“It’s going to change everything.” Teresa Lim on the urgent AI cloning fight

Teresa Lim. Image: Facebook

“Honestly, it’s going to change everything.”

When asked how she thinks our media industry will look in ten years’ time, Teresa Lim pulls no punches.

“AI is going to be our biggest discussion in the next few years: how that looks, what’s broadcast on air, what’s disclosed as AI, how it’s used to clone voices.”

In an interview with Women In Media Australia, the award-winning voice actor talks of the urgent need for legislative safeguards, as cloning technology advances.

Lim is one of many within the industry fighting the good fight, passionate in the quest to ensure that industry professionals have consent, control and compensation over any AI replication of their own voices.

Last year Lim – who is Vice President of the Australian Association of Voice Actors – gave evidence at the Senate Select Committee on Adopting Artificial Intelligence.

More recently, Lim led the backlash over ‘Thy,’ the AI-generated host on ARN’s youth station CADA.

“As an Asian-Australian female HUMAN voice actor and presenter in the radio and advertising industry, I find this industry-first move offensive on various levels,” Lim said at the time on LinkedIn.

Last month, Lim took part in AI ethics discussions with the Australian Media Diversity Council and Commercial Radio & Audio (CRA).

Lim believes that in an era where AI can clone with eerie precision, the need to protect the value of the human voice has never been more pressing.

In her Women In Media chat, Lim says “Newsrooms will be the next important thing that we look at, so that human voices and likeness are protected, and that truth and full disclosure is out there.”

Teresa is a firm believer in her mum’s advice: If something doesn’t work the first time, try again another way.

“That’s really shaped my work ethic, because now I’m involved in a massive AI fight against voice cloning,” she says.

Lim says that if she had her time over again, she would have been prepared for the AI-cloning fight and sought preventative legislative measures earlier.

“Now we’re fighting to contain it. Something like Google’s recently launched AI video generator, Veo 3, is phenomenal – it’s going to revolutionise video-making, and that puts a lot of creatives’ jobs in question. We’ve got to scale ethics with tech. We can’t be relying on ethics we had two years ago, when this tech wasn’t here.”

“Government is very slow to legislate. We’ve got to act now.”

*Images: ARN, Instagram and Facebook

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ACCC recommends more regulation of big tech companies