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It starts with a simple, enticing offer: "For $4.86, I will generate a humanlike professional AI voiceover for your text". On Fiverr, the platform where small creative jobs are exchanged for $5, the tone is festive. Here, the reduced price of creativity is announced with great fanfare, and the noise becomes deafening, as dozens of freelancers are already soliciting potential clients with offers of AI voiceovers. Their promise? "Unlimited revisions and a fast delivery: the AI models can beautifully do the work for you in a professional manner".
Professional, or to the detriment of dubbing professionals, who fear that their vocal cords will no longer be of much use? A proposition that extends far beyond the small service rendered to the freelance community. From the seventh art form to the eighth, entire industries could disappear tomorrow.
On the job market, Artificial Intelligence is an equally greedy creature. On the Internet, the inexhaustible source for job seekers, actors are sometimes tempted to make a pact with it. Casting calls are proliferating on the web, inviting voiceover professionals to record their voices and have them synthesized using AI.
Although often better paid, these castings reduce the workload of a voice actor. Which in a country like France, where access to social benefits is calculated on the number of hours worked, could lead to long-term financial instability.
Another problem: actors are generally ill-informed about these practices. By surrendering their voices’ rights to studios, they put their intellectual property at risk. In April 2023, more than 200 voice actors from the French collective "La Voix" were offered fraudulent recording contracts. Once they had signed and begun recording, they realized that the Italian company, Voiseed, was planning to exploit their voices indefinitely, and without further remuneration or royalties. The so-called Salma Hayek experience.
"Many companies claim to be in the research phase for AI, and in reality allow themselves to use data without worrying about legal issues," says one actor. "The only reason for these contracts was to feed the beast".
With these recordings, new technology such as text-to-speech software also enables these companies to transform a simple text into a series of complex emotions, such as irony or despair. Astonishingly, they guarantee a variable intensity that can even replace acting. Murf and Synthesia are already available on the Internet, and amateurs are now able to dub their favorite characters.
Posted to a Facebook group last year, a video caused quite a stir amongst French fans of the TV Series "The Walking Dead". In question was a trailer for the spin-off devoted to one of its characters, Daryl Dixon, whose dubbed voice had been modified by AI. "To be honest, I recognized myself," confesses Emmanuel Karsen, the French voiceover actor for the show’s star Norman Reedus. "My voice was only a little more metallic, but its color and grain were the same".
Like Karsen, many actors consider that the use of their voices is intimately specific, and belongs to them. This is not the opinion of amateur dubbers who, despite being fans of their work, are quick to reproduce it illegally.
The latest application to hit the web, HeyGen, goes even further. It offers Internet users perfect synchronization of simple text with the lip movements of an avatar, created within the app. With its Video-Translate new version, users can superimpose another mouth on an existing character and have it speak any language, under any conditions.
This poses another significant danger to dubbing actors, already bereft of their bodies and voices, and who may soon find themselves without resources. After the 2023 strike, SAG-AFTRA, the main actors' union in the USA, announced it signed a deal with Replica Studios, an Artificial Intelligence voice technology company, for the licensing of actors' voices for use in video games. With dubbing actors earning an average of $300 per hour, this decision is perhaps not one to be celebrated.
On elevenlabs.io, another AI voice generator, competition is very aggressive for voiceover actors: for $1 per month, users can already synthesize 30,000 characters, in 29 languages, in 10 different custom voices and get a commercial license for it. Did you say stop?
We think you’re right, because it could be the most perfect way for them to go from laughter to tears, automated and automatically.
