Update 9/23 07:34 PT
Elecrow has responded to our request for comment with this statement
"On the morning of September 23, our company received an email from Jeff messaged that our ESP series tutorial videos may infringed upon his voice cloning rights, along with the video content. First of all, We recognize that this is a very basic and serious issue, and have promptly launched an internal investigation. Through the investigation, we found out that the video was made by one of our employees." The employee was "not fully familiarized with our company culture or received enough training." The statement goes on to say that the employee did not consider the "copyright issue" and that the infringing videos were released without management approval.
Elecrow's CEO has responded directly to Geerling and offered compensation to Geerling for the issue. We have reached out to Jeff Geerling for his comment.
Elecrow has removed the videos, citing that it is a "direct response to the error in our work". Internal training with the marketing team will see an improved content review mechanism that will prevent future infringements.
Original Article
Renowned Raspberry Pi expert and YouTuber Jeff Geerling joins Scarlett Johansson on the list of people impersonated by AI. In his latest video, Geerling compares his own voice to an AI-generated voice used in a series of Elecrow tutorial videos.
In Geerling's video, entitled "They stole my voice with AI", Geerling talks about how he thinks his voice was cloned. There is no evidence, but Geerling believes that the AI voice was trained on his videos and then used to narrate a series of Elecrow tutorials for the Raspberry Pi Pico and the ESP32. Topics that Geerling also covers in his videos. Geerling has covered Elecrow's products on his channel, reviewing the CrowPi 2, and he states that he "didn't have a bad relationship with them [Elecrow] in the past."
As of checking on September 23, 2024, all of the Elecrow videos that Geerling links to, have been made unavailable, possibly due to the highlighted situation. Looking back through Elecrow's videos, we cannot find any videos that sound like Geerling. But, many AI-generated voiceovers are being used in its product videos.
Earlier this year, an "eerily similar" clone of Scarlett Johansson's voice was used as the basis of OpenAI's "Sky" AI voice. According to an NBC report, Johansson was approached by Sam Altman in September 2023, as he sought to hire her to voice the GPT-4o chatbot. Johansson ultimately declined but was then alerted to "Sky" and its vocal similarities. Geerling comments that because of this, he thought that companies were being "very careful with the AI voices that they use". According to Geerling, he is unaware of any legal precedent for the unauthorized use of AI voice cloning. There is precedent for "not using someone's voice in commercial work without their consent", covered under the US Supreme Court case between Bette Midler and Ford Motor Company. Middler versus Ford covers the user of a Bette Midler impersonator used in a series of Ford commercials in the 1980s.
Geerling was keen for Elecrow to take down the videos, and it seems with the video series now being unavailable that they have complied. We've reached out to Elecrow, offering a right to reply. We will update this story with a response.
