- Nicola Coughlan said she was “spooked” after encountering her AI vocal likeness on TikTok.
- AI-generated audio featuring the vocal likeness of public figures is common on social media.
- AI has been a crucial labor issue in Hollywood, as AI companies attempt to make inroads into the industry.
During the height of the “Bridgerton” season three press cycle, it was almost impossible not to run into clips of Nicola Coughlan on TikTok. But Coughlan herself experienced a new horror — running into her AI-generated vocal likeness.
The actor, who was named one of Time’s 2024 Next Generation Leaders, told the publication that she had come across a video on TikTok featuring her reading lines from a “Bridgerton” novel. Coughlan didn’t recognize the dialogue — and eventually realized that she had never recorded it.
“It was just an AI version of my voice, and it spooked me so badly,” Coughlan told Time. “I was like, ‘I hate this.'”
Coughlan is, by her own profession, extremely online. But she’s not the only actor who has spoken about having their likeness used for unauthorized, AI-generated content on social media.
Fake cover tracks featuring well-known artists regularly go viral, and in April 2023, Drake spoke out about an AI-generated cover that featured his vocal likeness rapping “Munch” by Ice Spice. This year, K-pop group Seventeen parodied an AI-generated cover of them singing fellow K-pop group Illit’s single “Magnetic.”
Using a public figure’s vocal likeness can pay off on social media. There’s an entire sub-genre of content featuring the vocal likenesses of United States presidents — mostly Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Barack Obama — chatting with each other while playing online video games or Dungeons & Dragons. Those videos rack up millions of views on platforms like TikTok and YouTube, mostly because they feature public figures like Biden saying unpresidential quips like, “Donald’s always mad, that’s Donald Grump.”
When it comes to actual corporate use, some actors are taking a hard line. Scarlett Johansson said in a statement in May that OpenAI’s new ChatGPT voice, Sky, was “eerily similar” to her own, after turning down an offer to voice act for the technology months prior. OpenAI said in a statement that Sky wasn’t intended to resemble Johansson but paused its use “out of respect” for the actor. These days, as top talent leaves AI companies like OpenAI and Stable Diffusion, they’re launching their own startups — and drawing significant investment from VCs.
AI has been a major point of contention for Hollywood labor unions, including during the dual SAG-AFTRA and WGA strikes of 2023 and the ongoing video-game performers strike. For performers, those negotiations deal with how studios can use their likenesses and, in turn, how the studios must compensate them.
Fan-generated content is harder to regulate. Voice actor Connor Fogarty told Business Insider in September that he had encountered AI-generated videos featuring his voice on social media, which a fan took down at his request.
“I understand people might have attractions to fictional characters, but to see my iteration of the character and my ‘voice’ flirting with some TikToker I didn’t know, it just made me feel odd,” he told BI.
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