Even the heroines of novels see it: dubbing voices in films or series turns out to be a doomed profession. In Surf dayby Maylis de Kerangal (Gallimard, 2024), the heroine, resigned, announces to her family that she « [va] having to change jobs”. “I advise you to quickly sell your voice to an AI [intelligence artificielle] which could therefore generate others, more complex, more interesting”, has just attacked his employer in London. A fiction hardly far from reality. Because, with the advent of AI, voices will duplicate themselves infinitely and free themselves from bodies. Dubbing actors, the real ones, are well aware of this.
For them, the threat comes first from the United States, where actors and screenwriters have reached an agreement with American studios to end the last massive strike in Hollywood, in the fall of 2023. If the former have obtained winning their case for salary increases and financial compensation in the event of use of their image or their works by a generative AI, nothing has been concluded in the field of voice, which remains a blind spot. No financial compensation has been provided if this is doubled by a robot. The studios had a good time explaining to the actors that if, until now, they had never received a single cent thanks to dubbing, they would, on the other hand, benefit from a wider international notoriety if they were dubbed by their own voice in languages around the world.
Through a domino effect, this agreement hits French dubbing actors hard, who translate 90% of English into French. For Stephan Kalb, actor, audiovisual producer and founding member of the Les Voix association, “the technology is not yet ready, but it’s a matter of months, it will definitely work in a year”. In his eyes, it is also a cultural problem: that of French soft power. “We need to know whether in the future we want robots or humans” to properly perpetuate the language, he continues. Do not alter it, do not instill approximate French in children.
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