to already, that something needs to change.

PS: Absolutely. Something needs to change. So even before you start to delve into who is Revoicer, how did they steal my voice, how do I how do I now pursue some sort of action against them? You're already being told, even before that happens, hey, the deck is kind of stacked against you because, as my lawyer says, Ashley Brooks, she says famously that the law has not caught up with the technology and it likely may never because technology moves faster than the law. So you're already at a disadvantage.

RMC: I totally am. And there are many other things in the way, such as I don't even know where Revoicer.com got my voice. They could have got it from any number of places, you know, a lot of voice overs do a lot of long copy. A lot of it's in the public domain in one way or another. Whether you've done an audio book or a video that's, you know, embedded on a YouTube site or a website, you know, everyone can take audio from anywhere in the Internet.

Now, even with the most cursory technology. And then you just have to have a little bit more know how to actually maybe create a new AI voice from that. So where they got it from, I don't know whether they had the right to do it. I don't know. I'm not a lawyer. I don't know the copyright ins and outs, but I need to find out.

PS: So take us through from the moment you decided "I need to take action against these people." Take us through that timeline. What does that look like thus far?

RMC: So I asked for advice. I contacted another media lawyer who supported artists and she suggested that I find out where they were. This I couldn't do. There was nowhere on the website that told me a business address. There was nowhere that suggested where they were even placed in terms of a country, because I think there's a there's a website called WhoIs that you can find out where a website is based. And that didn't give a direct answer either. It seemed to suggest California and then other other places say that it's based in India. So I said, well, the best way to try and find out what this is, is to go straight to them and ask them. So I sent an email, but I didn't say it was from me.

I said I was a prospective client, you know, and I needed the address for a grant and they just said, "We can't help you with that."

PS: That was the entire reply.

RMC: Yeah, we can't help you with that. And then they said, "We outsource our payments to another company." So immediately it was, you know, not engaging. Nothing to do with us, You know, if you want any information about us, you're not getting it whether you're a prospective client or not. So...

PS: So they completely stonewall you at that point. So, what's your next move?

My next move is finding out where they got my voice from. So that's a big thing. I need to find that out. And I need to find out whether I have any legal leg to stand on to go after them. And that's really important. That's the next step. So when I find time in between caring for my ten month old baby and trying to keep my career afloat, that's my next step in this story.

As I, you know, it's a funny timing for something like this to happen because it's really, you know, is there ever a right time for something like this to happen? Probably not. But at the moment, especially not because I have so many things to juggle and, you know, I know there's this…

PS: And congratulations…on the bright side…. On being, I think, a brand new mum. This is your first baby?

RMC: Yeah. This is my first one.

PS: This is fantastic. And tell me your baby's name.

RMC: Ronan. Is an Irish name. It's an Irish name. Yes. That means little seal.

PS: Little seal. I love it. I love it. Well, thanks to Ronan for at least, you know, being reserved in his vocal expression today....

RMC: He's asleep. He's asleep.

PS: Yeah. So you're a voice actor? I'm a voice actor. This channel is for voice actors. Yeah. How do we how do we combat this sort of thing? Looking back, it seems to me, Remie, there's nothing you could do to prevent this from happening.

RMC, Tech, you know, has it's has a life of its own and a AI is a whole other beast. And for me, it kind of throws up a lot of questions, you know, beyond the legality of it and beyond, you know, the recompense and all this kind of stuff around this website using my voice.

What about humans and their desire and need to create? Humans and their worth in what they create and what they give and how they contribute to the world? So many people identify themselves through their work and artists, especially artists, you know, paint pictures. They write songs, they write books, and they contribute to culture. They shape culture, and culture gives us meaning and gives humanity meaning and people meaning and helps people through all sorts of times in their lives.

So A.I. is taking that away. You know, it's kind of saying, "Humans, what are you good for anymore?" And that to me is the biggest issue here. And I don't, you know, the law also needs to catch up with the ethics of the day. So many laws that used to be active were repealed because they were no longer seen as ethical.

And I think maybe there are a lot of laws around this issue that maybe don't think of the individual, the human, and they maybe support bigger companies, corporations, rather than the individual standing at the other end who might be made obsolete. And that's my that's my issue here. That's what's really getting to me here.

PS: I agree with you. And I think the other inherent issue, Remie, is that tech is global. Law is local. Righ?. So the law in Ireland may catch up at some point, but that's nothing….that's not to say that the law in the U.S. may catch up at some point. Right? Every every voice actor around the world has to now be tasked with raising awareness. Right? Not only to ourselves and to the people who may make the choice between an inhuman voice, a AI, and a human voice, us, but also to the politicians that have the power to catch the law up to the technology. To me, that's one of the biggest challenges there is right now.

RMC: What I feel might help a little bit, you know, and making this more of an issue that there's awareness around for the voiceover community maybe will help other people, you know, to really be aware of where their voice might be, to be aware of sites like this, to be aware of the fact that, you know, their voice might be being used without their knowledge.

PS: I think even one of the more basic challenges we have as certainly as non-union actors here in the States, we can't even really know if our if our voice is being used in unauthorized ways. Right? We may book a TV commercial for three months. We have no real way of knowing whether that commercial only runs for three months.

RMC: You know, I'm sure it's happened to you and it's happened to me many a time where something has been rerun and you have to kind of go back and say, okay, you know, you didn't have you didn't have the rights to rerun this, and then you have to organize a whole new contract, you know?

PS: Yep. And you can only do that if you're made aware... A friend hears it in a market they live in and you don't or, you know, whatever happens. And that's still the same basic challenge that we have when it comes to A.I.. Our voices may be stolen, but you wouldn't even be on this odyssey right now had your recording engineer not made you aware, right?

RMC: Mm hmm. Yeah.

PS: You talked about your advice for voice actors. What advice would you have for the other side of the glass, for the people making the decisions, whether to use a human voice or an A.I. voice?

RMC: I mean, I think for a lot of small businesses, they look at this as an easy way out, an easy way to finish a project that they might not have the funds for a full, you know, a true voice artist.

But I don't know how an AI voice will last the test of time because AI and all of its artistic creations, you know, quote unquote, are based on everything that's happened before. So everything, you know, you can't create an AI voice without a human voice standing behind it. You can't create an AI piece of art without the work of many, many artists preceding that.

So all these creations are based on the past. So there's nothing new being made. And I know they say there's nothing new under the sun and everything is kind of like a a reworking of something in the past. But there's everything. What you're getting when you, you know, purchase an AI voice is something that has no spirit in it.

You know, that's what's so important to me about like human creativity is that there's something inspired about it, maybe even something slightly spiritual. And a lot of the greatest works of art. There's a sort of a spiritual nature, I believe. So when you go for A.I. over human, you're kind of missing that element out. And I think that's something that you can connect with or not in the case of AI, something that you would feel.

So it's kind of like the feeling difference between A.I. and Human. And, you know, they say all the new voices, they have emotion. But there's another element that's beyond, you know, the kind of surface inflections of emotion. So you could be buying something that's an AI voice, but it's, you know, where's the value in it? Where's the true value in it for your business or your product?

So maybe people might consider, well, not only that aspect, but actually that there's a human on the other end who may be suffering because of the choice as well. So those two things are worth considering, I think.

PS: Absolutely. Any final parting words before we go? Anything that you would like to say to voice actors that we haven't covered so far?

RMC: Keep workin’! Keep fighting the good fight. I honestly, I don't know. I think just keep showing up. You know, as a lot of people have said about AI and I mean, this is the first time that I've kind of really thought about AI and come into contact with it in this way beyond, you know, the work that I've done.

Because, you know, when you're recording a lot of jobs all the time, you kind of you record your script and then you sort of move on. You know, you don't keep thinking about them for days and days and weeks on end. So keep showing up. And many people say that AI is something that has to happen and kind of has to we kind of have to blow through it and either it will take over completely or it won't.

And I suppose my hope, because I'm definitely a glass half full kind of person, is that it won't and that, you know, human creativity and spirit is what we'll win over and especially community, you know, people getting together, talking about these issues, saying, okay, this is, you know, good in some ways, but in other ways it's maybe really harmful.

So trying to find new ways around things and trying to maybe work with AI in a way that it doesn't kind of eclipse so much good stuff that humans and voice artists have to offer.

PS: The hopeful and lovely and talented Remie Michelle Clarke. Remie, thank you so much for joining us and sharing your story from Dublin today.

RMC: Thanks so much, Paul. It has been... It's been a delight to talk to you.

PS: And a delight to talk to you as well, Remie.

AI/Synthetic Voices Resources for Voice Actors

We do have some resources available for you. These are just emerging from NAVA, the National Association of Voice Actors. I'll include the link to their A.I. and Synthetic Voices Resources page here. You do not have to be a NAVA member to access that page. That page includes a template, a voice contract, a synthetic/A.I. voice rider, a glossary of terms, and more.

Also, I'll put a link to three different articles, one from Vice, one from Wired, and one from Kotaku.

UPDATES:

And this one from WBUR.

From attorney and voice actor Rob Sciglimpaglia: Don't Commit 'Career Suicide' In AI: How To Keep Control Of Your Cloned Voice https://www.voiceoverxtra.com/article.htm?id=BJSOS5GG

The Open Voice Network: https://openvoicenetwork.org/

All of those articles are around what's been going on very recently in our business with regard to companies not bothering to get our consent or stealing our voices outright, and the movement that is beginning to gather among us voice actors to try to get in front of this and educate ourselves. You need to be educated.

I need to be educated, and hopefully providing these resources to you will help us all get educated on the growing threat...not really of the tool, the tool is fine. It's how the tool is being used and how disreputable people are trying to skirt our consent and use our voice without our consent and certainly without compensating us. So let's get educated.

I'm deeply grateful for your support. Thank you so much for watching and we will see you back here again next week.

A special note of thanks to Paul Strikwerda for helping to connect me with Remie. Thank you, sir!