Ned Luke, the actor who provided the voice and image for one of the protagonists of GTA V, Michael de Santa, shared a post on Twitter last Sunday criticizing the company WAME for creating an AI-based audiobot that simulates his character’s voice.
Audiobots, unlike the already standardized chatbots, are tools that rely on a person’s voice to recreate any phrase we write to them. According to the website PCGamesN, WAME offered an audiobot that simulated being the character of Michael. What’s the problem? Well, the company never had the actor’s approval to create such audiobot.
WAME previously tweeted a link to their new audiobot with the message: “Any GTA fans here? Take your gaming experience to another level. Try having a realistic voice conversation with Michael De Santa, the protagonist of GTA 5, right now!”. Currently, both the tweet and the audiobot have been deleted, but they did not go unnoticed by Luke, who got angry on his Twitter account.
“This is complete bullshit @wamexyz,” Luke said. “It absolutely sucks to scam people with a crappy computer-generated imitation of my voice. DON’T WASTE YOUR TIME WITH THIS GARBAGE.” Music producer Marilou Burnel responded to Luke, saying: “Creative people do extraordinary things with AI, and the opposite is also true,” to which the actor replied, saying: “They don’t do it by not using my voice,” Luke replied.
A few days earlier, in the midst of the controversy of voice actors with SAG-AFTRA, Clark argued with several Twitter users who defended the use of AI to imitate voices, commenting the following: “I find it hard to understand what some of you regular actors have done to you. Of course, AI is coming, no one knows it better than us, but if they ever start copying your voice on your bank’s phone I hope some of you have a different perspective”.
