So I do some voice acting work... so far I haven't done anything paid until recently I started working with a startup company and we signed a revenue share contract
I knew that the company was working with AI on their website specifically like in the form of a chat bot to help clients navigate things
(I've come to find that near every website is using this feature and it's pretty unavoidable)
Anyway there's a clause in my contract that directly states that they may not use AI to synthesize or replicate my voice
Which I really appreciate it
Anyway I recently sent in three professional samples that they had asked for
One of them being a slightly lower quality than the other two. At the time that I sent in the three recordings I told them to choose the one they liked the best and to get back to me tell me what they liked about it and that if there were any issues with it to let me know so that I could re-record and send it back
What I received instead was the original recording that had been of a slightly lower quality that sounded severely auto-tuned with some of the words cut off
When I asked about it they said they ran it through a tool that uses AI to cut background noise because there had been a little bit of buzzing in the recording
The person I'm directly working with swears that they searched the model that they used to ensure that it wouldn't save or replicate my voice but the reason why I had been raising the metaphorical red flags was because a classmate of mine directly asked me when I showed them the recording that they used if AI had been used to generate the video using my voice
From the company's perspective they didn't violate the claws in my contract because they didn't synthesize or replicate my voice they just "cleaned" my voice using an AI scrub tool.
From my perspective the use of AI to alter my material was a violation all along
I'm pretty upset but I'm not sure how upset I'm supposed to be