Actor and author Stephen Fry says his voice has been digitally cloned without his permission. He says his narration for the British “Harry Potter” audiobooks was used to train an AI, which then used the data to create the narration for a documentary in Fry’s voice. Without his permission or knowledge.
“I’m a proud member of [actors’ union SAG-AFTRA], as you know we’ve been on strike for three months now. And one of the burning issues is AI,” Fry said while speaking at CogX Festival in London on September 14th, 2023. “They used my reading of the seven volumes of the ‘Harry Potter’ books, and from that dataset an AI of my voice was created and it made that new narration. What you heard was not the result of a mash up, this is from a flexible artificial voice, where the words are modulated to fit the meaning of each sentence.”
One of the key sticking points for the ongoing WGA, SAG-AFTRA strike is the use of AI in the film industry. SAG-AFTRA President Fran Drescher addressed the union’s concerns about AI in July of this year. Drescher said AI “poses an existential threat” to creative industries. She also said actors need protections from having “their identity and talent exploited without consent and pay.” The concern is that studios could use AI to capture an actor’s likeness and use it in perpetuity without having to compensate the actor.
The use of his audiobook narration to train AI is disturbing. This has the potential to use his voice to narrate anything without his consent, or compensating him. This is something the over 160,000 members of SAG-AFTRA are against. During his speech at CogX Festival, Fry played a clip of an AI system mimicking his voice to narrate a historical documentary. “I said not one word of that – it was a machine. Yes it shocked me.”
