Stephen Fry 'shocked' by AI stealing his voice from Harry Potter audiobooks for another project

Stephen Fry is a little upset with Artificial Intelligenceas he reveals that his voice from the Harry Potter audiobooks was taken by the AI software and was replicated without his consent. How AI did it and was using it is something both he and his agents are horrified at. As he attended the CogX Festival, Stephen said, “I’m a proud member of [actors’ union SAG-AFTRA]. As you know, we’ve been on strike for three months now. And one of the burning issues is AI."And, he then played a clip of his voice narrating a historical documentary.

It's not Stephen Fry but AI talking in one documentary

While you would think there’s nothing wrong with this, Stephen Fry reveals that it isn’t him speaking but an AI tool imitating him.

Stephen then elaborated, “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.”

“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,” he added.

Stephen warns everyone of what AI is capable of

Stephen Fry said that the discovery of AI mimicking his voice led him to warn his agents.“You ain’t seen nothing yet. This is audio. It won’t be long until full deepfake videos are just as convincing.”

He recently appeared in Prime Video’s Red, White & Royal Blue. He served as the audiobook narrator for the Harry Potter series in the United Kingdom.

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