Actors hit AI voice cloning company with class-action lawsuit

Voiceover actor Paul Skye Lehrman was at his friend's house in 2022 when a YouTube video was pulled from a channel called Military News about Russia's advance in Ukraine. He immediately recognized the voice as his own, although he never entered into a contract with the channel's operator for the use of his image.

“It was my voice dictating the conflict and talking about weapons,” Lehrman says. “Those are words I’ve never said.”

A year later, he was on his way to a doctor's appointment when he said he came across his voice again on a podcast about Hollywood double-taps in which a generative artificial intelligence text-to-speech tool was used to answer questions about the dangers of technology. That's when he and his wife Linnea Sage, also a voiceover actress who suspects her voice was stolen in a similar way, contacted a lawyer.

On Thursday, they sued LOVO, a Berkeley-based AI startup, in a class-action lawsuit filed in New York federal court, accusing the company of turn away their voices, as well as those of A-list talents such as Scarlett Johansson, Ariana Grande and Conan O'Brien. It would be the first lawsuit against an AI company for using likenesses to train an AI system and marks a growing divide between creators and companies accused of indiscriminately hoovering up reams of data to power their technology.

The lawsuit seeks to represent other voiceover artists who believe their voices were misappropriated by LOVO, which did not respond to a request for comment. He is also seeking a court order prohibiting the company from continuing to reduce production costs.

The actors join a growing list of rights holders that includes authors, artists and publications who have filed lawsuits over what they say is the unauthorized and uncompensated theft of their works and likenesses to fuel a multi-billion dollar industry.

SAG-AFTRA General Counsel Jeffrey Bennett says the misconduct alleged in the lawsuit is “the kind of thing that we're going to see more and more of as people don't understand that there are rights in voice “. The union argues that training AI systems on members' images without their consent constitutes a violation of their rights.

Thursday's lawsuit, which centers on an alleged violation of New York's Right of Publicity law, claims that LOVO sells its services using “stolen goods” and “falsely claims that it has the legal right to market these voices” when that is not the case.

In 2020, Lehrman was contacted by an unidentified user, who he later learned was an employee of LOVO, on the freelance services platform Fiverr to provide voiceover services, according to the complaint. When he inquired, he was reportedly told that his voice would be “used only for academic research purposes.” Lerhman, who received $1,200, was assured in another message that the money “will not be used for anything else.”

But two years later, the lawsuit claims he recognized her voice on the Military News YouTube channel, which has more than 336,000 subscribers, on a video about Russian weapons. “Then, on or about June 13, 2023, Mr. Lehrman heard his voice being used in a podcast episode of ‘Deadline Strike Talk,’” says the complaint, which notes that he was not compensated for this use.

According to the complaint, LOVO marketed his allegedly misappropriated voice as part of its subscription service under the stage name “Kyle Snow.” The lawsuit states: “His voice was the default voice of the software; her voice was also featured as one of the top five text-to-speech voices, and she was used to announce and explain the product.

Sage, a 14-year voiceover artist known for her work in Marvel video games, was also offered a job on Fiverr in 2019 producing test scripts for radio commercials. Like Lerhman, she was told that her voice “would only be consumed internally and therefore would not require rights of any kind,” the lawsuit states.

But in 2023, Sage claims to have discovered that LOVO had been using his voice as part of her subscription business under the name “Sally Coleman”.

While LOVO claims its AI system was trained on thousands of voices, the lawsuit claims the voices of “Kyle Snow” and “Sally Coleman” are distinctly those of Lehrman and Sage respectively.

“The voices of LOVO's other voice options are undoubtedly the voices of complainants from other classes who have not given permission to use their voices – whether for Genny's teaching, for LOVO's use or for its sale by LOVO as part of its service – and have never been properly remunerated. “, writing Steve Cohen by Pollock Cohenattorney for the actors, in the complaint.

Lehrman, who has more than a decade of experience as a voiceover artist under his belt and is best known for his roles on the NBC series New Amsterdam CBS Blue blood, estimates he has seen about a 50 percent drop in his work since last year. He emphasizes that the problem is not only the fact that he has fewer job opportunities, but also the “deterioration of my reputation”.

“My voice literally says things I wouldn't say with brands I wouldn't work with in places I wouldn't want to be placed,” he explains. “Furthermore, I have no control over the nuance of the artistic performance.”

Sage's concerns relate to the risk of being completely displaced from Hollywood with the rise of AI voice tools. If the hijacking of her voice is allowed by companies like LOVO, she warns that “99% of the work done by voice-over artists will be replaced by AI voices”.

“I didn't make it big, but I've worked with so many other hard workers in this industry my entire adult life,” she adds.

For SAG-AFTRA, Bennett says this lawsuit “puts companies on notice that they need to know what rights they're getting and what they want to get.” He urges members not to accept overly broad contract clauses that confer rights in perpetuity.

“Now we live in a world where we can clone someone's voice and image,” says Bennet. “These overbroad provisions are now incredibly dangerous. You have potentially given up your rights and consented to being cloned.

Due to the rise of AI services that allow users to replicate actors' likenesses, the union is advocating for a federal right of publicity law. There are currently no federal laws covering the use of AI to imitate someone's voice. A patchwork of state right of publicity laws has filled the void, but there is little recourse in states that have not adopted such laws.

“What I think is most important in a federal voice and likeness law is the creation of a federal intellectual property right over voice and likeness,” Bennett said. “If there are intellectual property rights at the federal level, you have given yourself the opportunity to attack online use cases and demand their removal. »

Although the class action seeks to represent talent whose voices were used to train LOVO's AI system, as well as those whose voices were misappropriated, it has the potential to extend to top-tier talent. The company also promotes its services using “thinly disguised images and names” of celebrities, such as “Ariana Venti,” “Barack Yo Mama” and “Cocoon O'Brien.” The company tells users that they can “clone any voice”, while specifying that they “cannot use this cloned voice to imitate celebrities, so they only use this tool for the purposes of personal entertainment.”