AI Stole Your Voice? Speak Up

 AI Stole Your Voice? Speak Up




Last summer, as they drove to a doctor's appointment near their home in New York City, Paul Skye Lehrman, and Linnea Sage listened to a podcast about the rise of AI and the threat it posed to the livelihoods of writers, actors, and other entertainment professionals.

The topic was particularly important to the young married couple. They made their living as voice actors and AI technologies were beginning to generate voices that sounded like the real thing.

But the podcast had an unexpected twist. To underline the threat from AI, the host conducted a lengthy interview with a talking chatbot named Poe. It sounded just like Lehrman. "We pulled the car over and sat there in absolute disbelief, trying to figure out what just happened and what we should do," Lehrman said. 

Lehrman and Sage are now suing the company that created the bot's voice. They claim that Lovo, a startup in Berkeley, California, illegally used recordings of their voices to create technology that can compete with their voice work. The couple discovered that Lovo had created a clone of Sage's voice, too.

The couple joins a growing number of artists, publishers, computer programmers, and other creators who have sued the makers of AI technologies, arguing that these firms used their work without permission in creating tools that could ultimately replace them in the job market.

In their suit, filed in federal court in Manhattan on Thursday, the couple said anonymous Lovo employees had paid them for a few voice clips in 2019 and 2020 without disclosing how the clips would be used.

They say Lovo is violating federal trademark law and several state privacy laws by promoting clones of their voices. The suit seeks class-action status, with Lehrman and Sage inviting other voice actors to join it.

Lovo denies the claims in the suit, said David Case, a lawyer representing the company. He added that if all individuals who provided voice recordings to Lovo gave their consent, "then there is not a problem."

The suit appears to be the first of its kind, said Jeffrey Bennett, general counsel for the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, the labour union that represents 160,000 media professionals worldwide.

"We hope to claw back control over our voices, over who we are, over our careers," Lehrman added. "We want to represent others this has happened to and those that this will happen to if nothing changes."


Compiled By: Pushpendra Maurya

Profession: Data Scientist

Source of: The Economics Times


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