A court in Shanghai has ordered an AI voice company to pay Genshin Impact developer miHoYo 750,000 yuan, roughly $112,000, for reproducing the voices of 63 of the game's characters and reselling them as voice packs, Dexerto reported, citing the Chinese outlet The Paper.
The Pudong New Area People's Court issued the ruling on September 10. The defendant, an AI voice provider whose name was not disclosed, was ordered to stop the conduct immediately in addition to paying damages.
According to the report, the service let users swap their own voice for a character's in real time during conversations. miHoYo said the company also used Genshin Impact character art and animations in its advertising, placed modified Genshin Impact faces on avatars and let customers preview the cloned dialogue before checkout.
The AI provider argued that its models merely reflected whatever users fed into them, and that any rights to the voices belonged to the voice actors rather than to miHoYo. The court was not persuaded after voiceprint analysis found the cloned voices exhibited "nearly identical characteristics" to the originals. The defendant also admitted training its model on a minute of character audio, which Dexerto described as stolen.
Genshin Impact has hundreds of fully voiced characters. The case lands amid wider pushback against AI voice cloning in entertainment: Dexerto noted that Evangelion voice actor Megumi Ogata had called the practice "heartbreaking" weeks before the ruling and appealed to the Japanese government for regulation, and that the entire French voice cast of Apex Legends refused new contracts in 2025 that would have pushed them to endorse AI.
Genshin Impact has hundreds of fully voiced characters. The case lands amid wider pushback against AI voice cloning in entertainment: Dexerto noted that Evangelion voice actor Megumi Ogata called the practice "heartbreaking" weeks earlier and appealed to the Japanese government for regulation, and that the entire French voice cast of Apex Legends refused new contracts last year that would have pushed them to endorse AI.