“We must mobilize people now and make a cultural exception”: Jean-Pierre Michael, French voice of Brad Pitt, is worried about the future of his profession in the face of advances in artificial intelligence. Guest of BFMTV this Friday, May 24, together with Patrick Kuban, president of the professional association Les Voix, he explains why the film dubbers challenged Rachida Dati in a video that went viral spread at the beginning of the week.
United within a collective called Touche pas à ma VF, the voice actors of Marge Simpson, Morgan Freeman and Samuel L. Jackson published this sticker on Tuesday, May 21, to demand that the Minister of Culture take measures to protect their activity.
“The doubling means that 15,000 jobs would be threatened by these artificial intelligence tools,” explained Patrick Kuban this Friday. “We are making a real appeal to the Minister of Culture, Rachida Dati, to safeguard this French cultural heritage.”
“We can create any voice”
“What will happen is that from my voice and that of all my colleagues (…) we will be able to create any voice, any style,” warns Jean-Pierre Michael. “We can even take the voice of the original actor and transform it into French,” making the use of a voice actor obsolete.
“It already started with soap operas (American daytime soap operas, like The fires of love) or in ambient sounds,” he assures, before qualifying: “Fortunately, at the moment, the quality is not sufficient and is generally rejected. But this poses a problem and since progress is exponential, tomorrow it will happen to everyone!”
A required law
And warn: “Ethically, do we want emotions created by a machine that imitates humanity, or do we want to give our children, when they watch cartoons and movies, human emotions?
Patrick Kuban concludes: “What we ask of the Minister of Culture is a law of cultural exception that guarantees that tomorrow, when we see a film in the cinema or on television, we will have real actors who dub.”
To accompany their video released earlier this week, the artists shared a petition addressed to the minister, already signed by nearly 107,000 people. Coincidentally, this shocking video that went viral was published while actress Scarlett Johansson accuses the company OpenAI of having copied his voice to make one of ChatGPT.
Source: BFM TV
