AI may be a buzzword on Wall Street, but on the West Coast it’s at the center of Hollywood’s biggest labor dispute in more than 50 years.
Among those warning about the technology’s potential to cause harm is British actor and author Stephen Fry, who told an audience at the CogX Festival in London on Thursday about his personal experience of having his identity digitally cloned without his permission.
“I’m a proud member of [actors’ union SAG-AFTRA], as you know we’ve been on strike for three months now. And one of the burning issues is AI,” he said.
Actors’ union SAG-AFTRA, which has around 160,000 members, went on strike last month over pay, working conditions, and concerns related to the use of AI in the film industry. It joined the Writers Guild of America—a union representing thousands of Hollywood writers—which went on strike in early May, marking the industry’s biggest shutdown in more than six decades.
A key sticking point for actors on strike is the possibility that studios could use AI to make digitally replicate their image without compensating them fairly for using their likeness.
Speaking at a news conference as the strike was announced, union president Fran Drescher said AI “poses an existential threat” to creative industries, and said actors needed protection from having “their identity and talent exploited without consent and pay.”
During his speech at CogX Festival on Thursday, Fry played a clip to the audience of an AI system mimicking his voice to narrate a historical documentary.
“I said not one word of that—it was a machine. Yes, it shocked me,” he said. “They used my reading of the seven volumes of the Harry Potter books, and from that dataset an AI of my voice was created and it made that new narration.”
Fry—who has appeared in movies including Gosford Park, V for Vendetta, and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—is the narrator of the British Harry Potter audiobooks, while actor Jim Dale narrated the American version of the series.
“What you heard was not the result of a mash up, this is from a flexible artificial voice, where the words are modulated to fit the meaning of each sentence,” Fry told the audience at CogX Festival on Thursday.
“It could therefore have me read anything from a call to storm parliament to hard porn, all without my knowledge and without my permission. And this, what you just heard, was done without my knowledge. So I heard about this, I sent it to my agents on both sides of the Atlantic, and they went ballistic—they had no idea such a thing was possible.”
Fry added that when he discovered his voice was being used in projects without his consent, he saw it as just the beginning of an emerging threat to creative talent, warning his angry agents: “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”
“This is audio,” he said he told them. “It won’t be long until full deepfake videos are just as convincing.”
As AI technology has advanced, doctored footage of celebrities and world leaders—known as deepfakes—has been circulating with increasing frequency, prompting warnings from experts about artificial intelligence risks. Fry warned on Thursday that those technologies only had further to go.
“We have to think about [AI] like the first automobile: impressive but not the finished article,” he said, noting that when cars were invented no one could have envisioned how widespread they are today.
“Tech is not a noun, it is a verb, it is always moving,” he said. “What we have now is not what will be. When it comes to AI models, what we have now will advance at a faster rate than any technology we have ever seen. One thing we can all agree on: it’s a f***ing weird time to be alive.”
Not the first
Fry isn’t the only famous actor to publicly vocalize their concerns about AI and its place in the film industry.
At a U.K. rally held in support of the SAG-AFTRA strike over the summer, Emmy-winning Succession star Brian Cox shared an anecdote about a friend in the industry who had been told “in no uncertain terms” that a studio would keep his image and do what they liked with it.
“That is a completely unacceptable position,” Cox said. “And that is the position that we should be really fighting against, because that is the worst aspect. The wages are one thing, but the worst aspect is the whole idea of AI and what AI can do to us.”
Oscar winner Matthew McConaughey told Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff during a panel event at this year’s Dreamforce conference that he had concerns about the rise of AI in Hollywood.
“We have a real chance, if we are irresponsible, of cannibalizing ourselves and creating this digital god that we’ll bow to, and we’ll all of a sudden become tools of this tool,” he said.
Meanwhile, Star Trek and Mission Impossible star Simon Pegg has called AI “worrying” for actors.
“We’re looking at being replaced in some ways,” he said at the rally in London in July. “We have to be compensated and we have to have some say in how [our image is] used. I don’t want to turn up in an advert for something I disagree with… I want to be able to hang on to my image, and voice, and know where it’s going.”
A spokesperson for the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), the entertainment industry’s official collective bargaining representative, was not available for comment when contacted by Fortune.
The much, much, much more concerning aspect of voice cloning technology is that it will be used to scam people on a massive scale.
Imagine you get a call at 4am from a loved one who tells you that they are in an emergency situation and had to borrow a phone to call you. The beg you to venmo some money to a stranger's account so that they can get their car fixed/get a plane ticket/pay someone back for giving them a lift/etc.
You recognize your loved one's voice. They can respond to your questions (because chatbot AI). They know details about your life (because social media). It's the middle of the night. You're scared and not thinking clearly.
This technology all exists TODAY. In 10 or 20 years it'll be so terrifyingly sophisticated, even the most wary people will be vulnerable to it.
They can't get me if I live in a hole. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: but a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.
The solution that EVERYBODY needs to learn for something like that is to hang up and call them back using the contact you have in your phone. They can afford 10 seconds while you do that if they're calling you for money. And if it isn't them calling for money, well sorry for waking you up Frank, but an AI was posing as you asking for cash.
90% of the world will be unemployed and fighting for whatever scraps of food are grown between the constant flooding and fires we had 100 years to prevent but it wasn't profitable to.
We will have to learn to live entirely without factual information as every form of communication becomes hopelessly compromised by corporations, governments and billionaire extremists.
You won't even be able to trust the people you meet in meatspace. You think Fox News addicts are fucked up? Wait until every piece of entertainment is propaganda that's been personalised just for you.
And when it inevitably turns to war and you're put in charge of the big red button, will you even care if the order to press it has been deep faked by a death cult?
Unemployment and petty scams are small fry. With this technology, we can end the world.
I've had friends fall for email scams. We're from Canada and I remember one being that another friend of our was stuck in Wales and needed a bank transfer. I knew it was a scam but a few of my friends were worried. I said that I live in the UK now and can take a train to Wales if you REALLY want. They were still panicking and saying they should do it in case. I'm like, you can't be serious!
So yeah, it can already be bad and with ChatGPT they can pass the Turing test. All of our friends will probably test each other on our memories. "Tell me the name of your ex-gf and which year and how you broke again?"
Most people don't know what their loved ones sound like on the phone. This is already a scam and you should never believe someone calling you like that. You can ask them something only you two know or just tell them to call the police and that you'll meet them at the police department or hospital or whatever. Never give out credit card info ect over the phone. Nobody would ever do that in a legit situation.
I'm not going to lie, the ability to have Stephen Fry narrate my daily schedule every morning is one of the things I am most excited for. Like, I understand why he's upset about a movie using his voice without his permission, but I didn't expect to get his permission for my thing, either.
I mean if he wants to make a fortune and also make people giddily happy... I'd totally pay for that. Or like Andy Serkis (whose narration of The Hobbit is a fucking masterpiece, by the way).
Fry could just license a company to use AI for a narrow purpose in this instance. He could or have his people quality control check it and get royalties on sales. He could even record new bits of voice for stuff not already covered adequately. This would be a way for AI to benefit both parties. Instead AI companies are stealing prior work and copying it wholesale.
There really needs to be a "right to identity" that companies can't pretend to be you without express permission on a per instance basis and roll it into fraud protection/identity theft laws.
Arguably, enumerating such rights in the first place mainly benefits the wealthy and corporations because once encapsulated, such "rights" can be bought and sold.
An established actor like Fry has a lot of leverage, and the union may win the recognition of those rights, but then that's just putting them on the negotiating table. What studio, trying to launch a film franchise, wouldn't get the exclusive Digital Identity Use Rights, in-perpetuity, solely for use in that character? Sure, RDJ is free to go make other movies and control how his image is otherwise used, but Marvel-Fox-Disney gets to keep making Iron Man content (starting the AI-replicated likeness) for all time. And if they want Iron Man to sell Big Macs, too fucking bad, shouldn't have sold your rights so cheap. Leverage he didn't have when Marvel was rebooting his career.
Expansion of copyright that way could set a very dangerous precedent and have unintended consequences.
For example, does that mean Trump, who was once part of SAG, can claim royalties every time SNL/late night talk show shows a clip of him saying dumb things? (I'm pretty sure one of these shows used a combination of impressionist/deepfake to mock him too, and you KNOW Trump is petty enough to actually do it)
I'd say it's not just his intelligence and presentation. There's a high level of bravery there. You never know how someone is going to react when you tell them their beliefs are suspect (or outright bullshit) and just saying this opens him up to derision or worse from any rando with a soapbox to stand on.
Voice actor here. There's an ad on the radio that sent in an audition tape for. I keep hearing it and I'm pretty sure it's an AI voice. Thankfully it's awful. Unfortunately, only a few people will notice or even care.
Oh hell yeah it’s just the beginning. Go check out some popular twitch streamers, they have TTS of tons of celebs using their voices. Those idiots are gonna get sued so fucking fast once celebrities figure out computers
They aren't sound bites of anything the celebrities have said. They are original clips generated from text submitted by the viewer who has paid a fee for that to happen. Some celebrities actually sell their services this way and the streamer is taking that revenue from them.
Well, you probably can copyright aspects of your likeness that are sufficiently distinct. Just your voice might be too generic, but your voice and accent and mannerisms etc. presented in context (e.g. Trump-bot used in a political ad) might be specific enough to be convincing in court. I don't think streamers are getting sued (successfully) at any point though.
I think/hope we eventually set some sane legal ground rules for the protection of individuals' likenesses, causing (or stemming from) some high profile court case(s) involving serious offenders (e.g. publishing an AI-narrated audiobook without the original VA's consent). Once that's in the media for a bit (again I think/hope) we see companies like Twitch and Youtube ban the use of AI imitations on their platform to protect themselves. Just like DMCA.
I disagree with this because companies will start enforcing a "if you wish to work for us you must give the ability to use your data set including after termination and etc with no further compensation". This needs to be strictly a per individual per instance basis preferably requiring the person who owns it be the primary sale person included in the transaction.
Yeah it'll definately take legislature to prevent scenarios like you described, but at the end of the day, a person should own their own identity, and nobody else should be able to make a 100% copy of it.
There are going to be some laws hastily passed for this that is going to put impressionists out of the job. If it is Rich Little or and AI impersonating Howard Cosell, how is it any different?
I love Stephan, and I understand why he's upset, but I hate copyright and think the entire world would be better off without trademarks, copyright, etc. It's the one thing I agree with China on. It only serves to hinder innovation and make people obscenely rich from small efforts.
They serve a purpose for companies. Consider if we didn't have unique usernames, someone could post threats under the name "Jokedeity" and there would be confusion over where the liability sat. Copywrite and Trademark is a protection for both producers of things and content, and for the users. It's an attestment to the source and quality, and identifies liability in the case of failures.
How are artists protected without copyright? Do you really believe what artists do is small effort and thus don’t deserve protection.
Without copyright people get rich with even smaller effort. If I write a book and publish it online some big publisher will just steal the work and republish, print and sell it under their own name and because there is no copyright there is nothing I can do.
I don't care if they're protected. Honestly. I don't care. I don't charge for any of the music or art I've ever produced and I don't buy art. I literally just do not care even 1% about artists crying about their lost money.
I think China has a nuanced position on the issue. It's not a free for all over there. Unless we're talking about some instances of private-public cooperation in business.