Voice-over artists sue AI firm over unauthorized voice cloning

In a case that highlights growing concerns over artificial intelligence (AI) in the entertainment industry, voice-over artists Paul Skye Lehrman and Linnea Sage have filed a lawsuit against AI company Lovo, accusing the firm of cloning their voices without consent. The couple, who are both based in New York City, claim that Lovo used their voice recordings to create AI-generated replicas, which have been sold and used potentially hundreds of thousands of times without their knowledge.

The alarming discovery came in June 2023 when Lehrman and Sage were driving near their home, listening to a podcast discussing Hollywood strikes and the potential impact of AI on the industry. As voice-over performers, the topic was particularly relevant to them. The podcast featured an AI chatbot equipped with text-to-speech software to discuss the implications of AI on jobs in Hollywood. To their shock, the voice of the chatbot sounded identical to Lehrman’s.

“We needed to pull the car over,” Lehrman recalled. “The irony that AI is coming for the entertainment industry, and here is my voice talking about the potential destruction of the industry, was really quite shocking.”

That night, the couple spent hours searching online for answers. Their investigation led them to the website of Lovo, a text-to-speech platform. To their dismay, Sage also discovered a clone of her voice on the site. “I was stunned,” she said. “I couldn’t believe it. A tech company stole our voices, made AI clones of them, and sold them possibly hundreds of thousands of times.”

Lehrman and Sage allege that Lovo obtained their voice recordings under false pretenses. According to their lawsuit, Lovo’s employees anonymously contacted them via Fiverr, a popular freelance platform, requesting generic voice recordings for what they claimed were internal research projects. In 2019, Sage says she was asked to record dozens of test radio scripts and was paid $400. Six months later, Lehrman received a similar request, for which he was paid $1,200.

The couple now believes these recordings were used by Lovo to create AI voice clones, a process the company’s co-founder, Tom Lee, described in a 2021 podcast as needing just 50 sentences to capture the tone, character, and phonemes of a voice. Lehrman and Sage allege that the anonymous Fiverr users were actually Lovo employees, who misled them about the intended use of the recordings.

Despite providing evidence of their voices being cloned, Lovo has denied any wrongdoing. The company pointed to the communications between Lehrman, Sage, and the anonymous Fiverr users as proof that their engagement was legal. However, the couple argues that they never agreed to have their voices used for AI cloning, and they did not sign any contracts beyond the Fiverr messages.

“In our careers, we’ve delivered over 100,000 audio assets,” Lehrman said, referencing their extensive work on Fiverr over nearly a decade. “We were able to find this needle in a haystack – they gave us this needle in a haystack.”

The case has drawn attention to the ethical and legal challenges posed by AI in creative industries, particularly regarding the use of human likenesses and voices without consent. The BBC has reached out to Lovo for comment on several occasions, but the company has not responded. As the lawsuit progresses, it raises critical questions about the future of voice-over work in an age where AI can replicate human voices with increasing accuracy, and whether existing legal frameworks are sufficient to protect artists from unauthorized use of their identities.