Generative AI has quickly expanded voice cloning’s capabilities, while also lowering barriers for using this technology. Questions about how voice cloning may impact our claim to ownership over our voices remain open, with legal standards lagging in protections for everyday people. This suggests there is a critical need for researchers to develop more frameworks to understand the complexities of voice and voice data as emerging sites where extraction and exploitation can occur. To this end, we explore voice cloning as a (...) tension point that bridges the competing goals of how voice functions in social versus commodity frameworks. We approach this topic through two main research questions: (1) What do different paradigmatic understandings of voice reveal about the power dynamics of voice cloning? (2) How is voice characterized in legal cases and discourse around voice cloning? Using lawsuits from the United States (US) as evidence, we investigate how different voice paradigms are materialized in court decisions and argumentation. We identify key cases where voice cloning is litigated as misappropriations of identity, demonstrating the incompatibility between the value of voice as an intrinsic property of the self and the value of voice as a product. Our framework provides theoretical footholds for describing the ontological complexities of voice cloning and suggests new paths forward for researchers and policymakers. (shrink)

Generative artificial intelligence (genAI) tests the limits of copyright law in the United States (US), requiring the US Copyright Office to reassess its longstanding position on computer-made works. The Copyright Office argues against awarding copyright to genAI works because it overextends the limits of Sweat of the Brow Doctrine, which rewards effort with ownership and protection because the result has value. Sweat of the Brow Doctrine is based on John Locke’s labor theory of property, which posits that mixing labor with (...) resources yields property and rights to said property; however, awarding copyright to genAI works would deplete the commons due to the incredibly high rate of productivity exhibited by genAI. This article reinterprets Locke’s labor theory of property and proposes an extension to the framework. This extended framework is then applied to a hypothetical scenario that shows how technology firms may use genAI, streaming media platforms, and automated copyright enforcement systems to flood websites with genAI content, enabling them to assert claims over similar human-authored works. The result of this scenario is expanded to the larger terrain of US copyright law, showing that such privatization of content would impoverish the public domain and exploit unpaid human creativity. Under the proposed extended theory, AI outputs belong in the public domain, demonstrating how the Copyright Office’s argument ultimately protects the commons. (shrink)

AI voice technologies transform the human voice, contorting embodied identity markers into commodified interactive interfaces. As users continuously engage with AI voices, iterative training cycles reinforce voiced simulations, enabling cloned voices to supersede the embodied voices from whom they originate. Building on commentary made by Leuenberger that links social development and voice, we examine how voice cloning objectifies the voice and produces a simulacra, blurring distinctions between the real and simulation. Through remediation, developers cultivate the illusion of a conversational presence (...) while masking media and social biases. (shrink)

AI voice technologies transform the human voice, contorting embodied identity markers into commodified interactive interfaces. As users continuously engage with AI voices, iterative training cycles reinforce voiced simulations, enabling cloned voices to supersede the embodied voices from whom they originate. Building on commentary made by Leuenberger that links social development and voice, we examine how voice cloning objectifies the voice and produces a simulacra, blurring distinctions between the real and simulation. Through remediation, developers cultivate the illusion of a conversational presence (...) while masking media and social biases. (shrink)