AI Voice Generation Company Accused of Stealing Actors’ Voices
Lovo Inc., a synthetic speech startup, was hit with a proposed class action Thursday alleging the company misappropriated voiceover actors' voices and deceptively promoted its product as legally marketing their use.
Voice actors Paul Lehrman and Linnea Sage say Lovo used their voices in its product without fairly compensating them or telling them what the recordings they had made unknowingly for the company through the freelance gig website Fiverr were actually being used for.
They seek to represent a class of everyone whose voice Lovo used without permission or compensation for “the purpose of creating or refining its AI text-to-speech generator” or whose AI-replicated voices were used or sold without proper compensation, their complaint filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York says.
Lovo didn't immediately respond to a request to comment.
Lovo advertises more than 500 voices in 100 languages and that users “own all rights to the content created,” including commercial rights, via its services. The company raised $6.5 million in pre-series A funding in 2022 to develop AI-generated voices for Web 3.0 after it launched a collection of 8,888 NFT unique voice tokens.
Both Lehrman and Sage say they made voice recordings after responding to anonymous user inquiries on Fiverr. They were paid $1,200 and $400 respectively and were each told the recordings were for academic purposes or to test radio ads. They say the users who reached out to them were actually Lovo employees.
Years later, Lehrman discovered a YouTube video about Russian military equipment that seemed to be narrated by him, but he'd never recorded the video. Lehrman says he believes the YouTube channel used Lovo to create the narration.
In 2023, Lehrman also heard his own voice on Deadline's Strike Talk podcast, which was “ironically” about “the dangers of AI technologies,” the complaint says.
That year, Sage says she discovered her voice was being used in Lovo's
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