Purported AI Voice Clone Allegedly Narrated Shaun Rein's 'The Split' in Unauthorized YouTube 'Podcast' Videos

January 9, 2026

Author Shaun Rein accused an unidentified party of using an allegedly AI-cloned version of his voice to narrate excerpts from his book 'The Split', without permission. The seven YouTube videos on the channel 'The US-China Narrative' drew over 200,000 streams in a week.

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MAP 2.2 — similarity 0.583, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 4.2 — similarity 0.580, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.2 — similarity 0.576, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: the-us-china-narrative-(youtube-channel), unknown-actors-impersonating-shaun-rein
Alleged developer: unknown-deepfake-technology-developers, unknown-voice-cloning-technology-developers
Alleged harmed parties: shaun-rein, epistemic-integrity, john-murray-press

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1380

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

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