Tech giants sued over ‘stealing’ voices of well-known journalists, voice actors to train AI

Ah, the sweet sound of a class-action lawsuit — or in this case, nine of them, harmonising in a Chicago federal court. The defendants: Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and assorted other tech giants. The allegation: they 'ingested recordings' of journalists and voice actors to train their AI voice models, in alleged violation of Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act.

One can almost hear the whirring of legal AI models being trained to generate settlement arguments. The companies probably thought they could hoover up every scrap of audio from the internet and train their voice clones without anyone noticing. But someone noticed: nine sets of lawyers, who are now arguing that a voiceprint is biometric data requiring consent. The defence will no doubt involve some creative parsing of 'publicly available' and 'transformative use', but Illinois law has been remarkably stubborn on this point.

This is what happens when you build a multibillion-dollar AI on a foundation of 'ask forgiveness, not permission'. The irony is delicious: the same companies that lecture us about the future of voice interfaces now have to answer for pilfering the voices that made those interfaces possible. Tick tock, voice actors: your compensation is coming, but not before the legal fees consume most of it. Still, it's a start — a rare moment where the law catches up before the technology runs away entirely, even if only in one particularly litigious state.