Geralt actor Doug Cockle would sue AI platforms carrying his voice

Doug Cockle, the voice of Geralt of Rivia in CD Projekt Red's The Witcher games, has said he would take legal action against the AI platforms hosting replications of his voice if he had the means to do so. Cockle made the comments to Polygon in remarks reported by IGN.

Cockle described the cloned voices as "the bugbear of my life at the moment" and said his main objection is not lost income but what a synthetic Geralt can be made to say. He told Polygon the technology could be used to make the character racist or misogynist, or to give him political views he never expressed, and that listeners might assume he had performed the lines himself. "There are people behind these voices," he said. "They're not just digital imprints."

A long-running objection

The position is not new. Cockle told IGN in 2023 that studios were already using AI to fill in background and NPC voices, and that he had turned down an approach from an AI company that wanted to add his Geralt performance to its database. He said then that voice actors in lead roles were routinely having their voices taken, and that policing every use was impractical.

He also argued to IGN that well-meaning uses still carry a cost, citing fan-made Witcher mods that reproduce his voice: each one, he said, removes paid work from him and from other performers. The greater risk, in his account, is deliberate misuse — fabricated statements and political content attributed to a recognisable character.

IGN notes that video game performers have raised the same objection repeatedly, including over AI-generated explicit Skyrim mods, and that Assassin's Creed Syndicate actress Victoria Atkin and Metal Gear Solid's Paul Eiding have both spoken against voice cloning. In July last year, roughly 2,500 SAG-AFTRA members voted to end a year-long strike against ten of the industry's largest companies; the union said the resulting contract secured consent and disclosure requirements for AI digital replicas. That agreement does not restrict what third-party AI platforms outside those contracts can generate.