‘Peppa Pig’ Child Actors Being Asked to Sign Voices Over to AI

It’s a television revelation dirtier than a pigsty: The child actors who lend their voices to the hit international animated children’s TV series Peppa Pig are reportedly being asked to sign over the rights to their voiceover work to AI for “commercial assets within their franchise.”

Deadline reports that Hasbro, which acquired the Peppa Pig brand from Entertainment One in 2019, now requires the show’s young stars to sign over their voices to AI per the TV franchise’s latest contract terms for its talent.

Technically, the clause could give Hasbro the power to clone its child actors’ voices to be recreated via AI technology, to be used in perpetuity for promotional and other purposes.

Organized by the Agents of Young Performers Association (AYPA), almost 1,000 industry professionals have signed an open letter pushing back against controversial, newly instated AI terms on an “international children’s franchise,” revealed by Deadline’s sources to be the series about the playful little pig with the British accent.

According to the AYPA, such AI clauses are typically presented to child professionals and their parents or guardians as “take it or leave it.”

“Where the performer is a child, consent must be treated with the greatest of care. Children cannot provide fully informed legal consent and a parent or guardian’s approval should never be used as a blanket license to capture, clone, train, or reuse a child’s voice indefinitely,” the letter reads, per Deadline.

“Any agreement involving a child’s voice should be fully exempt from all AI usage. No child should have their future professional identity shaped by an AI model created before they were old enough to understand its consequences,” it continues.

In a statement to Variety, Hasbro confirmed it was aware of the letter and said that the “protection of child performers is core to who Hasbro is” and “part of our DNA.”

Unfortunately, AI clauses in voiceover work are becoming increasingly common across the entertainment industry as powerful companies such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video lean into AI.

Such contracts are being used to dictate whether or not clients can clone actor’s voices, use their audio to train AI learning models, or even use recordings to generate artificial audio using actors’ vocal likenesses indefinitely.

Some contracts even include language that can allow production companies to sell or license a voice actor’s data to third parties without paying royalties or obtaining consent.

Potential protections against AI voiceover clauses include prohibition on learning model training, usage term limits for agreed-upon AI jobs, and explicit project limits.