Voice Actors Say AI Is Being Used to Fuel a Nightmarish Harassment Campaign

 

Sure, there’s been a lot of attention being paid to deep fakes of celebrities and major public figures. Still, with the advent of free or cheap AI-based voice synthesization software, anybody who has had their audio uploaded to the internet runs the risk of being deepfaked.

Voice actors Zane Schacht and Tom Schalk were among several who were targeted by videos on Twitter containing faked audio that shared their home address while using racist slurs. Schacht, who has done voice work for properties like Fallout 4, told Gizmodo he and other voice actors were targeted after posting their outspoken antipathy toward generative AI. Schalk, who has done voices in several indie video games and animated series, also said the folks targeted by the malicious tweets had been outspoken on AI.

Some of these accounts and offending tweets have been banned and deleted from Twitter, though a few of those malicious tweets remained online for some time. Gizmodo was unable to independently verify whether the offending tweets or accounts remain online. Schalk told Gizmodo over the phone that he did think the users were “just trolls being trolls” trying to do a smear campaign against actors concerned about AI-generated voice.

“[The doxxing video] didn’t exactly sound like me, it takes time to do that,” he said. “But if someone is successful replicating my voice, you know I would take action against it especially if they’re using it on a grand commercial scale.”Vice first reported that voice actors and other, ordinary folks are being targeted with online harassment and doxxing attacks using their own voice. Specifically, these attacks targeted people with YouTube channels, podcasts, or streams. Several of these doxxing attempts also hit voice actors, some of whom have been especially critical about AI-generated content in the past.