Dubbing actors want to have a voice. In a manifesto published Thursday, May 25, while the Cannes Film Festival welcomes world cinema, 21 unions and associations of voice professionals spread across ten countries are raising their voices in the face of artificial intelligence (AI).
They call to “protect the work of actors and human creativity as a whole” to avoid the “destruction of an artistic heritage steeped in creativity and emotions, which no machine can produce”. The young organization also encourages European decision-makers to “adapting the regime for the protection of the rights of performers”.
Among the signatories, the French association Les Voix, which brings together more than 210 professionals in the sector, had already warned “fraudulent records”in an alert to “voice theft” published in April 2023. “We have received ‘research’ recording contracts from some of our members.says Patrick Kuban, actor and co-founder of Les Voix. We then discovered that they were used to train the artificial intelligence of a Milanese start-up. »
“biometric data”
On its website, Voiseed, the company suspected of feeding on these voices, claims to respond “to the growing demand for multilingual expressive voice content by revolutionizing text-to-speech with new technology”. In February, this same company announced a fundraising of one million euros from an Italian fund and the European Innovation Council. The institution, created to support the marketing of technologies developed on the Old Continent, had already granted a loan of 3 million euros to the young Milanese shoot in 2021.
Voiseed is not the only company in this niche. The company Eleven Labs promises “the ultimate storytelling tool”. In 2021, the Israeli start-up DeepHub dubbed the horror film Every Time I Die in Portuguese and Spanish thanks to AI. In early May, Google introduced its new Universal Translator tool, which can translate a person’s speech while matching their lip movement with the specifics of the new language.
Companies that have entered this market highlight the savings that production companies could make, as well as respect for the original work. Dubbing professionals oppose them with legal excesses.
“The voice is biometric data, analyzes Mathilde Croze, a lawyer specializing in intellectual property and digital technology who defends the interests of Voices. Do the companies that collect this kind of data really have all the actors’ agreements to use them in this area? »
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