AIAAIC - Voiceverse NFT voice theft

Voiceverse NFT caught plagiarising voice lines from AI service 15.ai

Occurred: January 2022
Page published: January 2022 | Page updated: October 2025

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Voice NFT start-up Voiceverse plagiarised voice lines generated by a third-party AI service without acknowledgment or permission and sold the altered voice clips as NFTs, prompting a backlash against the company.

What happened

Voiceverse used voice lines created by 15.ai, a free non-commercial AI text-to-speech service, to market their own NFT voice products. The company altered the pitch of the voices to make them unrecognisable and sold them as original AI-generated voices on their platform.

15.ai's terms explicitly prohibit commercial use and require attribution.

The misappropriation triggered a heated public backlash, damaging trust in Voiceverse and the then emerging voice NFT space, and raising ethical concerns about AI voice synthesis, plagiarism, and the impact of such practices on voice actors and creators.

The 15.ai creator discovered the ruse through log files, and publicly exposed Voiceverse's actions.

Why it happened

Voiceverse claimed its marketing team hastily used 15.ai's voices without proper credit, as they rushed to demo their technology before it was ready.

The controversy was exacerbated by Voiceverse's initial hostile promotion and delayed admission of wrongdoing.

The incident was also tied to broader skepticism about NFT ventures exploiting creators' work without respect for intellectual property.

The developer of 15.ai publicly expressed extreme frustration with what they called misrepresentation and commercial exploitation in the vocal synthesis field.