If you’ve been on YouTube over the last week, there’s a chance you’ve come across this video.

It’s a fan project wherein Mystery Inc. visits the world of Five Nights at Freddy’s and tangles with one of the killer animatronics the video game series is known for. This makes for an amusing little crossover, but went viral due to the surprising animation quality and sheer effort that went into the project. I expected it to be some edgy mess of blood that made me regret clicking the video, but instead saw one of the most loving tributes to the original Scooby-Doo Where Are You ever made, perfectly emulating the original show, albeit at half the length of a real episode. This level of quality got the ten-minute episode some fast YouTube fame, at which point people scrutinized the credits more closely and noticed that several of the voices were done using Artificial Intelligence. With the exceptions of Scooby and Shaggy, who were impressions done by the creator and someone he hired, the rest of the cast were A.I. duplicates of the voices of the What’s New Scooby-Doo cast, Frank Welker, Mindy Cohn, and Grey DeLisle.

This has produced immediate controversy. As many of you are aware, there is an actors/writers strike in Hollywood right now, revolving around the threat of A.I. either stealing jobs or reducing people’s pay. After all, if a studio can pay an actor to do one project, and slip the right conditions about this into the contract, they will be able to have A.I. replicate that actors voice for future projects, for free. And why hire a voice actor if you can literally generate their voice for no money? This situation has produced a very reasonable amount of paranoia amongst those in the entertainment industry who stand to suffer from such things, and they are currently on strike in an effort to guarantee that this future does not come to pass. While we might not put much stock into a fan animation like this being a threat to the strike or its mission, some of the people involved absolutely have. Grey DeLisle, the voice of Daphne, went on twitter to call for the video’s creator (Tilghman) to be blacklisted.

Now, to consider some perspective, this video is ultimately one person’s harmless project made for no profit and which, based on Tilghman’s response to the controversy surrounding his video, was made on a ten dollar budget. This is somebody who did it for the art and made a video about two franchises he loves crossing over for the fun of it. It also acts as disturbing evidence of how dangerous the A.I. voice technology is, because while they’re obviously not very emotive, I could have believed Fred, Daphne, and Velma were just being voiced by people doing stiff impersonations if the credits had not listed them as being A.I. voices. To his credit, Tilghman used these voices for the characters with the least dialogue, purposefully centering the video around the two characters he actually had real voices for, which leads me to believe that he really was just using the artificial voices due to lack of resources. And while this might be acceptable for a fan project on YouTube, we do have to ask ourselves where we draw the line on this front. Is it okay for a real studio to take this route when producing for-profit entertainment? Can Hollywood or Disney claim lack of budget and get away with this? Once we accept that, both art and several of the professions surrounding it are dead. The actors are right to strike with this threat looming over their jobs, and whether Tilghman intended this or not, his video is abject proof that this could come to pass in the near future. As for DeLisle, while some may say that she is having a dramatic overreaction, we should be understanding of the fact that she is hearing her voice come out of a project she didn’t participate in, while she is striking against exactly that fear. To her, the video represents everything she is fighting against, and everything that is threatening her livelihood right now; perhaps she is right to react so dramatically.

Of course, this issue with A.I. voicework goes beyond Scooby-Doo. Perhaps you’ve encountered some of the most amusing videos on YouTube right now, the A.I. Presidents:

This is just one randomly selected video from hundreds that exist, featuring a number of U.S. presidents, politicians, and celebrities in amusing and nonsensical situations. Once again, these videos are largely harmless, as everyone knows that they are created using artificially generated voices and that nobody presented in the video was actually involved. These have become their own genre of video, and to be perfectly honest, they’re some of the funniest content on YouTube right now. They are also one of the biggest threats to democracy the world has ever faced. Sure they’re being used to create meme videos and generate laughs right now, but we as a people should be utterly terrified of how far this technology is advancing. Watching through a handful of these will demonstrate how close we are to the point in which it becomes impossible to tell if a voice recording of somebody is real, and when this is being done with politicians and policy makers, that represents a very real threat to every public figure, as well as having the potential to massively mislead the public when it matters. We aren’t quite there yet; the voice generators still can’t replicate human emotion well enough to be misleading. But how far off are we? Is the next presidential election going to be affected by this? If not, I can assure you that this will be a tangible concern by 2028; the technology is developing too quickly, and the tendency of technology is to develop more quickly the more advanced it becomes. With major studios and corporations willing to invest into this technology for the purpose of underpaying actors and creating entertainment, we may be opening a wholly separate can of worms we aren’t ready for and producing one of the greatest sources of misinformation the world has ever seen.

Now, all of this must at least partially come off as a man being afraid of a new technology, something the world has seen time and time again. And who knows, maybe some of this is an overreaction, maybe I’m overblowing the importance of all this, but what if I’m not? People need to be aware of this technology and what can be done with it, and the government needs to place some strict regulations on it before it is too late to put the genie back into the bottle. I never thought I’d say this, but there is a visible pipeline from fan videos to lost jobs to an altered election staring us in the face, and if we don’t do something about it now, then misinformation might be the next big crisis the world has to face, as any 23-year-old with ten bucks is able to produce high quality audio of any public figure saying anything they like.

To circle back to where this started, I don’t want to place any blame on Tilghman here. The guy just made an animation project about two things he cared about, and has been apologetic about the entire thing, going so far as to offer to get some friends to redub his video and remove the artificial voices. While some part of me thinks he probably should have just done that in the first place, I can understand a college student not totally thinking something through in pursuit of his preferred art form. DeLisle also isn’t wrong to be upset by this, as pretty much her exact professional fear spontaneously manifested on the internet over the weekend.

Artificial intelligence is not inherently a bad thing. No technology is. All technology, however, has the potential to become a bad thing if it is misused or poorly regulated, and this is a peek into the threat that this particular technology represents. For as much fun as it can be to experiment with ChatGPT or make ex-presidents talk about their trip to Disney World, we need to be incredibly mindful of what we are putting into the world. Setting the precedent that this can be done is dangerous, and we should, on principle, be fully aware of what we are consuming and what we are allowing to develop through our media consumption habits. I would love to see the world where we had a 100% guarantee that this technology was only going to be used for fan projects and meme videos, but there is no world where that is the case. The capacity to remove the humanity from our art is a problem. The possibility that actors and writers will never get fair payment for their work is a problem. The kind of mudslinging and outright lies that can be done using this technology is a problem. I’m not going to tell you to boycott anything with this in it (I’d have to be a moron to suggest that after linking you to two separate videos that use this tech), but I will ask for some awareness of what’s out there. It’s harmless right now, but if there’s ever a vote on the use of this technology, be mindful of what decision you make, and the possibilities that letting this run rampant inherently allows. I like to believe that people will always crave the real deal and search out the truth, but I am also aware that laziness and inertia are some of the strongest forces on this Earth. There’s a time for optimism, and a time for well-measured fear.

So where does that leave us? Artificial Intelligence represents a very real threat to industry, art, and politics, and I just ask you all to be mindful of that as we inevitably interact with this rapidly developing technology. Actors and writers deserve to be paid because there’s a human element in their work that a machine will never be able to replicate to a satisfactory degree. It is completely rational to overreact when one hears their voice saying things they never said in a project they were never involved with. We should keep a sense of perspective and not permanently blacklist a student doing their best even if they released their project at what was perhaps the worst possible time. And most importantly, let’s all keep an eye out for what’s to come in the future, as this technology can produce some cool results, but it also has the potential to be utterly terrifying and devastate the internet with a barrage of misinformation. If we don’t keep that in mind, we may need Scooby and the gang to do quite a bit more unmasking.