Stephen Fry Shocked to Learn His Voice Was Stolen From the HARRY POTTER Audio Books and Replicated by AI for a Documentary
UK actor Stephen Fry has been in a ton of great films and series, including Gosford Park, V For Vendetta and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but along with acting, his voice work is absolutely as iconic as his roles, as he’s known worldwide for bringing the beloved Harry Potter book series to life in the audiobook versions of the novels. But because of his well-known vocals, the actor has been subjected to an odd theft of sorts.
Fry recently revealed at the CogX Festival (via Forbes/Variety) that his voice from the Harry Potter audiobooks was taken by AI software and replicated without his consent, and he and his agents have spoken out.
“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,” Fry said before playing a clip of his voice narrating a historical documentary. Only it wasn’t Fry’s voice. It was an AI replication of his voice.
“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.”
Fry served as the audiobook narrator for the Harry Potter series in the United Kingdom. He said 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.”
AI has become one of the focal points of the ongoing WGA and SAG-AFRA strikes. Bryan Cranston delivered a fiery address to Disney CEO Bob Iger in July in which he said actors would not let studios take their jobs away with AI replication.
It seems like the unions are doing their best to get ahold of this issue before it gets out of control, but it’s wild that some people think they can get away with stealing someone’s voice without repercussions. Hopefully the strikes will lead to a clearer resolution pressing forward.
Fry most recently appeared in Prime Video’s Red, White & Royal Blue, now streaming.