Documentary uses AI to steal Stephen Fry’s voice from the Harry Potter audiobooks

Between Blackadder, A Bit of Fry and Laurie, V for Vendetta, The Hitchhikers’s Guide to the Galaxy and much more, actor Stephen Fry has crossed the threshold into living acting legend. One of his most popular endeavors in recent years is as the narrator of the Harry Potter audiobooks in the UK, which spawned a pretty famous meme comparing the books to the Harry Potter movies:

Reading all seven of the Harry Potter books aloud and recording it represents a fair amount of work, but modern AI systems can replicate someone’s voice very quickly, and then have them read whatever it is the person who replicated it wants. We can argue over how well the digital clone compares to the real thing, but the technology is there.

Speaking at the CogX Festival in London last week, Fry revealed that something like that had happened to him. He played a clip of an AI system mimicking his voice and using it to narrate a historical documentary. “I said not one word of that—it was a machine. Yes, it shocked me,” Fry said. “They used my reading of the seven volumes of the Harry Potter books, and from that dataset an AI of my voice was created and it made that new narration.”

Stephen Fry was “shocked” to hear an AI version of his voice narrating a documentary

The implications of this are troubling, as Fry had no difficulty imagining. “What you heard was not the result of a mash up, this is from a flexible artificial voice, where the words are modulated to fit the meaning of each sentence,” he said. “It could therefore have me read anything from a call to storm parliament to hard porn, all without my knowledge and without my permission. And this, what you just heard, was done without my knowledge. So I heard about this, I sent it to my agents on both sides of the Atlantic, and they went ballistic—they had no idea such a thing was possible.”

We don’t know what this documentary is, possibly because Fry’s agents got on the case and crushed it. But at this point there’s basically nothing stopping people from using AI to clone someone’s voice and then using it for whatever they feel like doing. “You ain’t seen nothing yet,” Fry warned. “This is audio. It won’t be long until full deepfake videos are just as convincing.”

The jury is out on that one, but AI technology will certainly be advancing in the coming years. Right now, both actors and writers in Hollywood are on strike, in part because they want guardrails put on the ability of studios to use AI to replace them.

How those strikes resolve could set important precedents when it comes to this technology. They could give legislators guidance on how to regulate it, so everyone is watching the strikes with great interest. We’re at an inflection point here; we can embrace AI fully and just see what that future looks like, consequences be damned, or we can decide to go slow and evaluate new developments as they come up.

“One thing we can all agree on: it’s a f***ing weird time to be alive,” Fry finished.

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h/t Deadline