Stephen Fry Revealed His Voice Was Stolen From The ‘Harry Potter’ Audiobooks And Cloned By AI

British actor and author Stephen Fry revealed his voice was stolen and cloned by artificial intelligence, per Forbes.

While giving a speech at the CogX Festival in London last week, Fry shared a clip of an AI system using his voice to narrate a historical documentary. The system created the narration by using the actor's narration of the British Harry Potter audiobooks as a dataset. Then, Fry said, the words were "modulated to fit the meaning of each sentence." This was done without his knowledge or permission.

"I said not one word of that — it was a machine. Yes, it shocked me," he said. When shared with his agents, the actor said they went "ballistic."

Fry told the audience that the AI system could have him read "anything from a call to storm Parliament to hard porn." He also warned that this is just the beginning of AI-related problems as the technology continues to improve.

"What we have now is not what will be," he said to the audience. "When it comes to AI models, what we have now will advance at a faster rate than any technology we have ever seen."

Fry is a member of the SAG-AFTRA union, which began strikes in July over higher wages and regulatory concerns of AI usage in the film industry. Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, the union's national executive director, described the technology as an "existential threat" to actors' livelihoods.

"They proposed that our background performers should be scanned get paid for one day's pay, and the company should be able to own that scan, that likeness, for the rest of eternity, on any project they want, with no consent and no compensation," he said about the studios' offer.