4chan users abuse ElevenLabs voice cloning to generate celebrity hate speech

Within days of ElevenLabs opening a public beta of its voice-cloning tool, users on the imageboard 4chan used it to generate abusive audio in the cloned voices of celebrities including Joe Rogan, Emma Watson, Ben Shapiro and Rick and Morty voice actor Justin Roiland. Reported clips included Watson’s voice reading passages of Nazi propaganda and Shapiro’s voice making racist remarks about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, alongside further transphobic and homophobic material, according to Vice’s Motherboard.

ElevenLabs’ cloning tool required only a short sample of a person’s speech to reproduce their voice convincingly, and the beta had made the feature available to any signed-up user with minimal verification. The company said it had already logged “an increasing number of voice cloning misuse cases” during the beta and that it was able to trace generated clips back to the accounts that made them, though it did not detail any enforcement taken against those responsible.

In response, ElevenLabs said it would add safeguards, including requiring payment information or identity verification before granting cloning access, and manual review for some requests. The episode, arriving within weeks of ElevenLabs’ public launch, became one of the earliest widely reported cases of consumer voice-cloning software being turned to abuse rather than novelty use, and it prefigured the pattern — a capability shipped, immediately probed by an anonymous community, followed by tightened verification — that recurred across later generative-audio and video tools.