Voice-over performers Paul Skye Lehrman and Linnea Sage filed a class-action lawsuit against artificial intelligence (AI) text-to-speech platform Lovo, alleging that their voices were cloned under false pretenses.

The couple discovered the incident in June 2023 after listening to a podcast interview with an AI-powered chatbot that sounded like Lehrman as it talked about how AI would affect career opportunities in Hollywood amid ongoing artist strikes.

“The irony that AI is coming for the entertainment industry, and here is my voice talking about the potential destruction of the industry, was really quite shocking,” Lehrman said.

An extensive search online also led the voice-over performers to the Lovo website, where they found a copy of Sage’s voice. “A tech company stole our voices, made AI clones of them, and sold them possibly hundreds of thousands of times,” she shared.

Recently, the Screen Actors Guild – American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) and Writers Guild Association (WGA) held a double strike to protest against AI threat. As technology rapidly advances in Hollywood, actors, writers, and artists are raising concerns about how AI can replace them and calling for policies to safeguard their basic rights and jobs.

Voice cloning allegations vs Lovo

The couple already filed a federal law class-action lawsuit in May, detailing how Lovo was able to access their voices.

In 2019, Sage claimed that an anonymous Lovo employee reached out and asked her to record multiple generic-sounding test radio scripts on the freelance talent website Fiverr. After completing the job, she was paid $400. Lehrman also received a similar offer in 2020, which requested dozens of generic radio ad recordings for $1200.

According to the messages shared by the couple with the BBC, the anonymous Fiverr user explained that the recordings would be used for research into “speech synthesis” and guaranteed that the scripts would not be utilized for other purposes.

Lehrman further inquired about the goal of the research, to which the user said, “The scripts will not be used for anything else, and I can’t yet tell you the goal, as it’s a confidential work in process, sorry.”

Besides these conversations, the couple did not have a written contract with the anonymous Fiverr user or with Lovo. However, they claimed that it was Lovo itself that confirmed its relationship with the user.

This allegation came after Lehrman and Sage forwarded the evidence of their cloned voices to Lovo, which responded that they had done nothing wrong and that their communications with the anonymous user served as proof of only legal activities.

In a 2021 podcast, Lovo co-founder Tom Lee mentioned that its voice-cloning technology can replicate a human voice using only 50 sentences. “We can capture the tone, the character, the style, the phonemes, and even if you have an accent, we can capture that as well.”

The couple believed that the startup used this software and their audio recordings to create copies that illegally compete with their real voices without permission or proper compensation. They also said that the anonymous Fiverr user deleted some messages in their conversations.

Still unsure despite legal basis

While the class-action lawsuit has not seen other claimants joining in, legal experts are saying that it has a legitimate legal basis.

Georgetown University professor and intellectual property expert Kristelia Garcia stated that the case can be expected to fall under the rights of publicity or personality rights. Garcia added that a breach of contract regarding the licenses, which Lehrman and Sage gave the anonymous Fiverr user, is also possible.

“Licenses are permission for a very specific and narrow use. I might give you a license to use my swimming pool one afternoon, but that doesn’t mean you can come whenever you want and have a party in my swimming pool,” she told the BBC. “That would exceed the terms of the license.”

Nevertheless, this lawsuit only adds to the already long list of cases from artists, authors, illustrators, and musicians whose work and livelihood are threatened by AI.

“This whole experience has felt so surreal. When we thought about artificial intelligence, we were thinking of AI folding our laundry and making us dinner, not pursuing human being’s creative endeavors,” Sage said.