“A tech company stole our voices

Artificial intelligence may one day take over our jobs, a message many of us have heard in recent years.

But for Paul Skye Lehrman, the warning was particularly personal, chilling, and unexpected: He heard his own voice uttering it.

In June 2023, Paul and his partner Linnea Sage were driving around their home in New York City, listening to podcasts about the ongoing strike in Hollywood and how artificial intelligence (AI) was impacting the industry.

This episode is interesting because the couple are voice actors and, like many other creatives, fear that human-voiced speech generators will soon be used to replace them.

This particular podcast has a unique hook – they interview an AI chatbot equipped with text-to-speech software and ask how it thinks the use of AI will impact jobs in Hollywood.

But when it spoke, it sounded just like Mr. Lehrman.

“We need to pull over,” he said.

“The irony that artificial intelligence is about to enter the entertainment industry and that my voice is speaking out about the potential disruption to the industry is truly alarming.”

That night, they spent several hours online searching for clues until they discovered the website of text-to-speech platform Lovo. Once there, Ms Sage said she also found a copy of her own voice.

“I was stunned,” she said. “I can’t believe it.”

“A tech company stole our voices, made AI clones of them, and sold them potentially hundreds of thousands of times.”

They have now filed a lawsuit against Lovo. The company has not yet responded to requests for comment from this or the BBC.

But how did Lovo recreate their sound? The couple claimed this was done under false pretenses.

Lovo co-founder Tom Lee has previously said that its voice cloning software only requires users to read about 50 sentences to create a faithful clone.

“We can capture tone, personality, style, phonetics, even if you have an accent, we can capture it,” he told the Future Visioners podcast in 2021.

In the lawsuit, the couple lays out how Lovo obtained such recordings from them.

They allege that they were contacted by anonymous Lovo employees to record audio assets on the popular freelance talent site Fiverr, where they sell services providing audio for television, radio, video games and other media.

First, Ms. Sage said, in 2019, a user contacted her and asked her to record dozens of generic sounding test radio scripts.

Test recordings are often used in film and television for focus groups, internal meetings, or as placeholders for a work in progress. Because they are not widely shared, these recordings cost much less than broadcast audio.

Ms Sage said she completed the work, delivered the documents and was paid $400 (£303).

About six months later, Mr. Lehrman said he received a similar request to record dozens of generic-sounding radio ads.

In a message the couple shared with the BBC, an anonymous Fiverr user said the audio would be used for “speech synthesis” research.

After asking users to ensure that the scripts would not be used outside of their specific research projects, Mr. Lehrman asked what the project’s goals were.

“These scripts will not be used for anything else,” the user said. “I can’t tell you the target yet because this is an ongoing confidential work, sorry haha.”

Mr. Lehrman asked whether the completed documents would be repurposed or used in a different order. Users indicate that these documents will be used for research purposes only. Mr. Lehrman said he delivered the documents and was paid $1,200.

They say the connection between anonymous users and Lovo comes from Lovo itself.

They shared the evidence they had found that the voices had been cloned with Lovo, who responded that they had done nothing wrong and pointed to anonymous user communications between them as evidence that they had legitimate contact with the couple.

“We’ve shipped over 100,000 audio assets over the course of our careers,” Mr. Lehrman said of their work on Fiverr for the better part of a decade.

“We were able to find the needle in the haystack — they gave us the needle in the haystack.”

In both cases, Mr. Lehrman and Ms. Sage said they had no written contracts, only these conversations. The BBC was unable to verify all of their conversations. The couple said the user they were speaking to also appeared to have deleted some messages.

The BBC contacted Lowo multiple times requesting an interview with Mr Lee and seeking a response to the couple’s claims. They did not respond to any of our messages.

The lawsuit filed by the couple in May alleges that Lovo used recordings of their voices to create copies that illegally competed with the real voices of Ms. Sage and Mr. Lehrman.

The couple said the company did so without permission or proper compensation.

This is a class action lawsuit – meaning they hope other claimants will join it, although so far none have.

Professor Chrystelia Garcia, an expert on intellectual property law at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., said the case may focus on an area of ​​U.S. law called the “right of publicity.”

Sometimes called personality rights, violations of personal image often result from the misuse or distortion of someone’s image or voice.

She also said the licenses Ms. Sage and Mr. Lehrman granted to users who commissioned recordings may have breached contracts.

“A permit is permission for a very specific and narrow use. I might give you a permit to use my pool for an afternoon, but that doesn’t mean you can come to my pool and have a party in my pool anytime,” she told the BBC.

“This would be outside the terms of the licence.”

Regardless of the outcome of the case, it’s just another in a long line of lawsuits filed by artists, writers, illustrators and musicians who don’t want to lose control of their jobs and livelihoods.

They are likely just the tip of the iceberg. This week financial firm Klarna said Plans to use artificial intelligence to cut headcount in half.

Some experts predict 40% of all job opportunities Will eventually be affected by artificial intelligence

For Mr. Lehrman and Ms. Sage, a worrying future is now playing out.

“This whole experience feels very surreal,” Ms. Sage said.

“When we think of artificial intelligence, we think of artificial intelligence folding our laundry and cooking our meals, rather than pursuing human creative endeavors.”

You can hear more about this story at Technology lifeon BBC Sounds.