voice theft

This is another manifestation of the changes which AI is making in once familiar patterns of work.  It is possible now, using AI, to create a synthetic voice for commercial use.  There are two problems with this. The synthetic voice production will do the voiceover artist or voice actor out of a job.  The voice actors argue that the synthetic voice has no heart or soul and is of inferior quality, although how much heart and soul you need to advertise hamburgers is debatable.  The second consideration is that the synthetic voice is trained on real voices so a real person may have contributed to the creation of the AI voice but is receiving no compensation for that.

There are celebrity voices which are in trouble as well with AI creating voices that sound so close to the celebrity’s voice that people might be forgiven for thinking that it was the celebrity that they were hearing.

And then there is the creation of voices used in scamming.  Just a three-second snippet of someone’s voice is sufficient to produce an AI clone.  It is possible to replicate the voices of friends and families as part of a scam.