Vice highlights that voice actors are rallying behind Bev Standing, who is suing TikTok after the company acquired and replicated her voice using AI without her knowledge.

With only 30 minutes of audio, companies can now create a digital clone of your voice and make it say words you never said.

Using machine learning, voice AI companies like VocaliD can create synthetic voices from a person’s recorded speech—adopting unique qualities like speaking rhythm, pronunciation of consonants and vowels, and intonation.

For tech companies, the ability to generate any sentence with a realistic-sounding human voice is an exciting, cost-saving frontier. But for the voice actors whose recordings form the foundation of text-to-speech (TTS) voices, this technology threatens to disrupt their livelihoods, raising questions about fair compensation and human agency in the age of AI.

At the center of this reckoning is voice actress Bev Standing, who is suing TikTok after alleging the company used her voice for its text-to-speech feature without compensation or consent. This is not the first case like this; voice actress Susan Bennett discovered that audio she recorded for another company was repurposed to be the voice of Siri after Apple launched the feature in 2011. She was paid for the initial recording session but not for being Siri.

Standing’s supporters say the TikTok lawsuit is not just about Standing’s voice—it’s about the future of an entire industry attempting to adapt to new advancements in the field of machine learning.

Read more in the article here.