So actor Doug Cockle, who’s been the smoky voice of Geralt in The Witcher series since the first game in 2007, hates generative AI – join the club, right? Totally, but Cockle is in a unique position when it comes to feuding with the technology notorious for stealing from artists, taking over jobs, and dissolving your neuroplasticity. Generative AI steals audio of his voice as if it’s the Sea Witch to his Little Mermaid, and it is hard for a hate to get more personal than that.
That’s why, “if I had the power, the money, and the influence,” Cockle tells Polygon in a new interview, “I would sue every single AI platform out there with my voice on it. I would sue them into the ground.”
Many popular AI chatbot platforms like Character.AI feature Geralt as a companion people can do things like roleplay with, or talk to about their impending divorce. Some like Talkie even feature generated audio that pulls from Cockle’s distinct rasp, so that you can hear the “real” Geralt tell you how much he loves your tawny hair and amber eyes, and stuff like that.
Actually, I just watched a YouTube documentary that chronicles a married mother’s romance with her Geralt companion bot, who grumbles flirty commands in Cockle’s scratchy voice.
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I’m sure hearing yourself saying filthy things to a stranger isn’t great, but Cockle seems truly disturbed by the more evil way people use AI to strip a real person’s sense of self: using AI text-to-speech to create convincing fakes of anything they want. In Cockle’s experience, they usually want something disgusting.
He says he wouldn’t hypothetically sue AI companies for “money or anything else,” but, instead, primarily out of exasperation with being violated in this way.
“They can make Geralt say horrible things,” Cockle says. “They could make Geralt a racist. They could make him a misogynist. They could make him have political views that are absolutely horrific.”
“I’m being a little bit passionate about this,” he continues, “but it is the bugbear of my life at the moment.”
I’m not surprised – us normal people have increasing reasons to worry about generative AI ruining our lives, whether through deepfakes, layoffs, or one of the other billion ways the tech seeks to harvest our data, then punish us with it. I imagine for someone like Cockle, whose voice is featured in hundreds of hours of publicly accessible audio through The Witcher games – basically one ginormous database – the threat of AI is much more a reality.
So he reminds those who use AI and create their own made-up realities that, actually, “There are people behind these voices – they’re not just digital imprints.” Someone needs to tell them – using their real, human voice.