Voice in the Machine: AI Voice Cloning in Film

In 2021 Morgan Neville’s film Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain created some controversy when it was revealed that three of the lines we hear Bourdain say in the film were never spoken by him (although he had written them) but were instead AI generated. This shone a light on the rapidly developing field of voice cloning and its use in filmmaking. The voice, and the body that creates it, has an interesting history in cinema. For its first decades the body on screen was mute, the sound of its voice had to be imagined in the mind’s ear and the meaning of the unheard words derived from intertitles. The unique quality of a character’s voice is often one of their defining features and actors often devote considerable time in “finding” the voice of the character that they will create. This voice is linked to the body, to its movements, so replacing this voice can fundamentally change how we perceive the character. Replacing an actors on set voice performance with one they have recorded after the capturing of the image track is extremely common. In some cases, a majority of a film’s production dialog has been replaced and the audience is usually unaware of this.  Recording, or dubbing a different actors voice to create a new language version of a film is in many countries the common way to experience foreign films. Both processes require time and money and are ones that AI companies are seeking to disrupt. This paper examines AI voice cloning and its developing impact on the voice in film and its possible future impacts on film production with specific reference to automated dialog replacement (ADR) and film localisation.