Shanghai No. 1 Intermediate People's Court has closed the city's first case over an AI-made copy of a real person's voice. On 29 September it upheld a ruling that a platform operator infringed a voice actor's rights and owes her 50,000 yuan. Both sides had appealed.
The actor, named only as Ms Wang, earns fees dubbing on an app under her real name. In January 2025 a friend told her a company's user-recruitment campaign seemed to use her voice. She had the audio notarised and sued for 300,000 yuan. The company said its own AI made the clip but it could not trace the training material because the staff involved had left.
A forensic test found the clip close to her voice on 24 of 28 acoustic measures. The court held that training on someone's voice without consent to make a recognisable imitation is infringement, and that the company, which controls its data, had to prove where that data came from. It could not.
Damages should start from a normal licence fee, the judges said. Here the clip was a short prompt sound, not a selling point, and her public profile was modest, so 50,000 yuan stood. A judge's note calls recognisability, not the method of generation, the test for such cases.
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