“Synthesized voices to communicate, without soul, is that what we want?” asks a voice-over actress.

All summer long, we’ve been interviewing employees, freelancers, and business leaders about their relationship with generative artificial intelligence. How do they use it, how do it change their professional practices? Today, Marine Maïwa, voiceover actress

How do employees, freelancers, and business leaders use generative artificial intelligence? What changes do they mention in their professional practice? Sarah Lemoine met Marine Maïwa, a professional voiceover actress.

In addition to her job as a singer, she uses her voice to record documentaries, radio and TV commercials, and corporate videos. Artificial intelligence, capable of generating a synthetic voice that is almost as natural as a human voice, was initially amazing to her. But in the last few months, she has begun to see its dangers.

“In mid-May, I was contacted for an advertisement for a car brand, and the client, spontaneously, wanted a synthetic voice to record the voice of his advertisement. The production said to the client: are you sure? Because you won’t have an ideal result. So the client finally agreed to use a real actress, that’s when they called me.”

“The client came to the recording session, he was able to see and hear all the retouching that we can do, all our added value, which is not possible with three sentences in a software.”

Marine Maïwa, voiceover actress

to franceinfo

Among the pitfalls, there are also AIs capable of cloning voices. According to Marine Maïwa, production companies are starting to use this when a recording needs to be retouched. This avoids having to bring the voice-over actor back into the studio, she says, but it raises several questions. This poses a real problem of consent, she explains.

“The actor has to agree to have his voice cloned. If he refuses, maybe the production company won’t call him back. If he accepts, his voice will be sent to a database, and that’s the problem because we don’t know where it’s actually going.”

“We need to legislate on this, we need clear texts so that we can exercise our professions, without fear of having our votes stolen, and therefore our work tool, without remuneration, obviously.”

Marine Maiwa

to franceinfo

With the emergence of these new technologies, the 40-year-old voiceover actress is not very reassured: “We are all a little shocked when we see the speed at which the situation is evolving. Today, when you have a trained ear, you can hear the faults of synthetic voices.”

“In a few years, AIs may be able to generate something much better. With the risk of ending up with very homogeneous voices, which sound alike. Voices without a soul to communicate. What is the limit? Is this what we want?”

Marine is also worried about her fellow actors who dub films. Their petition, “TouchePasMaVf”, launched last May, has already collected more than 150,000 signatures.