AI Is Stealing Our Artists: When Technology Becomes Organized Plunder

Imagine that one morning, your voice—the one you’ve honed for twenty years, the one that has brought hundreds of characters to life—is cloned, sold, and used endlessly, without your consent and without earning you a single cent. This isn’t science fiction. It’s what’s happening in France right now, in 2026.

VoiceDub, an American artificial intelligence platform specializing in voice cloning, was forced to remove several voices from its catalog after receiving cease-and-desist letters from French voice actors—among them, voices that have become part of the cultural heritage, voices that gave a French soul to Harrison Ford, Angelina Jolie, and Buzz Lightyear. Their voices: copied, exploited, and commercialized. Without them. Slash culture

This is just the tip of a colossal iceberg. AI now generates 60,000 new songs per day on streaming platforms. Sixty thousand. Per day. Songs without authors, without soul, without history—but which capture revenue, steal streams, and drown real artists in an ocean of algorithmic noise. Franceinfo

In February 2025, two days before the Paris AI Summit, 34,000 artists signed an open letter to warn of the dangers. They are demanding the right to object to their works being used to train AI, or to be compensated if they consent. Their plea has gone largely unanswered by policymakers. Monaco Heb