From the heart of Beijing to the edges of the global stage, you're at Roundtable.
I'm Niu Honglin.
Imagine scrolling through your phone and suddenly hearing a familiar voice promoting a product online.
It sounds exactly like a famous actor or a famous voice actor or maybe someone you know.
The tone, the rhythm, even the emotion are all there.
But here's the twist.
That person never recorded the message.
In fact, they never even knew about it.
In the age of artificial intelligence.
Voices can now be copied, replicated and distributed at scale.
And for many voice actors, the unsettling question has become very real.
If technology can perfectly imitate your voice, who actually owns it?
For today's show, I'm joined by Yu Xuan and Steve Hatherly.
Now pull up a chair and join the conversation.
Artificial intelligence has learned to do something once thought, uniquely human speak in someone else's voice.
With just a few seconds of audio, AI systems can now clone tone, rhythm and personality with startling accuracy.
While the technology opens exciting possibilities for filmmaking, gaming and accessibility, it is also triggering a wave of legal disputes.
Around the world.
Voice actors are discovering their voices appearing in advertisements, livestream sales pitches and online videos without their consent.
The question is no longer whether AI can replicate a voice.
The real question now is whether it should and when it should and how it's doing it.
And imagine if one day the people who are doing Roundtable sound still like us but no longer us.
Huh.
I think that day can come.
I mean, they have.
The technology there.
Yeah, it already exists.
AI podcasts already exist.
I remember the first time I heard one was about, oh, maybe six or eight months ago.
And I was pretty blown away, actually.
And what I was blown away by was not just the fact that the voices sounded human, but the fact that the voices did human-like things.
For example, They stuttered a little bit.
They paused awkwardly sometimes.
They would mispronounce a word and then repeat themselves to correct themselves, like all the things that we do here on the show from time to time.
So that kind of freaked me out a little bit.
But maybe we can talk about that later, little bit later.
You know, are they actually able of replicating what humans can do, or are they not?
But yeah absolutely, we're living in it right now.
Yes, and the reason we're talking about it today is because more and more voice actors as well as actors are talking about the fact and trying to find a way to deal with the issue of being copied by AI and their voices being used in different places without their consent.
Yeah, it's been quite popular lately.
China's voice acting industry is currently facing a wave of these collective rights protection things.
So, since March 2026, some of the country's Leading dubbing studios, such as Bianjiang Studio, 729 Voice Studio and Yingxiong Union, along with some well-known voice actors like Ji Guanlin, the voice behind Zhen Huan Empresses in the Palace, and also Lu Yanting, the voice of Nezha, have all spoken out publicly.
They are condemning the unauthorized use of their voice data to train AI models and its subsequent use for commercial profit.
Yeah.
So what you're seeing these days in China is a lot of these voice actors.
They're stepping forward and they are publicly condemning The unauthorized collection of their voices, of the voice data, for AI training or for voice synthesis or for commercial monetization.
Those studios that you mentioned just a moment ago Yushan, those are top tier agencies in the country.
And voice actors.
There was one in particular that took it even a step further, rather than just stepping forward and publicly condemning things, but to actually file a formal lawsuit.
And I think that same voice actor even provided an email address to Where I think people could send in evidence of work infringements to that email, just collecting all the things that were out there, that weren't supposed to be out there.
This is not exactly something new.
Actually, in 2024, the very first case of AI voice infringement has already raised a lot of attention here in China.
At that time, it was still relatively hard to identify whether or not this is an infringement case.
So people were still talking about the technicality and there has already been a lot of very insightful details from that very first case.
Yeah, actually back in two years ago, and Miss Ying, a professional voice actor with an extensive portfolio, never authorized any individual company to make the AI cloning of her voice.
Yet she discovered that users on various short video platforms were uploading content online featuring AI audio synthesized directly from her voice.
And then the court ruled the AI synthesized voices constitute a violation if they are identifiable.
And how to define identifiable is also one of the things that people are discussing.
Specifically, if the general public or those within the relevant industry can associate the audio with a specific natural person based on timbre, intonation and also speaking style, it is considered identifiable.
So back then, it found that the defendant media and software companies had used Ms.
Ying's voice without permission and also that's infringing upon her rights and also causing tangible harm, and that they were held legally liable.
Ever since the very first case, I think, legal people, professionals working in this area have been discussing how to perfect how to further improve the application, the use, as well as the details of different articles, different law articles.
Because when it comes to, for example, face recognition or using someone's faces, it's already very clearly stated that It does not have to be exactly like one's face.
As long as people see the face and associate the face with someone, someone famous, someone they know, it's already OK.
And for voice, it's the same thing.
In the very beginning, maybe identifying the voice as a voice infringement of authority.
Using AI to replicate someone else's voice is a bit still a bit strict, but it's getting broader and broader because the phenomenon is getting more and more common and bothering people a bit more.
Yeah, sorry.
Yeah, but what I'm trying to say here is that, even with more and more people trying to tackle the issue, it's still not fast enough.
It's still not enough to stop this kind of violation from happening.
Yeah, I mean, I was going to say, if the case makes it to court, then...
You have a strong case.
You have a strong chance of winning that case that you mentioned, Yuxin, from 2024.
The judgment came down that the technology and software companies they were ordered to issue a formal apology.
And if you're thinking, that's it?
No, that's not it.
They had to do that, and then they were fined 250,000 yuan.
That's about $36,000 in damages.
But that's if it gets to court, and that's if you win.
The problem is that this infringement, this type of infringement, is running rampant online.
And not long ago, a number of different voice actors, they discovered that their voices were being exploited in motion comics, AI-generated motion comics, short videos.
And yeah, it's like I said, if you can catch the people in the act, you have a strong chance of winning.
The problem is it's just so widespread online now.
And it's so easy to do.
So you really have to spend all your time searching and searching and searching online, or depend on people finding it for you and sending it to you.
The point is that when these short videos or whatever that is, they are using that kind of voice and generated a voice, maybe sound like professional voice actor, but they didn't label that because it is a AI generated voice and you can only maybe tell by person.
Or maybe you use that very specific and professional software to compare the wave of the sound to actually prove that they are like generated from you.
Yeah, I mean, your voice timbre, that's the thing that makes your voice your voice, right?
It's what makes you who you are when it comes to how you sound.
There was one particular voice actor that said it's kind of common now to accidentally find your own voice in videos that the person didn't even record.
That particular voice actor also noted that these illegal clonings of voice timbres of your voice for derivative works has become really common.
So they'll take your voice from one project and they'll use it on a related project without your knowledge.
And obviously they're doing that for free.
It must be not only common here in China.
Yeah, I mean, this is an issue.
I was a voice actor.
I use that term loosely.
I worked on a lot of.
I'm not a trained professional voice actor, but I worked on a number of different projects for many many, many years.
And there's even online support groups for voice actors.
This was in Korea.
Because many times studios will try to Under pay.
They'll look for people who will take a cheaper rate than what the market rate is.
They'll want to use your voice in the project and they'll use that same thing for maybe a couple of years or three years.
You never know, right?
So it's a really difficult situation to be in.
Because and this is a challenge for voice actors as well and it's gotten even trickier now because of AI.
If you can book a job and there's an established market rate, well you're in competition with other voice actors.
First of all,
And if you refuse to take a lower rate than the market rate, the agency or the company that wants to hire you might just say oh, we'll just find somebody that will take a lower market rate.
So that was the situation before.
Now, with AI cloning...
It creates a third-party competitor almost, and it's making it really, really difficult for voice actors out there.
And like I said, I'm not a professional voice actor.
The ones that are are so incredibly talented, they are so incredibly skilled and they're being taken advantage of now because of AI cloning.
The situation you described.
If we're talking about AI voices as a third party in the market that are competing with other real voice actors in the market, it is Definitely, to start with, illegal here in China.
If we're talking about the kind of commercial activities, that's one thing.
So we can discuss that part of it later.
But for some other situations, for example, if someone is only using a famous person's voice in their own personal little project that they release on their social media as their little creative work.
They're not generating profit out of it.
They're just using it as a fun little thing they share with their friends.
It's still annoying to those people who really own the voice and we can imagine their feelings from a very general kind of way.
But actually this kind of behavior happening, if at a certain scale, is definitely harmful to the voice actors, to the market and even to the consumers.
Sure, That's why we're talking about this today is because there's so many different types of damage to the individuals.
And I think the one that stands out most to me is the violation of your personality rights.
And this is what you mentioned in the very beginning because your voice is not only the primary medium of the voice actor's skill and craft, but it's a personality right that's protected by law.
So the civil code.
And now I did not know this Not that I would know about China's civil code, but I thought this was cool to know.
China's civil code explicitly stipulates that the protection of a natural person's voice is governed by the same regulation as the right of a portrait, as your picture.
Therefore, using AI tech to synthesize or utilize someone's voice without permission is is an infringement of their personality rights regarding their laws.
That was a bit of a surprise to me, which I thought was kind of nice that it was to that extent protecting the rights.
And also about the financial laws, is that, of course, when we are thinking about the use of some maybe short video and these um comic drama and everything, and they're using the voice that was generated by the platform.
But the thing is that if it is trained by some of these um the the content of these professional voice actors, they're not getting paid by any of them, right?
But actually, why these kind of videos can get popular, we're not seeing the hundred percent, but maybe part of it is that listeners or audiences like that voice.
So It is not related, or I mean the voice actors are not in getting anything.
And that is the financial loss.
Yeah.
When these kind of infringement is causing.
Yeah.
I mean, the financial loss is pretty easy to understand.
Right.
Because studios can replicate the voice, maybe even at a fraction of the cost of hiring actors.
Professional voice actor.
Now the payment to the voice actor will depend on the project that they're doing.
Many times it will come down to word count.
The voice actor will get paid by the word.
So if they speak 25 words in the script sometimes advertisements are really short, right and they're they'll only say like one sentence, or sometimes just a few words, and It depends on that.
It depends on the reputation of the voice actor, how much experience they have.
So, yeah, the financial loss is pretty significant.
Now, you mentioned the consumers and the market in general.
Now, this is a little bit different.
This type of infringement, it's about deception.
Because they think that they – and fairly, I think – they think they're watching or listening to that person, that real voice actor, when in fact they are not.
So this distorts fair competition.
So the primary goal when it comes to consumer deception is to – maybe even mislead consumers.
I think you could say for the people who are putting that type of thing out.
Because when you hear that voice, it creates a false sense of credibility.
Besides that, I'm actually curious, because Steve, you mentioned you work as a voice actor.
So I'm curious about the fact that if we're now talking about the violation and that is definitely not okay but we see the technology being here, it's going to be here, it's going to stay and we can use it.
So How do you see your voice?
Do you see it purely as a personality right or in some way as also a copyright?
I think for a lot of our listeners they understand or they know about the voice actors because in a lot of films and TV series we have seen the kind of videos comparing the voice actors dubbing and the real sound and also some other people's dubbing.
And we realize how much contribution a voice actor can put in the acting, can put in the character.
And we understand that it's an art.
It's a recreational work and they put part of the soul to the character and that's their skill.
That's, like you said, years of training.
They're very, very talented.
Yet with artificial intelligence, if it can copy a little bit, it's also, you know, It's part of their work.
So if we see it more as a personality right, if we see it from a traditional angle, we would like to do all the work personally.
But if we see it as a certain type of copyright, we can authorize our voices.
For AI to replicate.
And that's the key, though.
That's the key is the authorization.
If you say yes, then that's OK.
Have you heard of Eleven Labs?
It's called Eleven Labs.
It's an AI startup.
It was, it was launched, or it did launch something called Iconic Voices Marketplace, and it allows companies to legally license AI clones of famous voices, both of living celebrities and those who have deceased, and they do this for advertisements or other content.
411 Labs, do you know the actor Matthew McConaughey?
All right, all right, all right.
He's an investor, by the way, in that company.
And he, along with Michael Caine, Michael Caine's another famous actor.
They have signed over the rights so they can replicate Matthew McConaughey and Michael Caine's voice, because they signed papers that allow them to do so.
I think Matthew McConaughey, he's...
Did or already did.
I was planning to do a translation of his newsletter into Spanish.
So the A.I.
Matthew McConaughey will take care of that for him.
Things like that.
So the key is signing over the rights to your voice.
When people are taking it without your knowledge, then they're breaking the law.
Yeah, actually in China there are similar examples, I would say.
I mean many navigation apps.
Many of them have introduced a lot of these voices of celebrities that they can just tell you.
I think they recorded those, by the way.
Of course, some of them are recorded and some of them they need to generate by having a lot of data set of their voices.
And then they can.
Maybe, when they update the situation of the role, they can have a similar voice as well.
And the thing is that, of course, they signed for collaboration with these map apps.
And users are very happy to use that.
And maybe the voice actors or the actors and celebrities can gain a lot of profit from that.
I'm curious.
In this day and age, as a voice actor, yes, you can protect your rights.
You can choose to consent or not or to cooperate or not.
But in a reverse situation, if you sign up for a job book, a job for a voice acting job position or a role and you use your own AI to deliver that job, do you think it's infringement of the rights of the company?
Who's delivering...
I am using my own AI instead of working by myself.
Well, I mean, if you're putting it out there, that that's you.
That goes back to what I mentioned before about consumer rights and deceptions.
Does it?
But I know I am using my AI voice to say those things.
I signed up for it.
The only thing is that I didn't put in the work of me understanding it, creating it.
And at that moment, trying to be that person, I used my AI dub.
Well, I think that's why celebrities are doing this is that they can get the job done without actually doing the job themselves, which means there will be a financial reward for those celebrities.
And I mentioned there with Eleven Labs, there are deceased celebrities as well.
Judy Garland, you may not know who that is, famous actress who's gone, James Dean.
Maya Angelou, the famous poet.
Alan Turing.
You know Alan Turing, right?
So all of these deceased people. through deals with their estates, by the way.
So these are legal deals that were done with the estates of these people.
They sign their voices over and when their voices get, when their AI voices get used, their estates will be paid for the work that is done.
I am also previously asking the question about whether or not it's a kind of personality right or copyright, or about the percentage, the ratio of these two rights.
It's because I think when I was a little girl, China has experienced the period when, for example, different copyrights didn't get to the kind of protection that we're enjoying today, meaning that to the creators, the artists, were not protected the way they are protected today.
For example, I think when I was in primary school or middle school, I was able to download some music without copyright-less music from the internet and just enjoy them without paying.
And that was a stage.
And from there we see the IP protection moving from the face that people would go after those major player or major violators, those copyrights to general consumers.
Nowadays, if you want to listen to a new CD of your favorite artist, it's not hard.
You just pay for a dozen of yuan or something for the digital version on your favorite music platform.
Do you see this also happening in the world of ai, probably violating the copyrights of not only voice of voice actors, but also different types of work portrait, and also even the style of certain artists when it comes to painting?
Do we see it going through the same phase, in the sense that at this stage those, for example, voice actors, can only go after the major movie or film companies that are using their voice in the work without their consent and slowly go to individuals who are using their voices, creating their little, harmless work?
Yeah, I think there's a huge distinction there, because if it's only about you know some teenage boy in his bedroom in you know shanghai uploading a short video to his red note or whatever, which only have 200 followers, there's a huge difference between that and open ai asking scarlett johansson in 2024, can we?
Or 2023, can we use your voice for an ai character?
Scarlett johansson saying no.
And then when she heard the voice of sky sky, i think was the character name um in 2024, months later, she said wait a minute, that sounds exactly like me.
She got a team of lawyers together.
Open AI said, no, that's not you.
That's sky.
There's nuts, not you at all.
Scarlett Johansson said, well, it sounds exactly like me.
And I think within a week of launching that AI character open, AI canceled it and and and took it down.
Um, So what's the distinction?
Is it kind of the same thing?
Well, that teenage boy in Shanghai is not making any money from his 15-second short that he's uploading, so there's no monetary compensation for him.
Sam Altman's company, there would be a tremendous amount of monetary compensation, I would think.
Because of using a celebrity's voice.
The difference I think is that it's a lot more high profile.
When Scarlett Johansson's voice gets used, people are going to know.
And when they hear that character, they're going to say, oh, that's Scarlett Johansson's voice.
And they're going to put it put it on social media and they're going to talk about it.
So if she doesn't get paid for that or if she doesn't want her voice to be used for that, that is absolutely 100 percent her right.
And I think that is also something about the awareness.
Um, because as you said, we've got like the whole industry has changed a lot back then.
We may are we may be not that like aware of the importance of protecting the right.
And now we are getting to the era of.
I think most people have the idea of we need to pay for the music now, and I think that is also like changing in this kind of industry because, just like when you take a picture, when you are watching a film in the cinema, you didn't make any money or any profit out of it, but it is not right, so you are not.
Monetizing this kind of action doesn't mean that it is correct.
So at least these kind of action these voice actors are doing, or the whole um situation of the industry is, Or anything like that.
I think we're on the track of, I think, having the awareness of protecting the right of a lot of these actors.
One of the issues and I think this was a Black Mirror episode.
If you know that show, where the character in the Black Mirror episode she was a famous actress, Selma Hayek maybe.
Maybe I'm wrong.
Anyway, she signed a deal that would allow an AI her her, exactly her to be in AI form in a movie.
Now, in the movie...
I'll just keep saying Salma Hayek.
In the movie her character was doing some pretty terrible things that she would never agree to do as an actress, and she was upset.
This is another issue here.
When your voice is being cloned illegally, it's not just that it's being cloned illegally.
Where is it being used?
And what are the words?
What are they saying?
You have no control over that.
If somebody illegally cloned my AI voice, they could come out with some video on the Internet that says I hate China.
Well, I've never said that.
It's totally not true.
But how would the Internet know what was the difference between true and not?
So that's a whole other layer of the onion about yes, and for today's voice actors, they find filing a lawsuit, collecting the data, collecting the evidence and winning the lawsuit both financially and energy consuming, time consuming.
That's for sure one thing.
And also with the development of technology, you can easily imagine if someone enjoys my voice, but they like how Steve says things. the tone the rhythm they can easily combine those two features of that voice and create their own voice without quote-unquote violating my rights or steve's rights because we cannot prove that that that is what they they did so there are so many issues technically legally and that is also why we see constant updates when it comes to regulations related to ai here in china for example we see Because for law professionals, they would always go after the most severe cases when it comes to using faces of real people to create some... not really okay kind of videos related to for example porn or other kind of fake videos deep fake and from there also if They use unauthorized to clone faces or voices in videos without specifying it's made.
It's also not okay.
And also different types of watermark are now asked to definitely shift.
Appear on the content if you're using AI.
And also, if you are developing a AI tool that can do these things, you have to register in relative departments.
You have to make sure that, Even if you do not openly publicize all of the process, all of the, for example, coding of your AI tool, you have to keep a record in relative department.
These measures are all being taken.
But, that being said, my next question is we need to make sure that people's rights are being protected.
But at the same time we have to also acknowledge that the development of technology sometimes needs not only the professionals input, but also the using, the trying out to the creativity of users as well.
So how do we draw that line?
How do we make sure that?
At at what stage should we be stricter with the use of the technology and how strict should we go so that we can both make sure no severe violation of people's rights are happening but also we do not crush the creativity, the motivation of common people using the technology?
Well, I think, when it comes to the rights of the voice actors, preventative measures put in place would be the first thing, and that would be the contract that you sign.
There should be a statement in that contract or a stipulation that says the authorization of this voice's use does not include AI processing of the voice and model training.
You can put that in the contract so that when you sign that then if you find later they have done that well, you've got it in your hands when you go to court.
But that's from the voice actor's side of things.
And I would say, when users are using maybe, these voices they don't know okay, I am actually infringing the right of these voice actors.
They are just using the voices that these platforms are providing with them.
The platforms hold responsibility.
Exactly.
That's what I want to say.
So they have to take the responsibility of having the maybe or mechanism or requirements to have that clear labeling of AI generated content or maybe prohibit the unauthorized use of others' voices to actually make sure that, first of all, they are not infringing the right of others and also maybe get the voice actors compensated.
And we also have heard experts saying that all these platforms not only the AI tool related platforms, but also the short video platforms should have a one button report function.
Saying that I think this voice belongs to someone else and I'm not really sure if it's authorized.
So I'm reporting this video as it might be violating someone else's rights.
So having different ways so that these kind of Fishy behaviors can be reported, can be dealt with, would also be something that we are focusing on later.
Yeah.
And sometimes voice actors don't even know what they are doing.
What I mean is the project itself. that they are working on.
I've gone into studios before I've been hired for jobs.
I read what's on the paper.
I don't know what it's for.
And the most famous case of that is the voice of Siri.
Really?
Have you ever heard this story before?
It's crazy.
This is the case of Susan Bennett.
This is kind of a famous story.
Everybody knows about this in the kind of voice acting community.
But I found this on Business Insider from 2023 where she talked about it herself.
So I want to read to you what she said.
Susan Bennett became the voice of Sirius, her voice.
She said, but I had no idea at the time.
I got a gig to record at a recording studio, an interactive voice response company.
I thought the script would consist of regular sayings like, thanks for calling, or please dial one.
Instead I had to read nonsensical sentences like cow hoist in the tug hut today or say shift, fresh issue today.
So what they were doing was they were trying to get all the sound combinations in the English language.
They also had me read the names of addresses and streets.
I recorded from home for four hours a day, five days a week for the entire month of July.
The first hundred or so were fun.
After that, it got tiring.
Fast forward.
I got an unusual call from a friend six years later.
A fellow voice actor emailed me and said, Hey, we were just playing around with this new iPhone.
Isn't this you?
I had no idea what they were talking about.
I went straight to Apple's website to listen and knew immediately that was my voice.
I was paid for the gig i did at the studio, but because apple had bought the recordings from the studio, i never got a penny or any recognition from apple.
So the takeaway from that story would be Don't work for that company.
Don't give your voice to that.
Don't work for that studio.
But I think it's that there are always, quote unquote, stars. smart people that can find loophole yeah legally that's there's nothing wrong with it that's fine yeah there's absolutely nothing wrong with it but is the voice of one of the most famous and you don't even compensate after the fact I don't know But when we see the loophole, when we see the behavior from a common sense point of view, we know it's wrong.
So I think this also happens when technology develops so fast.
Sometimes if you feel like there is a problem, probably there is.
And we can find different ways to make sure that technology is not hurting us, but helping us.
