A hot potato: There’s been another instance of AI being used to impersonate someone’s voice without their consent. On this occasion, it’s YouTuber Jeff Geerling who’s the victim. He claims his vocal talents were pilfered and used to promote a tech company’s (now removed) tutorial videos.
Raspberry Pi expert Geerling posted a shorter-than-usual video on his YouTube channel yesterday titled ‘They stole my voice with AI.’ In it, he plays a clip from a tutorial video posted on Elecrow’s channel featuring a voice that sounds almost identical to Geerling’s.
Geerling notes that as he does talk about some of the topics covered in Elecrow’s tutorials, it’s natural that people might assume he agreed to voice these videos. He’s even covered the company’s products – he posted a review of the CrowPi 2 a few years ago. Geerling emphasizes that he didn’t have a bad relationship with Elecrow in the past.
It’s highly likely that the voice used in Elecrow’s videos was created by feeding Geerling’s own content into an AI voice creation tool. The end product was then used to narrate the series of tutorial videos. However, none of this can be proven.
Geerling says he’s unsure what to do, as there’s no legal precedent for unauthorized voice cloning, despite President Biden previously calling for it to be banned. There is, however, precedent for not using someone’s voice in commercial work without their consent: Bette Midler vs. Ford Motor Company, which involved an impersonator of the actress/singer being used in Ford commercials during the 1980s.
Geerling also faces the problem of lawyers’ fees and whether non-consensual voice cloning is against YouTube’s terms of service.
All of Elecrow’s videos that Geerling highlighted are now inaccessible, and there doesn’t appear to be any others that use a voiceover that sounds like the YouTuber. It seems all the publicity has had an effect.
The situation brings to mind that of OpenAI and Scarlett Johansson. When introducing the new GPT-4o model in May, the company showed off a very realistic voice assistant that sounded similar to the Marvel’s Avengers star. Making the situation even murkier was that Johansson had been approached by OpenAI to voice the latest ChatGPT update, to which she had refused. The AI firm removed the voice after the actress hired legal counsel.
In January, Ned Luke, the actor who portrays Michael De Santa in GTA V, blasted a company for using his voice without permission to create a Michael AI chatbot.
