When I was working in radio news in the late 1980s, I took a lunch break at a nearby cafe that happened to be tuned to our station.

“You have a voice like a radio announcer,” said the cashier, obviously not aware that he had been listening to my hourly news bulletins all morning. 

Gayanne Potter is one of Britain’s most recognisable voices – behind adverts for the likes of Estee Lauder, Apple, LBC radio, and B&Q.

Now, an artificial intelligence (AI) version of her voice is being used on Scotland’s nationalised train network, ScotRail.

But the professional voiceover artist says she had no idea she had been transformed into a robot until a friend called her last week.

“I was devastated, I was furious, I feel completely violated,” she told Sky News.

“My voice is my job, and I should be allowed to know who I am working with and what I am working on.”

[…]

Liam Budd, industrial official for recorded media at Equity, said: “It is extremely exploitative for companies to use and commercialise voice recordings to create digital replicas of artists from contracts which pre-date the development of generative AI or were not drafted explicitly for this purpose.

“Gayanne is directly competing in a marketplace with a low-quality clone of her own voice that she claims was developed without her informed and explicit consent.

“Not only is this distressing for her, but it would represent an infringement of our members’ data protection and other rights.” —sky.com