Key Points
- A voice actor has alleged that a production company replicated his voice for an animated series without his consent.
- The Senate launched a committee in March this year to inquire into and report on the rollout of AI in Australia.
- Experts say there is very little legal recourse for people who allege that their voices have been stolen.
Cooper Mortlock has been a professional voice actor since 2020. He trained himself to be a voice actor after realising it was the only type of acting work he could continue through COVID-19 lockdowns.
Mortlock says that he practised a lot and started to pick up regular well-paying jobs for companies including banks as well as government campaigns.
In 2022, he landed a voice acting job for an animated children's series that was published on YouTube. One of his colleagues described the ongoing job as a "unicorn gig" due to the fun nature of the work and the regular pay that the crew received.
Mortlock says he was contracted for 52 episodes but around the time of recording the 30th episode, production shut down.
"The producer messaged us saying they were cancelling the series. They didn't say specifically why, but I imagine they just weren't getting the return on investment they were looking for," he said.
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While he was disappointed and wasn't paid out for the remaining episodes, Mortlock said that kind of unpredictability wasn't uncommon in the entertainment industry.
Around a year after the job ended, a sound engineer who was working with him on the project sent through a video of another episode of the series that had been uploaded to YouTube.
But Mortlock says that they had never recorded the episode and alleges the company used artificial intelligence (AI) to replicate his voice and the voices of the three other voice actors.
I was unsettled because I heard my own voice speaking to me in this weird, robotic, unsettling way
"We didn't know this was going to happen. They didn't ask us, they didn't even let us know and they definitely didn't pay us," he said.
"I was unsettled because I heard my own voice speaking to me in this weird, robotic, unsettling way. I was pretty furious at the producers ... and gobsmacked and just bewildered that they chose to do this. I got really worried about the future of this industry," he said.
Mortlock is a member of the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA), the largest union for Australian creative professionals. After speaking with the union, he sent a cease and desist letter to the production company.
Mortlock says the company responded by saying that it did not use AI to replicate the actors' voices. He says it also claimed that the phrasing of his contract allowed the company to use retroactive consent to use his voice for an AI replication.
"When we spoke to the union and the union lawyers got to us, they said that unfortunately there isn't a strong enough case at the moment because there aren't laws in place for this," he said.
Mortlock says he hopes federal legislation will be updated soon to ensure all workers — including those outside of creative industries — are protected.
Teresa Lim, the vice-president of the Australian Association of Voice Actors (AAVA), says the rapid advancement in AI voice replication technology means voice replication without consent could become very commonplace in the future and affect many people.
"The replication of voices can happen very quickly and very easily — and now it's not just someone who's a very high-tech expert who's doing it.
"You can actually buy the software to clone voices for a very cheap price online, so it's accessible to everyone, and that's what we're really concerned about," she said.
The inquiry into AI's rollout
Australia's Senate launched the Select Committee on Adopting Artificial Intelligence in March this year to inquire into and report on the "opportunities and impacts for Australia arising out of the uptake of AI technologies in Australia".
Earlier this month, the inquiry's third public hearing drew representatives from legal, academic and media groups including the MEAA, with the union calling for restrictions on AI technology to protect Australian jobs and ensure workers were compensated.
Mortlock testified about his experience with the alleged voice replication at this hearing.
In a submission to the inquiry, the MEAA said that government policy development has been missing plans for "protecting work from devaluation and assisting workers who lose their jobs due to companies adopting AI tools".
"Also missing has been any consideration of the impacts that the widespread adoption of generative AI will have on arts, culture, and music," the statement said.
The inquiry was also told book authors and Indigenous storytellers were unable to address the theft of their work, and Australia should create sovereign AI models to ensure ethical behaviour.
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What does the legislation say?
Professor Jeannie Paterson is the co-director of the digital access and equity research program at the University of Melbourne and belongs to an artificial intelligence expert group that was brought together by the government earlier this year.
Paterson says the legislation is currently in a state of "flux" and people have very little legal recourse when their voices are replicated without permission. Paterson says that it's possible companies could be charged with misleading and deceptive conduct but this has not been tested yet in courts.
"This particular issue is a specific and immediate one and we really need to get creative about how we protect people who are in the creative industries," she said.
There is also little global precedent for legislation around voice replication. The requires tech companies to place markers into synthetic content, including voice clones and fakes, but Paterson says that these laws don't go far enough.
"I mean, if my voice was copied, I still might feel unhappy, even if it was identified as a copy," she said.
US Congress is currently considering legislation that would regulate the creation, disclosure and dissemination of deepfakes.
Earlier this year, Scarlett Johansson spoke out against artificial intelligence company OpenAI after it used a voice that strongly resembled the actor's in a chatbot product.
The company denied the claims and said that they had used recordings of another voice actor. However, the company suspended the use of the voice.
Paterson believes that all people should have the final right to give consent for their voices to be replicated. She also said that standardised AI could be used to test the similarity of a voice to an actor's voice.
"We could use AI to do a similarity test, which would be objective and if the similarity was over a certain percentage, we could agree that that's when there's a requirement to pay the actor," she said.
Paterson said that regulation around voice replication will also be a key way to protect people against scams that use people's voices to commit fraud and other cyber crimes.
Lim said that the AAVA is pushing for comprehensive legislation that outlines the consent, control and compensation for the use of an actor's voice.
"At the moment there's nothing in Australian law that enables voice actors the protections they need with this new AI technology in place," she said.
Paterson said that ultimately, the legislation has to reflect how societies value creative work as well as people's identities.
"These are really fundamental issues about how we value artists and actors and writers in our society, and we have to deal with those questions as well," she said.
"I don't think [AI] is going to destroy the world and I don't think it's going to take over the world, but it does raise some really important questions about the type of society we want to have."
Mortlock says that he isn't against the use of AI altogether and believes that in some cases and with certain professions it can be helpful.
However, he believes that people who work in the creative and entertainment industries are particularly vulnerable to AI because of the way creative work and a person's likeness can be captured by generative AI programs.
"Artists create work, whether it's voice work, artwork, scripts, whatever — and then an AI generator takes them, reappropriates them and spits them out without paying [workers], without asking them, without their consent ... that is theft," he said.
The Select Committee on Adopting Artificial Intelligence is due to report to parliament by September.
