When Julia Roberts gets in Richard Gere\u2019s Lotus Esprit as it stutters along Hollywood Boulevard in the 1990 film Pretty Woman, Germans heard Daniela Hoffmann, not Roberts, exclaim: \u201cMan, this baby must corner like it\u2019s on rails!\u201d In Spain, Merc\u00e8 Montal\u00e0 voiced the line, while French audiences heard it from C\u00e9line Monsarrat. In the years that followed, Hollywood\u2019s sweetheart would sound different in cinemas around the world but to native audiences she would sound the same.<\/p>\n
The voice actors would gain some notoriety in their home countries, but today, their jobs are being threatened by artificial intelligence. The use of AI was a major point of dispute during the Hollywood actors\u2019 strike in 2023, when both writers and actors expressed concern that it could undermine their roles, and fought for federal legislation to protect their work. Not long after, more than 20 voice acting guilds, associations and unions formed the United Voice Artists coalition to campaign under the slogan \u201cDon\u2019t steal our voices\u201d. In Germany, home to \u201cthe Oscars of dubbing<\/a>\u201d, artists warned that their jobs were at risk with the rise of films dubbed with AI trained using their voices, without their consent.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s war for us,\u201d says Patrick Kuban, a voice actor and organiser with the dubbing union Voix Off, who along with the French Union of Performing Artists started the campaign #TouchePasMaVF (\u201cdon\u2019t touch my French version\u201d). They want to see dubbing added to France\u2019s l\u2019exception culturelle, a government policy that defines cultural goods as part of national identity and needing special protection from the state.<\/p>\n Dubbing isn\u2019t just a case of translating a film into native languages, explains Kuban, it\u2019s adapted \u201cto the French humour, to include references, culture and emotion\u201d. As a result, AI<\/a> could put an estimated 12,500 jobs at risk in France: including writers, translators, sound engineers, as well as the voice actors themselves, according to a study by the Audiens Group in 2023.<\/p>\n \u2018I don\u2019t want my voice to be used to say whatever someone wants\u2019 \u2026 a voiceover artist in a recording studio. Photograph: Edward Olive\/Getty Images<\/p>\n \u201cHumans are able to bring to [these roles]: experience, trauma and emotion, context and background and relationships,\u201d adds Tim Friedlander, a US-based voice actor, studio owner, musician, and president of the National Association of Voice Actors. \u201cAll of the things that we as humans connect with. You can have a voice that sounds angry, but if it doesn\u2019t feel angry, you\u2019re going to have a disconnect in there.\u201d<\/p>\n Since the introduction of sound cinema in the late 1920s and 1930s, dubbing has grown to be an industry worth more than $4.04bn (\u00a32.96bn) globally. It was first adopted in Europe by authoritarian leaders, who wanted to remove negative references to their governments and promote their languages. Mussolini banned foreign languages in movies entirely, a policy that catalysed a preference for dubbed rather than subtitled films in the country. Today, 61% of German viewers and 54% of French ones also opt for dubbed movies, while Disney dubs their productions into more than 46 languages. But with the development of AI, who profits from dubbing could soon change.<\/p>\n