Voice actors fight for protections against AI in the halls of power

Simon Kennedy, Alistair Lee (with King) and Cecelia Ramsdale. Image: LinkedIn

The impact of Artificial Intelligence on voiceover artists is back in the national spotlight, with representatives from The Australian Association of Voice Actors (AAVA) having descended on Parliament House in Canberra.

AAVA Committee President Simon Kennedy and fellow AAVA committee members Cecelia Ramsdale and Alistair Lee are meeting with Federal MPs and Senators this week in a bid to get AI labelling enshrined in law.

They say the listener deserves to know when the content they’re consuming is AI and not human.

The goal is to uphold and enforce copyright protections for Australian creatives.

The AAVA team is calling for AI transparency and the mandatory labelling of AI-generated content and accountable training data, as well as identity protection, and the outlawing of the creation of AI voice clones and deepfakes without informed and explicit consent.

Kennedy recently spoke to ABC Sydney’s James Findlay about why voice actors are concerned about AI data-scraping and copyright and why we should all be worried.

“People are losing work. And it’s not only an industry issue. We think it’s going to spread pretty far and wide.”

“One of the things that voice actors face is, we appear and we contribute in various works. When we participate in helping to create these things, we don’t own any copyright over them, but we do think that the issue of copyright protection is important.”

“We believe that the collaboration that we have with those creators is pretty sacred and we want to see the work continue to be made by humans.”

With data now being used to clone voices and create ‘synthetic’ actors, Kennedy says there is much at stake for the industry.

“It’s our career. It’s everything we do.”

Earlier this year, AAVA Vice President Teresa Lim led the backlash over ‘Thy,’ the AI-generated host on ARN’s youth radio station CADA.

In an interview with Women In Media Australia, Lim said “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.”

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.

*Images: LinkedIn and Facebook