Konami’s AI Narration Sparks Outrage Over Uncredited Voice Actress
|
|
Key points
- Konami performed a trial run of AI-generated voice acting for Yu-Gi-Oh! World Championship 2025.
- Voice actress and singer Hibiku Yamamura claims her voice was used without consent, but did not explicitly name Konami.
- The videos online have since been removed, but suspicions of her voice usage had already spread online.
Konami held an AI live commentary project for Master Duel at Yu-Gi-Oh! World Championship 2025, an international tournament for various forms of Yu-Gi-Oh. The AI commentary allegedly uses the voice of Hibiku Yamamura, a voice actress and singer.
Suspicions of her voice usage spread online, prompting Konami to remove the suspected videos promptly. Yamamura shared her thoughts regarding the unauthorized use of her voice in AI-generated content, but did not explicitly name Konami.
“No matter how I listen, it’s unmistakably my voice. But it’s clearly not me; my voice is reading text I’ve never read before. Somewhere out there, without my knowledge, countless people who don’t know this are listening to that narration,” she shared on social media. The quote has been translated from the original Japanese text.
Although the exact correlation and allegations have neither been confirmed nor denied, Konami did make a public statement regarding the AI live-action trial. The open-source speech synthesis model, called “Anneli,” draws from sources that are supposedly commercially available. Konami stated that it used the speech synthesis model provided by Azure OpenAI Services.
The original creator of Anneli, the speech synthesis model used by Konami during the Yu-Gi-Oh! World Championship 2025, made a statement confirming that they did not have any permission from the voice actors or the sources they used. The learning model reportedly used the voices from Tsuki ni Yorisou Otome, a visual novel, without permission from Navel, the game maker, or the voice actors, which includes Hibiki Yamamura.
The speech synthesis models used during Yu-Gi-Oh! World Championship 2025 DAY1 are being investigated, and the videos using the speech synthesis model will no longer be published. The technology has not been incorporated directly into Master Duel yet. Yu-Gi-Oh! Master Duel World Championship qualifiers livestream occurred on Aug. 29; the AI live commentary project trial run was performed with 10 languages.
