Actor Says AI ‘Stole’ His Voice: Navigating the Murky World of AI in Entertainment

In 2022, voice actor Cooper Mortlock was hired to work on an animated series. At first, everything went well: the job was stable, and the employer was friendly and paid on time. However, the Sydney-based Mortlock was told the series would be cancelled when the project reached episode 30 of the contracted 52-episode season. Yet one year later, Mortlock found another episode had been released on YouTube and was surprised to hear himself doing the voiceover—even though he had taken no part in it. Mortlock believes he is the latest creative talent to fall victim to advances in artificial intelligence (AI), or more specifically, the growing problem of “voice theft”—where AI is used to imitate or “clone” the voice of artists without consent....