Our voice is our livelihood

Bollywood actor Amitabh Bachchan at Kailash Kher’s studio at Seven Bangalows. File pic/Getty Images

Kareena Kapoor's hot and oh-so-fashionable Poo from Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham was embraced by audiences at once, but as other movies of the actor came out, people noticed a detail - her voice had changed. It is an open secret that many actors borrow dubbing voices to either plug holes during production, or sound more appealing.

But these professional voice actors cannot vocalise their work, and remain largely unrecognised, and celebrated, outside a closed circle of movie technicians. Their professional rights, or lack thereof, came to the fore after Scarlett Johansson made headlines for saying OpenAI's latest chatbot voice sounded "eerily similar" to hers.

Vijay Vikram Singh, the voice-over artist who plays the role of sutradhar in Big Boss, recently sent a notice to a company asking if his voice would be used by AI for voice cloning. Pic/Satej Shinde

Johansson has requested OpenAI to reveal how and from where they extracted the voice; Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, responded saying they won't reveal the identity of the voice actor.

Who doesn't recognise the voice that says, "Big Boss chahte hai ki…" Vijay Vikram Singh was one of the first of the fraternity to take legal recourse against his unmistakable voice being reproduced. In March, Singh sent a legal notice to a previous employer with whom he had recorded some common phrases in 2018.

"The contract was ambiguous," he said. "I sent them a notice asking if they intend to use my voice for AI. They said they don't and will not in the future, and the matter ended there." Even though the company has assured Singh, and he now has a written document saying so, there is no way for him to check whether it will keep their word. "I have no tools to know where and when they use my voice. I just have to take their word for it; this is the complication with AI entering our industry," he adds.

A simple Google search will hand you hundreds of apps and websites on which you can sign up in 30 seconds, drop an audio clip and transform it to anyone's voice, including that of the country's highest-paid voice actor, Amitabh Bachchan.

Amarinder Sodhi, General Secretary, Association of Voiceover Artists

This despite the actor approaching Delhi High Court in 2022 to safeguard the use of his voice, face, name, and of course, image. He has raved against the 60-year-old copyright laws on his blog. One line reads (sic)"who built this Law.. who prescribed the time years of 60 .. why did they do so.. how can individual property become public property.. NO!!"

At 47 years of age, Singh has seen his share of struggles. He tasted success at 30 when he became an "accidental" voice artist. It has been only 10 years since he was selected as narrator of Big Boss, talks about why he revisited a job he had done six years ago. "When I signed the contract," he says, "AI was nowhere in our field. But recently, we have been hearing of voices being cloned for project actors never agreed upon. We get paid per line. Now we have to ensure our voice is not used for a project we wouldn't sign on for ethical or personal reasons."

Ganesh Divekar and Akshay Shetty

In August last year, the Association of Voiceover Artists (AVA) held their first conference in Mumbai. Ganesh Divekar, AVA President, shares insight on how big the industry is, "There are a mere 5,000 artistes by our estimate, and the industry is split into two, the Bandra-Khar artistes who work in advertising; and the Andheri-Goregaon professionals mostly involved in OTT, theatre, animation, web series, etc," says Divekar.

While the advertisement industry is a freelance setup, the artistes from Andheri-Goregaon belt are part of a more organised system closer to a regular job economy, and it's here that trouble has been brewing in particular.

Sam Altman, in turn, has said that they have in fact used a voice actor for the OpenAI but said that they would not be able to reveal her identity. File pic/Getty Images; (right) Scarlett Johansson who has voiced a self-aware computer operating system woman in the movie "Her" back in 2013, has said that the chatbott voice of OpenAI is "eerily similar" to hers and has asked it's CEO Sam Altman to clarify as to how the voice was made

Divekar, who is the Marathi voice for Jethalal from Taarak Mehta Ka Ooltah Chashmah, says, "You may have to record 400 episodes in six months, and get paid Rs 500 to 1,000 per episode, unlike commercials where you may be paid up to Rs 2 lakh for just one line."

Divekar is no small fish - he is the Hindi voice of Timon the meerkat in Lion King, and has dubbed for big-ticket movies such as Ishmael Gregor, the antagonist in Black Adam as well as Rhino the hamster in Bolt, and Dug the dog in Up. "The reason we are banding together is that the voice-over industry has never had a proper legal framework, and now AI has come in and disrupted it furthermore. Our voice is all we have," he says.

Amarinder Sodhi, General Secretary, AVA and their Legal Counsel Akshay Shetty have been trying to retrofit the rights of voice-over artistes into Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), "As of now," says Sodhi, "we have legal language so we are using IPR to protect ourselves." The need to educate colleagues is a high priority for many reasons. "There have been a number of incidents in the past two or three years where ambiguity in contract, or the complete absence of one have raised alarm bells," Sodhi adds, "An artiste is called in and made to say vague phrases that seem to be cloned and reused elsewhere. They layer our voice over another audio, and it sounds just like us. They are teaching AI voice modulation with the experience we have earned over our entire lives."

Lack of information about contracts and legal right was obvious in the conference held last year. "Some artistes didn't know the very first thing about getting a contract," says Shetty. "In one case," adds Sodhi, "while an artiste was recording, they asked the production house where and for how long their voice would be used. Their evasive answer raised the artiste's antennae and the artiste left the session mid-way."

So is there no legal recourse at all? "There is," says Shetty, "but it's vague and there is a lack of awareness within the industry. But I fully believe that the law will catch up with AI one day. Maybe not immediately, but we must keep fighting so that the future generation of artistes don't get the short end of the stick like us."