An AI voice company just found out the hard way that you can’t just yoink Genshin Impact characters and sell them as voice packs.
A Shanghai court ordered an unnamed local AI voice service to pay miHoYo 750,000 yuan — about $112,000 — for cloning the voices of 63 Genshin characters and selling them. Users could buy a pack and talk in real time sounding like Hu Tao, Raiden, Zhongli, whoever. The company also used Genshin art and animations in ads, slapped modified character faces on avatars, and let people preview stolen in-game lines before buying.
miHoYo wanted closer to $750,000. The court gave them a lot less, but the company still has to stop immediately.
The defense was the usual AI shrug: “the model just reflects what users feed it” and “the voice rights belong to the actors, not the game company.” Judges didn’t buy it. Voiceprint analysis said the clones were nearly identical to the originals. The company even admitted it trained the model on about one minute of stolen character audio mixed with other material.
The court treated the character designs as copyrighted works and the distinctive voices as something closer to a trademark — built up over years of the game existing. Using them this way wasn’t “reasonable imitation.” It was unfair competition. People could easily think this was official.
It’s being called Shanghai’s first AI voice-imitation unfair competition case. The timing is interesting too: China’s Supreme Court just put out new guidance on AI disputes, including the idea that using someone’s voice to train a model without consent is a problem.
$112K is not a huge number for a company the size of miHoYo. The signal is bigger than the payout. Game companies are starting to win these cases, and “we only used a minute of audio” is no longer a magic shield. If you’re selling Hu Tao’s voice as a product, you probably need to ask first.