Stephen Fry’s voice was stolen from Harry Potter books with AI

Actor Stephen Fry revealed that an A.I. program stole and repurposed his voice from a Harry Potter audiobook and repurposed it.

One of the big topics of conversation across all industries is the use of A.I. technology. For example, how people can use it to innovate specific jobs.

In the entertainment industry especially, a lot of discourse surrounds using artificial intelligence. This means production teams could create T.V. shows and movies without using real actors or writers.

And it seems like Hollywood is getting closer to an A.I. reality. Recently, Fry has declared that his voice was stolen from an audiobook and used without his consent.

Fry warns against A.I. after his voice was stolen from Harry Potter

While speaking at the CogX Festival, Fry disclosed that his voice was stolen from the Harry Potter audiobooks he narrated and used without his consent.

Fry played a clip of his voice narrating a historical documentary but vehemently claimed he had no part in it.

“I said not one word of that — it was a machine. Yes, it shocked me,” Fry said. “They used my reading of the seven volumes of the ‘Harry Potter’ books, and from that dataset an A.I. of my voice was created, and it made that new narration.”

Fry went on to say, “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.”

After discovering the clip of his A.I. voice, Fry warned his agents that they “ain’t seen nothing yet. This is audio. It won’t be long until full deepfake videos are just as convincing.”

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