Genshin Impact dev wins over $100K after AI company cloned character voices

The Pudong New Area People's Court in Shanghai ruled on September 10 that an undisclosed AI voice provider must pay Genshin Impact developer miHoYo 750,000 Chinese Yuan (roughly $112,000) for cloning 63 of the game's character voices and reselling them as voice packs without authorization. The court found the cloned voices showed "nearly identical characteristics" to the originals via voiceprint analysis, held that Genshin's character designs are copyright-protected works and its voices function as a trademark, and ordered the company to cease operations immediately. The defendant had admitted training its model on a stolen minute of character audio and argued rights belonged to the actors rather than miHoYo.

A Shanghai court just ordered an AI company to pay up for borrowing the voices of 63 Genshin Impact https://www.dexerto.com/genshin-impact/ characters without asking first. AI voice cloning has been creeping into every corner of entertainment lately. Just weeks ago, Evangelion star Megumi Ogata called AI voice cloning “heartbreaking” https://www.dexerto.com/anime/evangelion-star-calls-for-japanese-government-help-over-heartbreaking-ai-voice-cloning-3394195/ and begged Japan for regulation. Now China’s courts have drawn their own line, and this one comes with a hefty receipt. After all, Genshin Impact has hundreds of fully voiced characters and millions of players who could pick each one out in a lineup, so when an outside company started siphoning 63 of those voices for profit, developer miHoYo noticed. AI company fined $112,000 for illegally cloning 63 Genshin Impact character voices On September 10, The Pudong New Area People’s Court in Shanghai ruled that an undisclosed AI voice provider must pay miHoYo 750,000 Chinese Yuan, roughly $112,000, for reproducing 63 Genshin Impact characters’ voices and reselling them as voice packs, according to Chinese outlet The Paper. https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail forward 34043593 The service let users swap their voice for a character’s mid-conversation in real time, and miHoYo says the company also ripped character art and animations for its ads, slapped modified Genshin faces onto avatars, and let shoppers preview stolen dialogue before checkout. The AI provider argued its models merely reflected whatever a user fed into them, and that any rights belonged to the actors, not miHoYo. But judges weren’t swayed after voiceprint analysis found the cloned voices exhibited “nearly identical characteristics” to the originals, and the defendant admitted training its model on a stolen minute of character audio. In the end, the court ruled Genshin’s character designs counted as copyright-protected works, and that its distinctive voices functioned as a trademark built over years of operation, tipping the case into unfair competition too. And so, the company was ordered to cease immediately and pay up. It’s a rare win for developers against the tide of AI mimicry, following Apex Legends’ entire French voice cast refusing new contracts pushing them to endorse AI https://www.dexerto.com/apex-legends/apex-legends-voice-actors-refuse-to-work-after-being-forced-to-endorse-ai-3147226/ last year.