A lifelong fan of “Tomb Raider,” French gamer Romain Bos was on tenterhooks when an update of the popular video game went online in August.
But his excitement quickly turned to anger.
The gamer’s ears — and those of other “Tomb Raider” fans — picked up something amiss with the French-language voice of Lara Croft, the game’s protagonist.
It sounded robotic, lifeless even — shorn of the warmth, grace, and believability that French voice actor Françoise Cadol has given to Croft since she started playing the character in 1996.
Gamers and Cadol herself came to the same conclusion: A machine had cloned her voice and replaced her.
“It’s pathetic,” says Cadol, who straight away called her lawyer. “My voice belongs to me. You have no right to do that.”
“It was absolutely scandalous,” says Bos. “It was artificial intelligence.”
AI encroaching ‘everywhere’
Aspyr, the game developer based in Austin, Texas, didn’t respond to e-mailed questions from The Associated Press. But it acknowledged in a post last week on its website that what it described as “unauthorized AI generated content” had been incorporated into its Aug. 14 update of “Tomb Raider IV–VI Remastered” that angered fans.
“We’ve addressed this issue by removing all AI voiceover content,” Aspyr’s post said. “We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.”
Still, the affair has triggered alarms in the voiceover community, with campaigners saying it’s a sobering example of the dangers that AI poses to human workers and their jobs.
“If we can replace actors, we’ll be able to replace accountants, and a whole range of other professions that could also be automated,” says Patrick Kuban, a French-language voice actor who is also a co-president of United Voice Artists, an international federation of voiceover artists.
“So we need to ask ourselves the right questions: How far should we go, and how do we regulate these machines?”
Hollywood has seen similar concerns, with video game performers striking for 11 months for a new contract this year that included AI guardrails.
“This is happening pretty much everywhere. We’re getting alerts from all over the world — from Brazil to Taiwan,” Kuban said in an Associated Press interview.
“Actors’ voices are being captured, either to create voice clones — not perfect ones — but for illicit use on social media by individuals, since there are now many apps for making audio deepfakes,” Kuban said.
“These voices are also being used by content producers who aren’t necessarily in the same country,” he said. “So it’s very difficult for actors to reclaim control over their voices, to block these uses.”
Cadol’s ‘Voice Guardians’
Cadol says that within minutes of the release of the “Tomb Raider” update, her phone began erupting with messages, emails and social media notifications from upset fans.
“I took a look and I saw all this emotion — anger, sadness, confusion. And that’s how I found out that my voice had been cloned,” she said in an AP interview.
Cadol says 12 years of recording French-language voiceovers for Lara Croft — from 1996 to 2008 — built an intimate bond with her fans. She calls them the “guardians” of her work.
Once the initial shock subsided, she resolved to fight back. Her Paris lawyer, Jonathan Elkaim, is seeking an apology from Aspyr and financial redress.
Grammar error
In the update, new chunks of voiceover appear to have been added to genuine recordings that Cadol says she made years ago.
Most notably, fans picked up on one particularly awkward segment. In it, a voice instructs players how to use their game controllers to make Lara Croft climb onto an obstacle, intoning in French: “Place toi devant et appuyez sur avancer” — Stand in front and press ‘advance.’
Not only does it sound clunky but it also rings as grammatically incorrect to French speakers — mixing up the polite and less polite forms of language that they use, depending on who they’re addressing.
Gamers were up in arms. Bos posted a video on his YouTube channel that same evening, lamenting: “It’s half Françoise Cadol, half AI. It’s horrible ! Why have they done that?”
“I was really disgusted,” the 34-year-old said in an AP interview. “I grew up with Françoise Cadol’s voice. I’ve been a ‘Tomb Raider’ fan since I was young kid.”
“Lara Croft is a bit — how should I say — a bit sarcastic at times in some of her lines. And I think Françoise played that very, very well,” he said.
“That’s exactly why now is the time to set boundaries,” he added. “It’s so that future generations also have the chance to experience talented actors.”
—John Leicester and Nicolas Garriga, Associated Press