Over Twitter, Clarke told Gizmodo that she got the job in 2019 from an open call on major casting site Voices.com. Only after she got the gig did they reveal the call was for Microsoft and sent her the contract to sign. She admitted she signed “without fully understanding the ramifications” While Revoicer removed her voice—renamed “Olivia”—from the site, Microsoft has not yet reached out to her despite the media attention. In response to an inquiry from Gizmodo, Microsoft declined to comment. In a series of guidelines posted last year, the company said it contractually requires customers to obtain explicit written permission from voice talent to create a synthetic voice.
Connecticut-based attorney Robert Sciglimpaglia represented Standing in her lawsuit and has since taken on multiple clients in the voiceover industry concerned about their work and AI. In Clarke’s case, he said she had signed her Microsoft contract during a time when many of the big tech companies, from Google to Amazon to Apple, were creating large voice banks, and the documents specifically mention voice cloning and then selling that voice commercially. Though this was years before most professionals understood an iota of the work being done on generative AI, and a voice actor, especially one who’s desperate for gigs, wouldn’t necessarily notice any clause that noted any fine print that allowed perpetual use.
“There’s going to be a lot of surprises for voice actors coming up,” Sciglimpaglia told Gizmodo over the phone, noting how many actors have likely signed these kinds of contracts. The attorney himself has done some voiceover work on a few short films and TV series, and he’s seen cases where “unscrupulous players” are using provisions for “automated dialogue replacement” in union contracts to argue they can clone people’s voices.
Though as far as he’s seen, the major players—talent agencies, casting sites, or studios themselves—are willing to play ball and keep AI out of their contracts. What’s going to be more concerning for people, especially those just dipping their toes into voice work, are the bevy of unscrupulous companies across the world who could be more willing to outright lie about how they intend to use actors’ voices. With the proliferation of AI overseas, it’s going to get even harder for actors to make claims against foreign companies over stealing their voices.
“With Bev Standing, they said that she was going to be doing a job for a Chinese institute, which was based in the Netherlands, for translation,” the attorney said. “The only companies making money are the ones selling voices to third parties. You can tell right away which ones are the unscrupulous ones and which ones are the legitimate ones just by the language that they use in the contract, just based on if they’re willing to negotiate.”
What are the unions and actors’ groups doing to fight against AI?
AI has put the fear of a new, digital God in the hearts of folks in many creative industries, including artists, coders, and writers. Thousands of members of Writers Guild of America (WGA) initiated a strike earlier this month centered on pay disputes, but also tangentially related to writers’ concerns about generative AI and being replaced. The WGA is seeking to carve out new contracts that make sure AI isn’t used as a way to write or rewrite anybody’s actual work.
The actors’ union is gearing up for a fight on the same line of thinking that the WGA has presented. Early in May, SAG-AFTRA joined the WGA on the picket line. The actors union then sent a strike authorization vote to members, making room for another high-profile fight in the entertainment industry. Gizmodo reached out to the union for comment about its specific demands for companies regarding AI but did not hear back by press time. Still, the union has made its stance pretty clear, with statements saying the rights to digitally copy an actor or create a new performance with AI are “mandatory subjects of bargaining.”
That still leaves out the many voice actors who are either not signed up with a union, or who still take non-union gigs. Some groups like NAVA have taken up the torch by promoting contract language to give actors rights to the AI-generated content trained on their voices. Earlier this month, the organization revealed it had created a “fAIr Voices Coalition” that included several online voiceover casting companies including Voices.com and Voice123. The CEOs have pledged to work out mutually agreed, fair rates for any company that wants to use voice files for AI. Likewise, the Vocal Variants group spinning out of NAVA says it’s devising new contracts as well as lobbying for federal regulations that might protect voiceover actors.
The AI-voiced future is just over the horizon. Voices.com caused a stir in the voiceover community when it changed its terms of service to imply it could upload auditions to train AI, though it quickly claimed that wasn’t the intent and again modified its TOS. The site bought Voices.ai in April this year, a site that sells enterprise-focused APIs for AI voices. Voices.com CEO David Ciccarelli said in a release “there are many applications that don’t require artistic interpretation.”
While its easy to see the company’s argument, these kinds of lines from major corporations don’t sit well for the actors whose jobs are on the line. And in the end, the industry moving in the direction of AI without first engaging with actors has caused a widening fracture within the voiceover industry.
“In the past, it was very logical,” Sheh said. “You could say ‘I’m giving out these rights because it’s just the nature of production. We’re all gonna assume that everyone is a good player, and no one’s trying to cheat us or try to take advantage of us.’ Now, I think it’s a very different situation.”
And even if, in some utopian future, AI becomes another tool in the chest for voiceover work, it cannot replace the real, human expression that voiceover acting is. The actors Gizmodo spoke to all recognized those moments of unscripted inspiration. AI, they said, can never truly replicate those.
“It’s a piece of that process that you can’t name,” Hale said. “You just know it when it happens. It leaves you speechless. It leaves you laughing uncontrollably. It surprises you. It actually pings the heart center of your body as a real human experience.”
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