In 2023, when the Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) strikes shut down Hollywood for 4 months, searching for protection from, amongst other things, artificial intelligence (AI), many in India wondered why nothing of the type was happening there. One among the concerns of the movement was how big studios were going to make use of AI to duplicate likenesses of artists in ways in which may very well be exploitative. The strike resulted in a three-year agreement that guaranteed fair pay and included provisions that required performers to approve how their voices were used.
Nothing of the type has happened in India since. But there’s a small, area of interest section of the entertainment industry where the results of AI are being intensely felt: the dubbing and voiceover sector. Gigs have already began to vanish. As for the character of labor, these are strange times within the Indian industry. If you happen to are a dubbing artist, you might discover that your voice has been utilized in a movie you’ve never worked on.
Why the voice sector? Perhaps because a few of the advancements in generative AI — just like the text-to-speech model or voice cloning — have brought into focus facets like copyright, compensation and consent in an off-the-cuff industry of about 20,000 freelancers. The Association of Voice Artists of India (AVA) is more energetic than ever, issuing circulars and organizing forums for artists of their quest to spread awareness about methods to survive and demand fair wages in an environment of uncertainty.
AI isn’t so evolved yet to switch traditional dubbing altogether — it often can’t do emotions convincingly. What it may do is plainer narration, devoid of drama and nuance — perfectly functional for infomercials and company audiovisuals, user manuals and even TV promos. Many dubbing artists moonlight in these areas to complement income — and this sub-sector of the business has taken a significant hit. Text-to-speech has cut down costs (for the client) but eliminated the voice artist completely.
“If earlier a voice actor was doing around 15-20 projects a month, now it has come right down to perhaps six or seven,” says Amarinder Singh Sodhi, the General Secretary of AVA — and in addition the Hindi voice of Hawkeye (Avengers Assemble) and Blade (Deadpool & Wolverine). “And she or he might be 40 or 50-plus,” he adds. “It’s difficult to alter your career overnight at that age.”
In 2023, when the SAG-AFTRA strikes were on, actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt wrote a passionate, clarion call of an op-ed demanding fair wages from “tech giants, entertainment giants and each other profit-hungry giant” for using people as resources to coach AI. “What’s backstage of AI? The price of the human labour it took to provide the training data,” he wrote. “‘Generative AI’ cannot generate anything in any respect without first being trained on massive troves of information it then recombines. Who produces that training data? People do.”
Sodhi and his colleagues are fighting the identical fight. Before taking on a project, they need to know what they’re stepping into, in order that they aren’t exploited. Tech firms — normally U.S.-based — often approach voice artists to lend their voice to a project in vague terms, without specifying how, where and in what form their voice goes for use. The dearth of laws for AI use has meant that voice artists, particularly the brand new and fewer experienced, remain vulnerable to such offers. So, the AVA has taken it upon itself to coach. “If in any respect you’re going ahead with it, it’s essential to understand that your voice is your mental property. And it may very well be misused. And the usage of the voice may very well be to that extent where your future prospects as a voice artist may be jeopardized,” says Sodhi.
“Earlier, we used to go to the studio, where we were handed over a specific script, and we used to record after which return home, without ever asking questions. But now the scenario has modified,” he adds. “Our basic rule is that before even going for an audition, ask questions — ask them what exactly you’re taking this audition for because random scripts are going to be a whole no-no from here on.”
Aditya Mathur, the channel voice of Nickelodeon, echoes Sodhi. “I can voice in English after which the identical may be captured and utilized in quite a few languages that AI can do, which mainly means I’m purported to be paid for those multiple languages,” he says.
It’s not nearly compensation — it’s about consent too. “Tomorrow if someone sends me a clip of a hate speech with my voice in it, I might be horrified, because I don’t support it. And voice is a component of our personality. It’s our identity,” says Rakhee Sharma, who’s been working within the voice industry since she was a baby and has voiced Kate Winslet within the Hindi dub of Avatar: The Way of Water, amongst others. “There are such a lot of ethical and moral issues related to the identical,” she adds.
The newest miracle in AI voicing is cloning — a kind of speech equivalent of a visible deep fake. It allows the user to use the feel of 1 voice actor to the performance of one other. This has made possible a previously unthinkable feat: you may now hear your favorite Hindi-speaking Bollywood star blurt out lines in, let’s say, Telugu, in his or her own voice (and never the dubbing artist’s). This is clearly an improvement on traditional dubbing, giving it authenticity. But where does it leave the dubbing artist? They’re still needed, producing the all-important ‘performance’ on which the feel of the star’s voice might be applied.
Dubbing producer Rajashrie Sharma speculates that this may lead to clients paying less. “If a dubbing artist were to charge about ₹3 lakhs or ₹4 lakhs (around $3,500 to $4,500) to dub a theatrical film earlier, there may very well be an argument now that, ‘We’re not going to air your voice. We’re going to simply use your performance and duplicate it,” she says.
Just how popular a tool is voice cloning prone to change into in movies and streaming series? It has already been seen in movies comparable to Kalki 2898 AD and Vettaiyan — each South Indian movies with a pan-Indian appeal. And Kannada filmmaker and founding father of the voice cloning studio AI Samhitha, M. G. Srinivas, says that “many of the big movies that are releasing in multiple languages are doing it immediately.”
Srinivas himself has used voice cloning in his last film, Ghost, and is happy about its prospects in Indian cinema. He says voice cloning isn’t going to mean underpayment of artists. “It’s not like anyone — any average voice artist — can come and provides the voice, and we are able to clone it into the actor’s voice,” he insists. “It would not work like that. The dubbing artist should be very expert. He has to do the suitable modulations. He should be technically strong, wherein the bass voice needs to be a certain way and so forth.”
Srinivas, who was once a radio DJ, says that he knows the importance of voice. “Dubbing artists bring something that’s original, authentic. Currently, there is no such thing as a technology to switch it, but five years down the road, who knows?”
The best way ahead, then, for voice artists, is to adapt to the relentless march of technology. But insiders say there must be regulations in place. Unlike within the U.S., where clauses and contracts have been signed pertaining to the usage of AI, in India there have been no binding industry agreements or intervention from the federal government yet. “Any government or country would wish to leverage AI. It’s such a technology that it may boost productivity, but it may also disrupt plenty of lives,” says Sodhi. His colleague Ankur Javeri — who’s voiced all of Virat Kohli’s ads until recently and is the Hindi voice of Goku in Dragonball Z — says that to have that form of impact, other unions from other post-production units must join hands too.
Says Javeri: “The SAG-AFTRA people met plenty of resistance from the massive corporations, be it twentieth Century Fox or Paramount, but eventually they’d to buckle under collective bargaining. We want something like that.”