Actors speak out against AI being used without their consent

A host of Hollywood names have hit out at technology which allows AI to mimic their voices and use them without consent.

Tom Hanks recently spoke out after his voice was used in an advert for a dental plan, which also used his image, without his knowledge or consent, through artificial intelligence.

The Castaway star took to his Instagram page yesterday to tell his 9.5 million followers that he had “nothing to do” with the advert, explaining his voice and image had been used without his permission.

He wrote: “BEWARE!! There’s a video out there promoting some dental plan with an AI version of me. I have nothing to do with it.”

Speaking before the start of the Hollywood writers’ strike, which has argued about the use of AI taking jobs for Hollywood writers, he said the Writers’ Guild of America (WGA) had “known” this day would come, and said there is a “legal question” to be raised about someone’s voice and images being used without their consent.

Hanks explained: “We saw this coming. We saw that there was going to be this ability to take zeros and ones inside a computer and turn it into a face and a character. Now that has only grown a billionfold since then, and we see it everywhere.

“I can tell you that there [are] discussions going on in all of the guilds, all of the agencies, and all of the legal firms to come up with the legal ramifications of my face and my voice — and everybody else’s — being our intellectual property.”

And the Oscar winner is not alone, but who else has complained about the AI emergence?

Stephen Fry

Stephen Fry also expressed his anger at AI cloning, after his voice was used to front a documentary that he had known nothing about.

He warned others to be cautious, using his own experience to highlight the possible dangers of AI.

Speaking at the tech-based CogX festival in London, he played a clip of a history documentary that faked his voice, without his knowledge. It appears as though the actor is narrating the show, but the AI-generated voice was actually created by technology learning from Fry reading all seven of the Harry Potter audiobooks.

“I said not one word of that, it was a machine,” Fry told attendees, as reported by the Guardian. “Yes, it shocked me. 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.

“It could… have me read anything, from a call to storm Parliament to hard porn, all without my knowledge and without my permission. And this, what you just heard, was done without my knowledge.

“I heard about this, I sent it to my agents on both sides of the Atlantic, and they went ballistic — they had no idea such a thing was possible.”

Fry is not the only actor raising concerns about the use of AI. Both the WGA and Sag-Aftra (the actors’ union) are currently striking, with part of the reason being AI generation of content.

As a self-described “proud member” of Sag-Aftra, Fry himself is not taking part in new projects during the strikes.

Moving even further with AI, Fry went on to warn that deepfakes are not too far away. Indeed, some very convincing deepfakes have already surfaced online, largely for comedic purposes.

Robin Williams

The strike against AI was also backed by the late Robin Williams’s daughter, Zelda, who has criticised the use of artificial intelligence to recreate the sound of her father’s voice.

Williams died by suicide in 2014 at the age of 62. He had Lewy Body Dementia at the time of his death.

Taking to Instagram stories on Sunday, October 2, actor Zelda, 34, posted: “I am not an impartial voice in SAG’s fight against AI.

“I’ve witnessed for YEARS how many people want to train these models to create/recreate actors who cannot consent, like Dad.

“This isn’t theoretical, it is very, very real. I’ve already heard AI used to get his ‘voice’ to say whatever people want and while I find it personally disturbing; the ramifications go far beyond my own feelings.”

She added: “Living actors deserve a chance to create characters with their choices, to voice cartoons, to put their HUMAN effort and time into the pursuit of performance.

“These recreations are, at their very best, a poor facsimile of greater people but, at their worst, a horrendous Frankensteinian monster, cobbled together from the worst bits of everything this industry is, instead of what it should stand for.”

will.i.am

The Black Eyed Peas frontman will.i.am said he believes the rise of AI could be concerning and bring about lawsuits.

He spoke about protecting his “facial math” and raised concerns over not owning the right to your own face.

“We all have voices and everyone’s compromised because there are no rights or ownership to your facial math or your voice frequency. Forget songs, people calling up your bank pretending to be you. Just family matters. Wiring money. You get a FaceTime or a Zoom call and, because there’s no spatial intelligence on the call, there’s nothing to authenticate if this is an AI call or a person call,” he said on SiriusXM.

“That’s the urgent thing, protecting our facial math. I am my face math. I don’t own that. I own the rights to I Got A Feeling, I own the rights to the songs I wrote, but I don’t own the rights to my face or my voice? There’s new laws and new industries about to boom.”

Keanu Reeves

Another Hollywood heavyweight who is concerned about the use of AI is the Matrix star.

It is reported that he has a specific clause in his contracts that prohibit the use of AI being used on him during and post-production.

He said: “What’s frustrating about that is you lose your agency… When you give a performance in a film, you know you’re going to be edited, but you’re participating in that. If you go into deepfake land, it has none of your points of view. That’s scary. It’s going to be interesting to see how humans deal with these technologies. They’re having such cultural, sociological impacts, and the species is being studied. There’s so much ‘data’ on behaviours now.”