Actors hit AI voice startup LOVO with class action

Voice actor Paul Skye Lehrman was hanging out at a friend’s house in 2022 when a YouTube video came on about Russia’s war in Ukraine. The voice narrating the tank movements sounded eerily familiar: it was his own voice, speaking words he had never uttered.

A year later, Lehrman heard his voice again on a Hollywood strike podcast discussing generative AI risks. Around the same time, his wife, veteran voice actor Linnea Sage, discovered her own voice being sold on an AI platform under an alias.

On Thursday, the couple filed a proposed class action lawsuit in New York federal court against Berkeley-based AI startup LOVO, accusing the company of fraudulently harvesting voices from creators and celebrities to train and sell its synthetic voice tech.

It marks what is believed to be the first lawsuit against an AI company specifically targeting the use of likenesses and voices for model training.

From academic research to a commercial bestseller

According to the complaint, the alleged voice heist started on freelancing platform Fiverr.

Back in 2020, an anonymous client reached out to Lehrman offering $1,200 for voiceover samples. When Lehrman asked how the audio would be used, the buyer assured him it was purely for academic research and would not be used for anything else. That buyer was later identified as a LOVO employee.

Two years later, Lehrman found his voice narrating videos for Military News, a YouTube channel with over 336,000 subscribers. Inside LOVO's software, his voice had been rebranded as "Kyle Snow"—LOVO's default voice, advertised as one of its top five text-to-speech options.

Sage fell into a similar trap in 2019. She was paid to record radio ad test scripts under the written promise that the audio would only be consumed internally without requiring licensing. In 2023, she found her voice sold on LOVO as "Sally Coleman."

LOVO also offered thinly disguised clones of household names, pitching voices under labels like "Ariana Venti" and "Cocoon O’Brien." While LOVO tells users not to imitate celebrities commercially, it actively markets the ability to clone anyone.

Livelihoods cut in half

For working actors, this isn't just about IP theory; it is hitting their bank accounts.

Lehrman says his voiceover work has dropped roughly 50 percent since last year. Beyond lost income, he points to severe reputational damage: an AI puppet of his voice can now endorse political messages or brands he would never agree to work with.

SAG-AFTRA general counsel Jeffrey Bennett backed the suit, warning that companies must realize voice rights exist and cannot be stolen via open-ended contracts. Bennett reiterated the union’s push for a federal right of publicity law to make policing likeness theft across state lines possible.

Why it matters

For voice actors and digital creators, this lawsuit is an urgent heads-up: read every freelance micro-contract with extreme skepticism. Vague promises of academic research or internal testing are now common cover for building synthetic clones that could take your job.

We think LOVO’s alleged tactics highlight an unsustainable double standard in the voice AI boom. Marketing parody celebrity personas while tucking a clean hands disclaimer into the terms of service looks increasingly like bad-faith compliance designed to dodge liability.

Legally, this shifts the AI copyright fight from scraped public web data to personal biometric rights and the right of publicity. If the court sides with the actors, synthetic media startups that cut corners on sourcing will face crushing retroactive liability, giving properly licensed, ethically trained voice platforms a massive competitive edge.