Voice Actors Decry AI at Comic-Con Panel With SAG-AFTRA’s Duncan Crabtree-Ireland: ‘We’ve Lost Control Over What Our Voice Could Say’

variety.com:

Adam B. Vary Senior Entertainment Writer The perils of artificial intelligence to the entertainment industry came to San Diego Comic-Con on Saturday, with SAG-AFTRA national executive director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland joining a panel of voice actors organized by NAVA, the National Association of Voice Actors, to discuss the specific hazards AI is already posing to the profession. “We’ve got to reject the idea that this is just something that’s going to happen to us and we can’t say anything about it,” Crabtree-Ireland said at the outset of the panel, about whether AI could devastate the entertainment industry. “I think it definitely could, the question is whether we’re going to let that happen.” Along with Crabtree-Ireland and moderator and NAVA board member Linsay Rousseau (“God of War: Ragnarok”), the panel, which played to a standing-room only audience, consisted of Ashly Burch (“Mythic Quest”), Cissy Jones (“The Owl House”), SAG-AFTRA negotiating committee member Zeke Alton (“Call of Duty”) and NAVA president and founder Tim Friedlander (“Record of Ragnarok”).

At issue for the panel was the growing certainty that without explicit contractual and statutory protections in place, AI could not only effectively replace the vast majority of work for voice actors, but manipulate their voices to create content without their expressed consent. “As a human voice actor, I can walk into a room and get a script that says something that I didn’t either agree to say or something that I would never say, I personally have that ability to walk out of that room,” Friedlander said.

With AI cloning the voices of actors, however, “We’ve lost control over what our voice could possibly say,” he said. Without referring to the movie by