Stephen Fry fell victim to unethical artificial intelligence

Last Updated on September 27, 2023

Stephen Fry can usually get the upper hand on people with his wit but when it comes to technology, he has proven to be a target, admitting that he was taken advantage of by the powers of artificial intelligence.

Appearing at CogX Festival in London (via Fortune), Stephen Fry showed the audience a clip of a documentary he supposedly lent his voice to. After the clip ended, he told the crowd, “I said not one word of that—it was a machine. Yes, it shocked me…They used my reading of the seven volumes of the Harry Potter books, and from that dataset an AI of my voice was created, and it made that new narration.” He added, “What you heard was not the result of a mashup. This is from a flexible artificial voice, where the words are modulated to fit the meaning of each sentence…It could therefore have me read anything from a call to storm Parliament to hard porn, all without my knowledge and without my permission. And this, what you just heard, was done without my knowledge. So I heard about this, I sent it to my agents on both sides of the Atlantic, and they went ballistic—they had no idea such a thing was possible.”

But as we’re continuing to learn, it is very much possible. While we don’t know the extent of Stephen Fry’s contract regarding his audiobook narrations, Hollywood studios have devised plans on how to use one’s likeness – or a version of it –  in the future. This, of course, has been a thorn for the Screen Actors Guild, who have made artificial intelligence a major point in their continued strike.

It has been argued that artificial intelligence could also eliminate some key jobs within the industry such as casting directors and agents. There might be something to that; after all, the makers of the documentary didn’t need a single person to “cast” Stephen Fry. Yes, what they did was completely unethical and could be worth arguing as illegal, but the filmmakers got away with it up to a point – and clearly didn’t care about the ethics – which is quite scary for anyone lending their voice elsewhere.

What are your opinions on filmmakers using artificial intelligence to manipulate someone’s voice or likeness to their own advantage? How far do you think it could go?