During a recent episode of his Mostly Wise podcast, Chris Williamson told his guests that Eleven Labs, one of the leading AI text-to-speech companies, appears to have trained its default British voice on recordings of him.
“The thing that I’m going through at the moment, which is wild, is ElevenLabs, their go-to British voice,” Williamson said. “Their go-to AI British voice is me.”
He expressed no doubt about the source of the voice model. “A thousand percent been trained on me,” he said. “It’s awesome until people use it as voice-overs for products that I don’t endorse.”
Williamson said his team had already contacted the company directly before the episode was recorded. “We emailed them. We emailed ElevenLabs a year ago and said, ‘Hey, like this is f**king Chris. Like you’ve used Chris’s voice,'” he recalled.
He said Eleven Labs responded with a similarity score, telling his team that the voice had “come back at .3 similarity and it needs to be above .65 in order to” qualify as a confirmed match. He was not satisfied with that explanation.
During the episode, Williamson and his guests watched a video essay about the disappearance of flight MH370, narrated by what ElevenLabs calls ‘Archer,’ its British voice model. His guests told him it sounded exactly like him.
“People think that this is my secret second channel where I do video essays,” he said. “It’s not my secret second channel on Aviation Files. Like this video’s good. I watched it. I really enjoyed it.”
Williamson said the voice had also begun appearing in advertising. “There’s another one where people are using it for ads,” he said. “So they’re putting my voice as the voice over for ads.”
After guest Huberman offered to connect him with legal contacts who specialize in these cases, Williamson accepted. As of the publication, the situation remained unresolved.
