A Shanghai court just ordered an AI company to pay up for borrowing the voices of 63 Genshin Impact characters without asking first.
AI voice cloning has been creeping into every corner of entertainment lately. Just weeks ago, Evangelion star Megumi Ogata called AI voice cloning “heartbreaking” and begged Japan for regulation. Now China’s courts have drawn their own line, and this one comes with a hefty receipt.
After all, Genshin Impact has hundreds of fully voiced characters and millions of players who could pick each one out in a lineup, so when an outside company started siphoning 63 of those voices for profit, developer miHoYo noticed.
On September 10, The Pudong New Area People’s Court in Shanghai ruled that an undisclosed AI voice provider must pay miHoYo 750,000 Chinese Yuan, roughly $112,000, for reproducing 63 Genshin Impact characters’ voices and reselling them as voice packs, according to Chinese outlet The Paper.
The service let users swap their voice for a character’s mid-conversation in real time, and miHoYo says the company also ripped character art and animations for its ads, slapped modified Genshin faces onto avatars, and let shoppers preview stolen dialogue before checkout.
The AI provider argued its models merely reflected whatever a user fed into them, and that any rights belonged to the actors, not miHoYo.
But judges weren’t swayed after voiceprint analysis found the cloned voices exhibited “nearly identical characteristics” to the originals, and the defendant admitted training its model on a stolen minute of character audio.
Evangelion star calls for Japanese government help over “heartbreaking” AI voice cloning
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.dexerto.com/genshin-impact/genshin-impact-dev-wins-over-100k-after-ai-company-cloned-character-voices-3408234/
