A few seconds of your voice is now enough. 80 performers want that made illegal
Actors including Matt Lucas, Hugh Bonneville and Nicola Coughlan signed a letter asking the UK government to give every person a legal right to own their voice. Right now, nobody has one.
A quick voice clone takes minutes to build from a few seconds of audio. A convincing one takes hours of recordings. That is the whole technical barrier — and it is the reason more than 80 performers have signed a letter to Prime Minister Andy Burnham asking for a law that would give every person in the UK a legal right to own their voice.
Note the wording: every person. Not every actor. The people who make a living from their voices got there first because they noticed first. Audiobook narrator Alice Sockett, who co-founded the campaign, calls it "an existential threat to our entire industry" and says the theft is getting worse: "My voice is out there in the public domain but completely unprotected. We're seeing voice theft increase every week."
The gap the actors are pointing at is not about fame. It is about the fact that a voice sits in a legal blind spot. Copyright protects a recording. It does not protect the sound of you. Dr Mathilde Pavis put it plainly in June: "The law comes close, but it doesn't fully protect your voice, your face or your identity." Lawyers had already warned that UK legislation has become "unfit for purpose" because of how fast the technology moved.
So the practical situation today is simple. If someone takes a voice note you sent in a group chat and turns it into a phone call to your mother, the law comes close — and stops short.
The government's answer so far is a consultation. A spokesperson told the BBC that "digital replicas can be a powerful tool, including for the creative industries," but that there is also possibility for harm, and that it will "launch a consultation on how we address these harms, while protecting legitimate innovation." A consultation is the stage before a proposal, which is the stage before a law. No date was given for any of it.
And here is the part that makes this harder than a simple ban. The same technology gave Yvonne Johnson her voice back after motor neurone disease took it. She told the BBC's Tech Life programme in February that hearing her cloned voice "totally blown her mind" and brought her closer to a family who had forgotten what she sounded like. Pam Cronrath, from Washington state, used the tech to have a digital version of her late husband address the mourners at his wake. "I was completely impressed," she said. "It stayed with me." Any law that kills the copy kills that too.
Anyone who has ever posted a video with sound. That's the whole point of asking for a right that covers every person, not just performers: a few seconds is the entry price, and most people under 40 have handed over thousands of seconds for free — voice notes, stories, streams, work calls. It also lands hardest on the people who are choosing a career right now around a voice: narration, dubbing, presenting, podcasting, customer support. Siobhán McSweeney, who says she is "deeply worried" the government is lagging behind, argues there is a version of this where AI is a tool "rather than rendering us obsolete" — and audiences still want "that human connection. Not AI." And it lands on the families who would be the actual targets of a cloned voice on the phone, not the celebrities whose names got the letter into the news.
One concrete thing to watch: the government said it will launch a consultation on these harms while protecting legitimate innovation. It did not say when, and it did not say whether a right to own your voice is on the table. Until that consultation opens and its questions are published, there is nothing to read — and no law being drafted.
Sandi Thom said her voice was "unique to me and was handed to me at birth." That is a claim about ownership, and the law currently disagrees — a voice is one of the very few things about you that nobody, including you, legally owns. Eighty signatures are trying to change that. The interesting question is who ends up owning yours if they fail.
Sources: BBC News, Technology — "Matt Lucas and Hugh Bonneville among actors calling for law on AI voice cloning" by Tom Gerken; BBC Tech Life (February).
Клонирование голоса стало настолько дешёвым, что 80 актёров требуют признать голос собственностью человека — а правительство пока обещает только консультации, то есть у обычного человека сейчас нет никакой защиты от подделки его голоса.
Written by THE TELL’s AI newsroom. how we work · corrections