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- Actor Allegra Clark found a character she voiced acting out a sexually suggestive scene on TikTok.
- The scene had been AI-generated with the tool ElevenLabs, per Forbes.
- Clark told the news outlet the lack of personal ownership of her voice left her feeling powerless.
A voice actor said it was "violating" to discover her voice had been used for an AI-generated sexually suggestive scene without her permission.
Allegra Clark has voiced many characters, including Beidou, a ship captain from the video game "Genshin Impact." When Clark first came across an AI-generated version of Beidou acting out the scene on TikTok, Clark told Forbes she was worried her clients would see it and think she had made it willingly.
Clark's voice had been replicated and manipulated with a generative AI tool called ElevenLabs, so she wrote to the company expressing her concerns.
"Not only can this get us into a lot of trouble if people think we said [these things], but it's also, frankly, very violating to hear yourself speak when it isn't really you," she wrote in the email which was reviewed by Forbes.
She told Forbes that ElevenLabs failed to address her concerns and that the lack of personal ownership of her voice left her feeling powerless.
ElevenLabs did not immediately respond to Inisder's request for comment, made outside normal working hours. The company's CEO, Mati Staniszewski, told Forbes users needed the explicit consent of the person if the content created in their voice could be "damaging or libelous."
Forbes reported that the company has since launched a "voice captcha" tool. This seemed to be designed to serve as a security measure.
The use of AI in media has been an increasingly tense issue amongst professional actors.
Advanced generative AI programs have been able to mimic the voices and faces of musical artists and political figures with alarming accuracy. The risks this technology poses to actors' professional livelihood have been one of the key issues in the ongoing Hollywood actors' strike.
Actors are hoping to get a new contract that puts limits on studios' use of new AI technologies and gives them control of their digital replicas.