Having already resurrected his own career twice, the Failure To Launch star is doing the same for the deceased with a new AI venture.
I find the intersection of celebrity and technology fascinating. The famous are fragile and coddled creatures, hothouse flowers largely sheltered from a world that cruelly demands they occasionally know what the fuck they’re on about. This means they’ll generally believe whatever anyone tells them, because whoever has managed to penetrate the inner circle is de facto a trusted voice. So when Matt Damon or Brie Larson shill NFTs or George Miller lets out a brainfart about AI being the future of cinema, I tend to give an indulgent chuckle rather than pitching a fit. They can’t help it; their field of vision is necessarily constricted.
So it comes as no shock to me that celebrities including Michael Caine, Liza Minnelli, Babe Ruth, Maya Angelou, and J. Robert Oppenheimer – or the estates thereof, for the dead – have signed on with Iconic Voice Marketplace, an outfit that licenses AI recreations of the voices of the famous for commercial purposes. Now that could be a literal commercial, like Oppenheimer shilling Toilet Duck or something, but a moment’s thought reveals that the possibilities are endless. your smart washing machine could sound like John Wayne. Google Maps could be Burt Reynolds. Actually, I quite like that.
They can’t help it, and many of them can’t help it because they are dead: most of Iconic Voice Marketplace’s roster of talent are toes up, including all but Caine and Minnelli above – and we’ll update that as necessary in the coming days – plus James Dean, Judy Garland, Laurence Olivier, and more. Do they even have enough recordings of James Dean to work up a reasonable facsimile? That’s a bit ghoulish on the part of the various estates, but it’s hard to argue against their legal right to earn off the old cash cow. Caine and Minnelli may simply be getting their digital affairs in order, much like James Earl Jones did not long before his passing. That’s fine, I guess, but I’d hate to be a living actor competing in a marketplace crowded with dead legends.
Someone who is not dead is Matthew McConaughey, whose distinctive drawl does not appear to be on the Iconic Voice Marketplace roster. He is involved, though; the True Detective star is teaming up with the company’s parent outfit, ElevenLabs for the Spanish-language audio version of his newsletter, “Lyrics of Livin’“, which is a thing I just learned existed. Spanish speaking listeners who have been frustrated to only be able to access MM’s pearls of homespun wisdom en ingles will soon be able to hear him murmur “Bien, bien, bien, bien.” thanks to the magic of AI translation. And we should note that McConaughey has been an investor in ElevenLabs for “several years” according to the source article, so it’s a bit rough that we can’t hear him tell us our printer’s out of toner or some shit.
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