Voice-over artists allege an AI company cloned their voices in lawsuit

This story was produced by our colleagues at the BBC.

There are a lot of innovative ways artificial intelligence is being used, such as to make medicines and spot cancers. But in creative industries, many fear that AI-generated images, music, and text could drive artists out of work. The technology now means voices can be cloned in minutes.

In a lawsuit filed in New York, two voice-over artists say an AI voice-generating company stole their voices. The company, Lovo, has yet to file a response.

“A tech company stole our voices, made clones of them and sold them possibly hundreds of thousands of times,” Linnea Sage said.

Last summer, she and her husband, Paul Skye Lehrman, were in the car listening to a podcast about the Hollywood writers strike when something strange happened.

“The host was going to interview an AI entity,” Lehrman said, “and he is interviewing my voice. How disturbing and terrifying that moment was is hard to articulate.”

“I spent six hours on the internet that night, until I stumbled upon Lovo,” Sage added.

Lovo is a Berkeley, California-based text-to-speech platform. Once Sage started poking around the company site, she said she found an AI voice that sounded just like Lehrman’s.

“I just started listening to the other voices, and that’s when I stumbled upon my voice,” Sage added.

How did this even happen? 

“So, in October 2019, a freelancing site that I’m on reached out to me asking if I would record some scripts for them,” Sage explained. The couple said the scripts were generic radio ads, ones the user said would never be broadcast, so they didn’t need expensive usage rights.

About six months later, Lehrman got a similar request to record dozens of generic-sounding radio scripts, “and that put up a red flag.”

In messages the couple shared with the BBC, the user appeared to say the audio would be used for research into speech synthesis. Lehrman followed up to clarify whether the audio would be used for anything other than its specific research. In the message that followed, the user appeared to confirm the audio would not be used for anything else. 

Sage said the user she spoke with deleted part of the conversation, but in the communications that remain, it appeared the user presented the scripts as test radio ads, ones that would not be disclosed externally.

The couple added there was no formal contract, just the messages they shared with the BBC. However, the BBC can’t verify if these are the complete conversations.

Tom Lee, co-founder of Lovo, spoke to “Category Visionaries” podcast about how Lovo’s voice-cloning technology works, saying, “We only need a person to read 50 sentences. … We can capture the tone, the character, the style, the phonemes, and how you even, you know, if you have an accent, we can even capture that as well.”

We reached out to Lovo on multiple occasions. It did not respond.

“The thing that’s being copied is not a piece of copyrighted work, but a piece of someone’s personality,” said Prof. Kristelia Garcia, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center who is an expert in intellectual property law and a former music industry professional. “And so then, we get these personality rights, or rights of publicity.”

The licenses the couple granted the user who contacted them may have also been violated, Garcia said.

“Licenses are permission for a very specific and narrow use, right?,” Garcia said. “I might give you a license that you can swim in my swimming pool one afternoon, but that doesn’t mean you can come whenever you want.”

The voices have since been removed from the company’s website, but an ad still exists online with the alleged clone of Lehrman’s voice.

“This whole experience has been so surreal, to be honest,” Sage said.

This lawsuit is just one of many being brought against AI companies by artists who don’t want to lose control of their work and livelihood, and more are likely to come.