Anti-AIPerson

Tara Strong

Voice Actress

One of animation’s most prolific voices — Bubbles, Timmy Turner, Raven, Harley Quinn, Twilight Sparkle. Turned down a paid AI voice-cloning deal and publicly told fellow actors to “say NO” to teaching AI their voices.

Actor Entertainment

Wikipedia

In her words

I’m honestly not sure how to combat all the AI companies stealing our voices, but this should be a concern for all people, not just actors. Also… if a company asks you to teach an AI how to say anything & everything in YOUR voice, say NO.

— X (Twitter), 2023

Biography

Tara Strong (born 1973 in Toronto) is among the most recorded voice actresses alive, with a résumé spanning generations of animation: Bubbles in The Powerpuff Girls, Timmy Turner in The Fairly OddParents, Raven in Teen Titans, Twilight Sparkle in My Little Pony, and Harley Quinn across DC games and series. Her instrument — the thing an entire career rests on — is exactly what voice-cloning AI is built to copy.

Turning down the clone

Strong has said a company approached her with a well-paid offer to license an AI version of her voice, and she refused — telling The Globe and Mail that accepting would mean “teaching an artificial intelligence to sound like me, and, essentially, talking myself out of a job,” while risking her cloned voice being hijacked to say things she never would. In February 2023, as voice-cloning platforms launched, she tweeted that AI companies “stealing our voices” should worry everyone, urging any actor asked to train a clone: “say NO.” When a casting marketplace announced its own cloning service she asked, bluntly, “WHY WOULD AN ACTOR DO THIS?” Her alarm mirrors the fight her union and groups like the National Association of Voice Actors have waged over AI voice replication.

Her line has not been perfectly rigid — she once drew fan backlash for praising a piece of AI-generated fan art, and she has mused that AI is “a runaway train, there’s no stopping it,” hoping only that “agreements are fair” and “voices aren’t stolen… anymore or as much.” The nuance is the point: her opposition is a working performer’s calculus about consent and compensation, not an aesthetic crusade.