 Good morning everybody and welcome to this presentation from World Voices on AI and legalities and I'm Dan Leonard, president of World Voices, joined by Dave Gravasier, president emeritus of World Voices and a founding member and our guest Rob Siglampaglia, who is also a founding member of WoVo. He's been with us since the early days. Our legal counsel, in fact. He's also our corporate counsel. But Rob graduated, come laudee from University of Connecticut with a bachelor's of arts degree majoring in political science. He also attended and graduated from Pace University School of Law with a jurist doctor degree and Rob is also author of the book Voice Over Legal, which hit number one on the amazon bestseller list for entertainment law books, of which is not a big category, but there must be one. Anyway, uh, welcome Rob. I mean we everybody's talking about AI, you know, we see we see the ads and facebook of it's almost like human voices or it's better than human voices or it's all these things. Is it really a threat to everybody? Why don't we just start that way and then we can get to some of the other points that we want to get to? Sure, it's a threat. I mean, it could put the live actors and voice actors right out of business. Yeah, maybe it would serve us to if you could recap Bev standing's case. That was the first one that really got everybody's attention. Would it be pertinent to talk about how that came about and how you resolved it? Sure, yeah. So what happened with Bev was that she had recorded like back in 2018 time frame. She had got hired for a job to just record a bunch of random lines. They told her it was for a translation job for Chinese translation, which is red flag right there, China. And a couple of years later, her daughter heard her voice on TikTok as the text of speech voice. And so she contacted her mom's like, Hey, you're you're this is you're on TikTok. And she was like, wait a minute. I never I never did any work for TikTok. So she traced it back to that job she had done for the Chinese translation. What we did was we copyrighted those files because she had done them from her home studio. And we filed a copyright infringement case in the Southern District of New York. And, you know, TikTok didn't even know that they had purchased the files. They had gotten them not illegally. They had gotten them from that company that did the the voice that the work that did for them. And they were nowhere to be found. Lord knows where they were. They were probably somewhere deep in China. So TikTok ended up selling the case and, you know, making things kind of right. But, you know, just the whole way that it happened is, you know, it's just a kind of a wake up cause, you know, you have to figure out where your your files are going to end up when you hit the send button, you know, where are they going to go? So you have to trace them, you know, contractually protect yourself now. And like online casting is not going away. AI voices are not going to go away either. I know of some professional voice actors who are going ahead and licensing their voice with some online service that can clone their voice. Where do we decide what's right for us? I mean, that's really a personal decision. So right now, AI is still a way much in its infancy. Well, I mean that really, because it's been been developed. It's been developed for a long time. You know, it's been at least 10 or 20 years where it's AI has gotten to this point. Now, what we're seeing now is we're seeing the end results. We're seeing the marketing. We're seeing the business plans coming through. We're seeing the way to make money. As a matter of fact, NVIDIA, if anyone has NVIDIA stock, you know how AI, you know, can make you tons of money because the stock, they just, just yesterday put out their earnings and their earnings have gone, you know, through the roof and their stock price has gone through the roof and, you know, it's gone up 600% in the past couple of years. NVIDIA is one of the companies that are at the forefront of AI for, not necessarily for voice-overs, but for AI in general, technology. So the technology, now it's actually started to make a push consumer-wise, business-wise. So this is why we're seeing these issues come up now. But these issues, I've been talking about these issues for years. I did a presentation about this in 2019, back in VoiceOver Atlanta, you know, what to look for in a contract and, you know, it's been building up to this. So now, now the results. So now, voice actors just need to stay on top of these things to figure out when they want to jump in, or if they want to jump in to see if there's a way to make money as a clone of the voice. So there are opportunities out there. Some voice actors are like, I want nothing to do with it. Other voice actors are embracing it. So it's really the same thing with actors. It's the same thing with on-camera. You know, on-camera, I just talked to a filmmaker the other day who's doing a complete AI film. He's doing it 100% AI. No humans. All voice and faces that he's going to just generate. So, and we can talk about the different styles of AI that you have to, you know, the different uses for AI that people should be aware of, because there's really three big uses. You can clone someone's voice direct, or clone someone's image direct and use that. You know, so James Earl Jones, a celebrity, you can clone him and put him right in Star Wars just like they did, or Billy Joel's new video, where they cloned, you know, they took an actor and they put Billy Joel's face on it and made him young again, right? So that's one use. Same thing with voice. You could clone your voice. There's machine learning, which is another usage, and voice actors are getting paid big bucks right now for machine learning. So all what that is is you're going to record a bunch of files and then they're using those files to train to make AI sound more natural. They put the breath sounds in, they put the puzzles in, you know, all those things, it's trying to emulate human speech. So that's voice actors can be hired to machine learn. Same thing with actors. They could be hired just to teach AI. The third is the most, the one that's the most disturbing to me, and the one that should be most disturbing to all. And that's generative AI. What generative AI is, that's where the computer creates an entire new something, entire new likeness and entire new voice. And what it does is it scours all the files on the internet and comes up with something new. So for instance, I want a picture of a dog, right? And I want AI to generate it. So what the computer does is it goes out and scours every single picture of every dog that they can find online and it comes back with a unique looking dog. So it does the same thing with voices and it does the same thing with likenesses. So that's the part, that's the concern that the community has and that we should have because how are we going to know if they use the little piece of our voice to come up with a new voice? So how do you protect yourself from that, Rob? Right. So there's technology now that's coming up. That's coming that's out there that is being created so you can trace, you can trace your voice and you can opt out of those machine learning and doing those jobs so that you're not, you're not at least being illegally using your voice. So, you know, you can't really prevent somebody from using F files that are out there. There's really no way to prevent that unless you can digitally watermark it, which that's the technology that's coming. So, you know, with every new technology, there's a counter technology that comes out. So there's a bunch of counter technologies that are being developed. So stay tuned. Davidi is one of the companies that are doing it. They're not really out yet. So, you know, just keep your eyes open for it because it's still, you know, and that's what the whole lawsuit is about that New York Times brought against ChatGPT and the artists brought against ChatGPT, they're trying to say generative AI should be a violation of copyright. But the courts are not, they're really not helping because they're saying prove it. Prove that your voice is part of the, prove that your article is part of that new article. Prove that your voice is part of that new voice. Prove that your face is part of that new likeness. So that that's the hard parts, the proof. So it's a little, the proof part's a little behind yet. So the technology will catch up, but right now it's a little behind. So. So in the interim, while this is developing and the software to detect is not quite out yet, is there a way that we can protect ourselves like for the contract or with a statement? Yes, with a contract. Well, first of all, the law is protecting us a little bit. There's a couple of things that happened. The copyright office has said that, and they, this has been their policy for a while, they're not going to copyright anything that there's any generative AI in it, they're not going to copyright it. So if you come up with an AI film, that's generative AI, they're not going to copyright it. So it's, they're not going to have any protection. So that's one kind of pushback. You'd have to prove there's, they're coming up with standards and you have to prove that a majority of the work is human comes out of the mind and not from the computer. So there's guidelines for that that they're still coming up with. And the second thing that happened is there that the FTC or the federal government just passed the anti-fraud law saying that, you know, any, any AI that's used to commit a scam, commit a fraud over phone lines or computer lines, it's, it's criminal. So, and the FTC enforces that. So, you know, like all those scams that you hear where, you know, they, they cloned a voice to your kid's voice and they call you on the phone and, and, you know, the same, give me, you know, I've been in an accident. I've been, you know, it sounds like your kid, I've been in an accident. Like I'm in jail, send me $50,000 or, you know, they're asking for a ransom kind of thing. You know, those are, those are the kind of scams that fall under that new act. Deep faking. So that, you know, I think the, the, the impetus behind the law was when there was that deep fake with Joe Biden during the Vermont campaign. And that's when all this happened, the law got passed. I mean, obviously they've been talking about it for a while, but it actually pushed it over the finish line, I think. So Rob, you're saying right now the best recourse is through the courts. I mean, how much time do you have in your day? You're not the only one that we can turn to it. I've got whole floor full of cases right here that, you know, for, you know, one of my cases, the company that had the company. So a lot of the cases work, start out from legitimate work. So one, but one of the cases, the company I paid the producer and the producer never got the talent to sign off. So the talent found our voice on a, on a database and then they paid to settle the case. But then they messed up and they put it back on the database. So now there was some pornographic stuff that was that a lot of pornographic stuff that was done using the, the clone voice. So now they're paying again. But these are issues, you know, that are happening all the time. There's, there are some of the, the pay-to-plays are, they're not, they're promoting things like they're signing off on contracts, letting machine learning happen and not letting the talent know and stuff like that. So you got to be aware, like I said, aware where your files are going, read the terms of service and then, you know, follow it, you know, make, make sure that you're asking questions, you know, if you, like, if you did an audition for machine learning, for instance, and then you end up not agreeing to terms, make sure that the files get destroyed and that are still used because some, some of the places are still, still using the files. So contracts. Talk about that new replica studios contract. SAG after recently negotiated with replica studios. This was announced at CES and, and Fran Drescher called it a great example of AI being done right. So what's good and bad about this contract? So the collective bargaining in the TV and film agreement and replica studios are there, it's similar. So the disturbing thing about both of those things is that AI was not banned. Like that you didn't didn't say no AI, producers can't use it. So what they did was they set up parameters. So the replica studios contract, that's non broadcast. So that that mirrors the parameters that are in the broadcast, film and TV collective bargaining agreement. And basically what it says is, if you do a job and you get paid for that job, if they want to clone your voice to for that job for that project, that's okay. You know, they set minimum pay that you need to get in that circumstance. If they want to use the files for a future job, what the contract says that you, they have to get something from you specifically in writing, giving permission and that they need to you need to negotiate pay. So they didn't really say what the pay it can be, except that has to be minimum for the day. So, you know, like scale basically is what they said. But you can you can negotiate anything that you want. Because they didn't really set a, you know, this is the price. Now they just said, this is the minimum that has to be paid. And then they also put in there that if there is a celebrity deceased person or celebrity, they can use those files that they have, you know, they can get the deceased person's voice print and make a or likeness and make a clone, but they have to get the the estates or the family's permission. Right. And those permissions will have to be specifically revoked. So they give the right to revoke them to the to the estates or to the the actor. So what's missing in that shell? You know, what's missing in that? What would you like to have seen written into that? Well, the other things that they so that's for the current projects, for future projects, they can use those files, they have to pay you. But as I mentioned before, what they allow is generative AI without payment. So those are the things that that's the real danger, because there's no way to track it. That's the problem. So generative AI, if they use your if you have to prove your that they're using your like this, so it has to be close on you then. Right. Or like this would have to be close enough to find it. Or your face to be able to prove that, you know, that that's not allowed. Like that specifically is says in the contract if there is any any resemblance of any of the 10 D questions we want to get to. Sure. One thing I want to bring up is in our last webinar with Janet Walton, the president, CEO of Dan helped me out here sound spot some sunspots. She said it was very useful for her to have AI in certain circumstances. For instance, her husband got dystonia and could no longer answer client needs. And so they cloned his voice to be able to voice spots that they really liked his voice for. And she likes the fact that they can drop in tags or one or two words in a spot that that needs a change in the copy. And the voice actor is off, you know, in the Bahamas on vacation. There are some of those instances popping up that seem to be useful for voice actors. Yes, there are. It's a new movement I've seen, actually, where the producers want that ability to, you know, fix a couple of words, add a tag, not generate new things. And that's that's where the line has to be drawn. If they want to generate a new commercial, generate a new tag, that that's where that actor should still be paid. And that's kind of what the SAG contract says. If they want to use what you did for to fix that in that particular production, it's OK. But you just have to have to be paid for the production. So as long as you're paid, they allow that usage for AI. So what I think studios should do, and I know that there are some that are talking about doing this is just get some kind of waiver or contracts upfront that they're going to say that if they're going to use your voice to clone and do simple things like that, like they used to do in the past, it's really no different than when they you would do like five takes and they would take part of take one, two, three, you know, they or they take a word and combine it. It's really no different. So they're doing the same kind of thing, but they're just it's easier to to clone the voice and come up with the whole phrase and then piece it together. So I think is if they come up with some kind of you should come up with some kind of waiver or contract that the actor signs that they know right up front that that is a possibility. And they will know that the files are going to get destroyed. The clone files are going to get destroyed after the production that they're not going to store them anywhere that if they're not going to use a future productions unless you get paid for it. So if all that's spelled out in agreement, I think that it'd be more accepting and for voice actors because it's the unknown factor. Of course, that's the scary part is, you know, they're using my voice for clone. And, you know, it could be used for for, you know, like I said, yeah, they could be used for porn, you know, something like that, you know, like the worst fear that I was telling you about what that happened to one of my clients. So. So Dan, how about some questions from our attendees? Yeah, let's if anybody has a question for Rob about AI, because we're always seem to be asking these questions. And, you know, again, if you go on Facebook, you're going to get a trillion different opinions about that. But if you have a question, put it in the chat. There's a chat box at the bottom of the Zoom page. We've all been on Zoom. It's always there. And if you have a question for Rob specifically about this particular topic, throw it in there. And so that would be the best way to get your questions answered right now. Actually, Dan, is there them coming in as panelists that they need to use the Q&A block and not chat? Oh, it's oh, it's in the Q&A bot, right? That's right. Carry on. So do we have questions yet? Yeah. Elizabeth asked one, following on with the best standing case strategy, she was able to copyright because she recorded the files herself. But if she had recorded those files in a studio, would she have been without recourse? That a recourse that would only have been likeness, violation of the use of likeness. And we also put that in as a count. But copyright is much stronger legally than violation of the use of your likeness because copyright is basically a strict liability. You just prove that they use your files without your permission. And then the statute gives an amount of damages that the court can award. And you don't have to prove that you were damaged. You just have to show that they have used your work without permission. And then the court decides on a sliding scale from like $500 per violation into $55,000 per violation where it falls. So if she had recorded in another studio, she wouldn't have had that option. It would have just been illegal use of likeness. Yeah. Lynn Darlington is an interesting question. Concern about pulling audio from our websites. Have we seen examples of that? Everybody's... Any audio that's out on the internet right now on YouTube, on your website, anywhere is being... Right as we sit here, it's being scanned millions of times. That's what Generative AI does. So yes, that's the technology. And so the only way you can avoid it is get the... When the counter technology comes out, trace it, or don't go on the internet. Those are your courses right now. All right. We've got one from Phil Colicotronis who asks, do you think nowadays some potential clients ask for auditions just to do voice harvesting for AI purposes? Or should we proceed there as we always have? Absolutely. I've seen cases of that. The auditions are... I think it gives you hints. You can see little red flags in the specs. But their intention is to use it for machine learning most of the time. They're not going to go public facing with it because then they get snagged. But if they're sued, but they're tarvest, they're using it for machine learning for the most of the... A lot of times. Or... I mean, Generative AI could be... You'll never know because it's just like that's the computer scanning it, but they can put it up for storage and then it will be part of Generative AI. But again, there's really... You don't know about that. So that just happens. The machine learning part, that's the part like you can get money. You should get paid for that. So if they're doing an audition and they're legitimate, they'll say that if we like these files, we'll use them for machine learning or model. And I see their companies that do that. But there are companies that are sneaky. And for some reason, I mean, I'm going to say this. People may say I'm a racist or something, but China, they come out of China. If you see something out of China, those are the little contracts I see and they're the ones that they do sneaky stuff. I don't know. I think it's just because they don't really have the same copyright laws that we have here or that you can't trace them or whatever. Get away with it. Get away with it. So if you see a company from China, immediately put up a red flag. Immediately, you have to put it up because it could end up in the wrong hands and then you're not going to be able to find them. Hopefully, if they're doing contracting with a legitimate company, then it's not the ideal situation, but it's easier to track them down. And if you need to bring a lawsuit, bring a lawsuit. If they're using one of the big companies. Because a lot of the big companies also contract. They all do. They contract with smaller contractors and some of them were out of China, like Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Google. They contract with studios all over the world, some of them are in China. So sometimes it's legit. But if you can find out the end company that they're working for, that's the ideal situation. Not just a blind, this company from China is taking my audition or my files and I don't know what's going to happen from there. Once again, if you have a question for Rob, because again, we've all been asking questions about this, which is why we've brought Rob in here to talk with us this morning. There is a Q&A bot at the bottom of the Zoom page and you can ask your questions right there because we want to hear from you because this is for you. So Rob, it's getting really, really bad out there as far as everybody thinking that they're going to get cloned. Are we seeing lots of examples of this? I mean, obviously you were saying that you've been getting a lot of stuff that your inbox is pretty full of people asking about this. How bad is it out there, especially in the voiceover world, because we know they're doing it in video and various other things. But what about specifically with voiceover? What exactly are you seeing? Well, I'm not seeing blatant cloning, which is a good thing. So I'm not seeing people a lot of deceit, some auditions maybe, but it's more for sneaky stuff, machine learning. It's not really cloning where they're using the voice on a database. But what I'm seeing a lot of is people that had done all the jobs five years ago where they were doing it, saying all these lines, all of a sudden they're on a database. Somewhere are a bunch of databases. I'm seeing that. I'm seeing the results now with people coming forward. Hey, why is my voice on here and here and here and here? Well, give me the contract that you signed when you did the job. Then it says right there, they're going to do it for cloning. They're going to do it for commercial uses. This is not the other thing. I'm seeing a lot of that. Then people are saying, can I get out of this? It's really difficult to get out of that. There may be a reason to get out of it, but you've got to have a strategy or a reason why you could break the contract. You said you had like four cases right there on your desk. Can you speak generically about the nature of those cases? Yes. So those cases, one of them I already told you about with the company that had mistakenly put the voice back up on a database and then it was used for pornographic stuff and a whole bunch of other stuff. And then a couple of the other ones deal with some of the beta plays that are doing these auditions, but then they're not coming to agreements, but they're just allowing the companies to use the files anyway and not paying the talent. So those are a couple of cases that I have. I've got a couple of cases where there's no contract and then there's some kind of cloning or some kind of machine learning that's being used. So if there's no contract, that's actually better for the talent because then you could do a cease and desist because you still own your files. You still own where your work's going to be used. You own that right. And you also own your likeness. So if you're not, well, you don't own your likeness, but you have the right to say where your likeness is used. So I don't want to confuse anybody. So if you don't sign that away, then you still have that right. So you can send a cease and desist if you see that your files are being used for machine learning purposes or your voice is on a database somewhere. If there was no contract at the beginning, that's going to help. So those are the kind of things that I've been seeing. If there's no contract, it'll help. If there's no contract, well, ironically enough, yes. If there's a contract, well, if there's a contract and it doesn't cover this, that will help too. But if the contract, most of the contracts that I'm seeing, they were setting this up for it right now. So they were saying, we're going to use this for artificial intelligence, we're going to clone your voice. We're going to use it for any purpose we want, in perpetuity, commercially. It could be a commercial. They spell it all out. And we're using it for Amazon or saying that's the kind of stuff it says in those contracts. So look for those words so I get it. So I don't know why people signed those contracts. And those are the contracts that when I did review, I would call them career suicide contracts. Like, why are you going to do this? You don't know what they're going to use this for. They're saying they can use this for anything in the world any time. So like right now you're getting 10 grand, but who knows what's going to happen three, four or five years from now. So why are you signing that contract? Like without that knowledge, it's really hard to agree to things. I think a lot of us are just put off by the verboseness of a legal contract and how long and how difficult it can be to read through them. Is there anything that we should be, you know, by paragraph or by words? Is there anything we should be looking for? Well, first of all, the longer and the more complex the contract is, can I have a look by a lawyer, pay a couple hundred bucks and have a lawyer look it over? Like that's our job. That's why we went to law school, right? So that should be the first clue. If you have a 14 page contract that was sent to you, I'm telling you right now, there's going to be something in there or more than one thing in there that I'm going to find. That's going to be not in your favor. So just get it looked over. If it's something simpler, a couple of pages, focus on the usage. Focus on how if you, you know, I mean, I'm sure many people have heard this already, in perpetuity. If you see that word, you have to break that down. It's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's something that if you can't, if you don't have to agree to it, don't because first of all, nothing lives in perpetuity, nothing, right? So why are you going to agree to in perpetuity? All that means is they haven't thought about the usage. That's what that means because so you want to have them think, how are you going to use this? Ask that question. What is your intention? Oh, we don't know. Client doesn't know. Well, let's figure it out. You can base your price on that. You can make lots of decisions based on that. So if you, in perpetuity is definitely a word, I'm not saying that don't sign any contract that says it's in perpetuity, but just you need to do a little more digging on it. Let's get to these questions, Dan. Yeah, we've got one relating to that. Venus Crute asks, Rob, do you feel that the rates they're offering to do the learning AI type is fair? It completely depends on the job. So I've seen them for $1,000. I've just negotiated one for $20,000. So it really just depends on who's hiring you and what they're using it for. Sometimes they'll say they're going to do machine learning and they're going to use your files to combine it with other voices to come up with another voice. Sometimes they'll say that in the contract and those generally pay more than if they're just using it for machine learning. So I don't see a standard anywhere there and it really is. If a big company's hiring you, generally they're going to pay more than if it's just a small fly-by-night little run couple of company pop that pops up that's just doing this to make a buck. There are those companies that just popped up to make a buck and they're not going to be around long. Yeah. KO voice asks on a question we were just talking about. If you say at the top of the audition, this audio is for audition purposes only, is that enough? Oh, you just gave them another line, they could sample. No, it doesn't mean anything. The computer doesn't just, they don't understand what, I mean, they kind of understand because that's AI, but it doesn't matter. They're just doing that to train the computer how to speak better. So no, that doesn't. There's no legal protection in that. Yeah, not at all. Okay. Rivka Rothstein asks, do you know anything about the privacy laws that different voice cloning services abide by? For instance, if she wanted to create her own AI voice through something like 11 Labs, what privacy do they ensure? That's a good question. There are some legitimate ones, 11 Labs, Murph, and they're going to spell out what they're going to use your voice for. So they're either going to put it up on the database or they're going to use it for machine learning. And they all have, if they're legit, they'll have a paragraph in their contract that says how they're going to protect. They're going to use reasonable industry standards to protect your voice from being hacked. They'll use that kind of language. And they'll also have language in there about when you, the fair ones will say that the contract's only valid for a year or two years or whatever term you want to pick. And it'll also say what happens at the end of that term, that they're going to give you the voice back. They're going to destroy the files. They're going to destroy them after a period of time, whatever it'll say what happens when the contract's over. So those are the things that you want to look for if you're considering cloning your voice from a legit company. All right. Follow up on that. Which of these voice cloning companies have the best reputations? Do you have any insight on that yet? Respeacher, Murph, 11 Labs. What's the other one? It starts with an R. I forget it, but there's another one. There's like four or five of them that I see. Revoicer, that's it. I see over and over again that have legit contracts. And most of those, I think all of them have actually consulted with me. So that's because a lot of them be saying voice actors going with the same changes to the contracts. And they're like, hey, you're using the same lawyer. And then they'll end up going over their contracts and kind of making it so that they go get built into all their contracts. So I've talked to many of those companies. All right. Liz Dineshnera says, if we decide to clone our voice, what basics should we look for in an agreement? The ones I just mentioned. Time period. You need to mute it. There we go. Okay. Time period is a big one. So you should, when you're signing a contract, you should be able to set a period of time. So a year, two years, some kind of term. It shouldn't be forever. You should be able to try it out, make sure it's working out for you, and then be able to terminate the contract if it's not. So that's a big one for me. Some kind of residual. If they're going to pay you for usage. So 10%, 20%, whatever you negotiate. So if they're selling the voice, you're getting a piece. Some kind of say over who gets to use the voice. So you're not running into a conflict situation. So being able to veto certain voice, certain jobs, that's another thing that you should try to put into the contracts, and most of them are okay with that. What happens to storage? They're going to make sure you don't want that to be hacked. You don't want it to be used for generative AI. In the general public, you want it behind some kind of firewall. That's usually in there. What else? What happens with the files when you leave? Does it belong to you? Do you get it back? Do you have to destroy it? What are they going to do when the contract's over? Those are big terms that you want covered in an agreement. All right. Joe Nangle. Hey, Joe, how's it going? So there's no legal verbiage we can add to our websites to protect the use of our demos for cloning purposes? Nope. Oh, well. No, you can put all those disclaimers up that you want, but they're not. If someone, first of all, they can't clone your voice. That's not legal. The only thing that can happen is that they can scan the files and then use as part of some other generative AI thing that you're not going to recognize. They can't just take your file off your website and clone your voice. That's illegal. That's what the fraud act just said, and it's illegal use of your likeness. Plus, it's probably your file. It's yours. You own it. It's probably a violation of copyright too. So you don't need that disclaimer because it's already illegal. All you're trying, when you put the disclaimer up, what are you going to do? Prevent someone from that wants to break the law from breaking the law? Right? I mean, if someone's going to break the law, they're going to break the law. It doesn't matter what it says on the screen. And they may be from China, so they probably can't read it anyway. So I'm joking around, but you know what I mean. If the disclaimer, if someone wants to break the law, it's like putting a no trespassing sign up on your property, looking at it that way. So if they're going to trespass on your property, they can't have the damn signs there, what doesn't make a difference? It may deter some people, but it's not binding. It's not going to do anything. All right. No, Catherine Gaffney asks, what's the best way to find out if your voice is out there and being used without permission? That's a great question. That's what I don't have an answer to. So most people rely on their colleagues telling them that, hey, I heard your voice here or there, just like if there's a commercial that's running that you did that was not supposed to be running anymore and someone sees it somewhere, and that's really the only way. But there is technology that's being developed, so that you'd be able to trace, you'd be able to talk, give a sample of your voice. And then that sample lives on a server, and then you can compare other anywhere else on the internet to that sample. So that's in development. How soon will it be coming out, do you think, Rob? I think pretty soon, actually, because I've seen the posts for people to start putting up their samples. Some betas. Yeah. So pretty soon. And that's good. All right. Elizabeth Oaks asks, so what phrases or provisions in contract should be red flags or lined out absolutely? Anything that says that they have the right to, well, first of all, they're going to own your files. So if they take ownership, if it says that it's a work for hire, it's they're on the copyright, you have to, it may be okay for them to have ownership, but you have to put a caveat or a rider and say that they're not going to use your voice for cloning purposes. So that's first ownership. In perpetuity, any usage that they want, we're going to use the files for anything that we want in the future, for it be it commercial, be it narration, they'll list a whole bunch of things. Those are, that's a red flag. If they're going to take the files and there's no way to terminate the contract. So if it says that they can use it for whatever they want, and there's no time limit on there, and there's no way for you to terminate, that's a red flag. And you'll generally see these all in like one paragraph, it'll all be together, it'll say we own these files, you have no say over future use forever in perpetuity. It's usually all one paragraph that you'll see it. And sometimes you can't cross those out. Sometimes, if you cross them out, they're going to say they're not going to do the job with you. So that's just something that you have to decide if it's a worthy risk to take on for the amount of money you're getting paid or if you're going to pass on the job. And that's something that some talent, some talent have to decide. Tell them that I advise to. That's not my call to theirs. So. Liz Danecher, follow up question. Do we own the clone version that somebody's made of us? That would be a contract. Yeah, so some companies allow you to own the voice and your license to get back to them for a period of time. Other companies want to take ownership and then their license to get, your license to get from them, basically, to use it. So it really just depends on every company's different. So that's a negotiation point, though. Yeah, absolutely. Karen Clark asks, should we groups like WoVo start conversations with pay-to-play platforms regarding protecting our auditions? You mentioned something like firewalls. Yes, I think that you absolutely should. And I wouldn't even dig deeper than that and make sure that they're looking out for the talent and not for themselves when they're giving permission for the clients to use files for AI purposes or when they're doing other things that they shouldn't be doing, posting auditions that they shouldn't be posting in the first place. So I would dig even deeper. I would want them to to sign some kind of code of best practices or something on AI jobs. Would you be willing to help us, WoVo, in coming up with some language that we could present to those casting services? Of course, of course. Yeah, I mean, there's stuff I see over and over again and stories I hear over and over again that abuses. So you're at the apex of this issue. What troubles you the most about where it's going? Not necessarily troubling me, but I can see the unknowing part is the part that troubles me the most because it could go where I don't think it's the human element's ever going to come out, go out of arts. I don't think that that's ever going to happen. But how much? From your lips to God's ears, yeah. Well, I don't think it will. I know I agree, but how much? People are going to try. Well, of course they are because producers, but I don't even think the producers want to take the full human element out. I think they're trying to make their jobs easier and I can see it. I'm a producer too. So I see it from that side. I don't want to call these people back into new ADR. I just let me clone your voice and do the lines. You know what I mean? Like I can match it up much easier on the computer. You know what I'm saying? So I don't think they want to take the human element out, but they just want to make their job easier. I think what the scary part is is how far, like how far, how much of it they're going to, they want to take out of it. You know what I mean? Like they want to take out 75% of it. They want to take out 50. They want to take out 90. Like how far is it going to go? That's the part that troubles me. And then the generative AI part, like that part has to get worked out by law. Because they can just generate all new characters, all new faces, all new voices. So it's a wild west until those laws come into force? Right. And I don't know how good the technology is right now to be able to create 100% human looking likenesses or voices through generative AI by combining. But that's what they're working on right now. Those are the jobs that are going out that the voice actors are doing right now to perfect that part of the process. You know, the ones that are paying 20 grand, that's what they're doing, the machine learning. They're perfecting that generative AI part of the process. So we're kind of at the end stage of this now. At the beginning stages, there were just, you know, there was the robotic type voices that they were taking samples for. Now they're getting to the, we're doing the generative AI part now, where we're going to combine a whole bunch of voices by computer, a whole bunch of images by computer and come up with something that looks perfectly human and you're not going to be able to tell. That's what they're working on now. I was reading an article about gamer voices and producers who do those electronic games. And they're saying AI comes in really handy to protect the voices of voice actors who have to grunt and scream and yell. They can clone those interjections and save the actor's voice. Yes, that's true. And again, it just depends on how far how far they're going to take it. So, you know, they're going to just get rid of the actor altogether or surely, you know, they just get, is that where they're going to stop? So that's that's the scary part. And that's what the gap is wrestling with. Right. And that's the scary part for all of us. Like, that's, that's what we're worried about. And there's really no way to answer that question, but I just don't, I personally be involved with this for, you know, since kind of the beginning, I personally don't think that the human element is going to be removed completely. Like I think creativity comes in. Yeah, the creativity that, you know, the connection, you know, until I don't know if a robot is going to be able to make a human connection. I don't know when that day will happen. It might, but like, I don't know when that will be. I don't know when that will be accepted by the, you know, us humans will accept connections with with robots and AI. So I think we're, you know, I think, I think it's a way long ways down the road. So, yeah. Phil Kolakotronis asks, even if a legit AI company, of course, what is a legit AI company, agreed to destroy your voice files after a defined period of time, wouldn't they still have access if they did a disaster recovery of their file system at some later time? Well, that's what the contracts for. So if they're agreeing to destroy the files and they don't, that's what happened. That was the case that I was telling you about. They decided they said they were going to destroy the voice, take it down. They paid for that. And then they made a mistake and they ended up going back up. And so now they're going to be paying triple what they paid the first time, because now we have a contract, we have an agreement and they breached it. So, you know, if that would actually be a good thing for you, if that happened, because just call me and we'll, you know, we'll, I can file the lawsuit right there. It's easy for a judge to read a contract. So they violated it. All righty. Ellen Richards. So should we copyright our demos that are posted online? No, you don't have to do that. Again, you're not going to know, you're not going to know if someone's using your little piece of your demo for generative AI. We don't know, because the computer just does it automatically and they do it in the background. They don't tell you, hey, I used your demo. Right. And then so it's only if someone was going to steal it and then use it to clone your voice. But you still, you can still go after them for that. Like they can't, that's still not legal under US law, pretty much the whole world law. You can't do that. So I don't think you need to copyright, copyright. It's the same challenge that artists and photographers have is that AI is going out and grabbing snippets of their product and incorporating it into some, some other amalgam. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, that's what you're saying. Yeah, that's the case. That's those are the cases that were filed. You know, the photographers, artists and New York times, but already filed lawsuits against the chat GPT. And that's what that's what the cause of action is that they're using snippets of my work in violating copyright. And like I said, courts are like, you know, it's still running through the courts, but the initial reaction of the judges were like, prove me, prove it to me. And yeah, I'll, you know, I'll be more sympathetic kind of thing. So well, let's look at it from, from another perspective, because laws come from legislation. Are we seeing any real action in Congress or the Senate or the federal government to really try to address this particular situation? Yes. Yes. That's what that's what I said. It was a big step forward with the fraud act, because they specifically addressed AI. Deep faking is one of the big parts of that case or that law, like they're, they're, they weren't like when Joe Biden got deep faked, like that. That's why it got over the finish line, pushed over the finish line. But now they're talking about more, they're working on more of the nuances. They've been working on it for a while. You know, FTC had a whole, they've been having hearings on this for a long time. So yes, they are actively working on it. They did pass a big part of the law, you know, and maybe a bit of fraudulent. So that's good. The artist part of it's gonna, that's a whole other, that's a whole other arm. Like that's, that's a very specialized like the laws that they're passing are for the general public now, like it's for everybody. You know what I mean? So like now when they're moving on to artists, that's, it's more of a specialized, we're specialized group. So we're just not as big as a priority. You know, that this is a huge issue that they're trying to tackle. So, you know, eventually we'll get there. The courts will help. You know, as more lawsuits are brought, you know, there'll be precedent that will be set. So that's going to help FTC now doing regulations. They'll be able to help. So, and I know that every state has something pending, like every single state, you can go online and there's a website where you can track I laws and what every state's doing. So I forget the name of the site, but yeah, that's because Facebook is probably not the place to get the definitive answers on these questions. I mean, it's good to hear the conversation, but never has been. Yeah. Yeah. Facebook is good for raising issues, but it's not good for resolving them. Right. That's how I look at it. Once again, if you've got a question for Rob, there is a Q&A bot at the bottom of the Zoom window there. And I'm sure this probably raises more questions than it answers. But figure if you go in there, you can ask that question. We'll get that right to Rob. Rivka Rothstein asks, get what kind of official copyright process, if any, should we think about going through if we were to clone our own voice? If you clone the voice and own it, then you just register with the copyright office, the U.S. Copyright Office. It's simply the form of the sound recording. Yeah, you can record what you're cloning are the sound recordings. So you're not recording the actual, you can't record the cloned voice because that's a result. The voice pieces everything together and then comes out with another file. So you have to, it's the data files that you have to copyright. So the actual recordings that you made that they use to create your cloned voice. So that's what you register. You just register them as sound recordings with the copyright office. And then if those files are being used and you, you know, like if it's a straight clone and you can recognize you, then that's a violation of copyright. If it's the part where it's still up in the air is if they're taking just a little snippets, little teeth pieces and they're combining it with all 10,000 other voices since they come up with a new voice. Like that's the part where the copyright office you can't really enforce a copyright because you can't prove. Right. It would be hard to determine anyway if they've created a homogenous voice of lots of different people. Elizabeth Oaks asks, are there any big court cases pending that we should watch? She was disappointed with the recent dismissal of some of the cases in the Sarah Silverman generative AI case. The cases that everyone are watching are the ones against chat GPT, the ones brought up in the New York Times, brought by the photographers and brought by the artists, those are the ones to keep your eye on. That are the ones that deal with generative AI. So we'll see what, you know, we're going to see where the courts come down on that. If they're going to, if they say that it's, you know, you only have to prove a little teeny piece and you're protected or if they're going to say that you need to have more proof that it's you or your work. And then the other thing is keep your eye on the copyright office because the copyright office, like I said, they're not filing any new copyrights for generative AI. So if, for instance, like my dog example earlier, if I want a picture of a dog, a unique dog and I go on chat GPT and it brings me this nice new combined dog, I don't want to copyright that. I've been using it in a children's book or something and I want to copyright it. The copyright office is going to say they're going to deny the copyright. That actually happened to my daughter. My daughter wrote a children's book. She hired an illustrator. The illustrator went on chat GPT and did all the illustrations and the copyright office denied her, denied her copyright. So again, this is brought to you by worldvoices.org. Feel free to join us if you're not a member and you get to find out all these great questions and answers because that's what we have. Again, this will be available on our website. If you go into, if you remember, we will post this in the worldvoices website and you'll be able to watch this again if you missed some of it or all of it. I guess to finish up Rob, again, why don't we review what are some of the things that people can do to make sure that they're protecting themselves? Read the fine print. So let me talk about this a little bit because I also, the thing that I've seen that is a little disturbing to me and actually a little humorous. People are focused so much on AI that they're missing all the other bad language and contracts that are screwed up over. So yes, protect yourself from AI. So put something in, make sure there's something in the contract that says that they're not going to use your files to clone your voice or for machine learning, right? Yes, put that in there. But don't forget about the rest of the contract. Like the rest of the contract may have bad things in there too that you want. So you can't just like, sure, AI is something to think about, but it's just added to the list of things that you needed to think about before, right? So that's, I'm seeing a very hyper focused concentration of people just reviewing contracts for AI stuff and they're forgetting all the other stuff that they have to look out for in contracts. So put, make sure that you have, make sure if the contract doesn't say already that if they're not going to use your files for cloning purposes or machine learning purposes, that you add that to the contract. So that's for this issue. But don't forget to review the whole contract as well. Alrighty. Well, thanks everybody for joining us this morning. This has been very enlightening. Rob, if they want some legal help, where do they go about this? So they could come to my website, which is robcigesq.com and I also just started up a membership program beginning of the year called the 30 on demand pay a monthly fee and you get one contract review per month, one draft per month, you get discounts on free copyrights, you get discounts on trademarks and LLCs. It's just for artists. So attorney on demand.com. Well, thanks for all your expertise, Rob. You're just a wealth of knowledge on this. And I guess to summarize, be proactive, be aware, read the fine print, stay with it, stay with the trends on this because they're developing fast. And read between the lines on auditions, read between the lines. If they're asking you to read a whole bunch of lines, you're going to read 10,000 words. Automatically thank you. That's for some kind of a job, like automatically think. So just read between the lines on what they're asking you. All right. Well, thanks everybody for joining us this morning. We appreciate your attendance. I'll also post this on our Facebook page. So if you missed it, you'll be able to see it there too as well. Rob, thanks again so much for joining us this morning and for continuing your legal, legal attack at all this stuff and letting us all know what's going on out there. My pleasure. Alrighty. Take care, everybody. We'll see you for our next webinar, which is we're not sure where it's going to be, but we got lots of topics. You'll be good though. Yeah. If you have a topic you'd like us to cover, please let us know at infoatworldvoices.org. We'll be glad to hear from you. Take care. Have a great week, everybody.