Why the SAG-AFTRA contract might let AI kill voice acting

When SAG-AFTRA members cheered their acting union's contract win, Jesse Inocalla's voice didn't raise in celebration with the rest. 

Despite the historic agreement, wrestled out of Hollywood studios after a 118-day strike, Inocalla was simply more worried than ever because to his eyes there was the equivalent of a contractual time bomb buried in that achievement. 

"Not to be too fearmongering about it, but there are definitely huge swaths of the industry that will be affected by this," he said.

Inocalla was referencing one of the most hotly contested aspects of the contract: Generative artificial intelligence [AI], the technology behind everything from ChatGPT to the deepfake song Heart on My Sleeve with computer-generated voices of Drake and the Weeknd. It uses machine learning on vast amounts of data to produce high-quality original text, graphics, sounds, images and videos.

And while it has disrupted multiple art industries like music, visual arts and literature in the past two years, Inocalla says generative AI poses a special threat to performers like him.

"For a lot of voice actors, [generative] AI has been the canary in the coal mine that we've been shouting about for years," he said.

Because of how voice actors are positioned in the industry, he says they're at most risk of being taken advantage of by movie studios using the contract's new language. 

"A lot of companies are looking to make the bottom line, and if they can spend $100 on licensing Male Voice No. 3 off of [text-to-speech platform] ElevenLabs instead of paying $500 to a living, breathing voice actor … then they're going to do that," said Inocalla.

Those fears come from two places: Both in practises already seen in the entertainment industry before the agreement was reached, and by language in the contract itself. 

Inocalla says it has already affected him.

Though rumblings of live-action actors being fully recreated to appear in productions  — like Magic City Films' never-realized plan to have James Dean digitally resurrected to play a role back in 2019 — deepfakes in general have popped up in increasing frequency, and it is still easier to recreate a voice than a person's entire physical likeness. 

For that reason voice actors, whose jobs consist of creating thousands of publicly available examples of their performance, are often targeted by generative AI. Inocalla says he found a cloned version of his voice from an episode of My Little Pony on a fan website, while the cloned voices of actors from Spongebob have proliferated enough to create their own AI-based rap battle subgenre. 

While those are not done by studios, Montreal voice actor Tod Fennell says it proves the ease of creating artificial voice actors — and the lack of protest from audiences with the result. 

"As a voice actor, ... you used to feel competition from other voice actors and you all kind of want to get better. Now I'm literally feeling the push from AI," he said.