Jennifer Hale

Jennifer Hale (b. 1972, Goose Bay, Labrador) is among the most prolific voice actors in video game history — the female Commander Shepard in Mass Effect, Samus in Metroid Prime, Bastila in Knights of the Old Republic and hundreds more roles across games and animation, including X-Men ’97.

The voice actors’ AI strike

When SAG-AFTRA called its video-game strike in July 2024 over AI voice replication, Hale became one of its most forceful public voices. Speaking to Gizmodo that September, she described performers as the canary in the coal mine and recounted a colleague whose recorded files were repurposed without consent or pay: the studios “absolutely cost that actor the ability to feed his family at that particular month.” Her demand was simple — “control of how our voices are used… we want to be able to consent and say, ‘Yes, you have my permission’ and we need to be paid, because this is our skill.”

Hale is not an AI absolutist. She frames the technology as a hammer that can build or break, and accepts AI in voice work under “transparency, consent and fair compensation” — the framework behind SAG-AFTRA’s interim agreements requiring informed consent and separate pay for digital voice replicas. She also lends her weight to the National Association of Voice Actors campaigns for federal protections like the NO FAKES Act, and refuses any AI use of her own voice without written consent.

On accountability she is pointed: “A company is not an entity that can make decisions. A company is a collection of humans” — her way of insisting that choices about cloning voices have authors, and that those authors can choose differently.