Oscar winners Matthew McConaughey and Michael Caine have signed separate deals with AI audio company ElevenLabs to create licensed synthetic versions of their voices for authorised commercial use.
The New York-based company announced the deal on Tuesday at its inaugural summit in San Francisco, where they also launched their new “Iconic Voice Marketplace” that it said will let brands and creators request licensed use of celebrity and historical voices for adverts, narration, and other audio work.
The firm says the marketplace was created to make sure that any cloned or recreated voices are used only with the explicit consent of the people, or estates, that own them. The marketplace, according to ElevenLabs, has been designed to “set a new standard for responsible use of voice technology” and to ensure that “the people behind the voices are always in control”.
According to a statement by the company, this is aimed at solving a “key ethical challenge in AI-driven media creation by enabling the ethical sourcing and licensing of some of the world’s most recognisable voices”.
Caine’s voice will be available through the company’s ElevenReader app, which converts text into speech, and through the new marketplace for approved clients.
Caine, 92, said in the company’s announcement that the partnership was intended to “preserve and share voices”.
“For years, I’ve lent my voice to stories that moved people – tales of courage, of wit, of the human spirit. Now, I’m helping others find theirs. With ElevenLabs, we can preserve and share voices – not just mine, but anyone’s,” he said in a statement, published on ElevenLabs’ website.
McConaughey, 56, who the company said has been investing in them for years, has entered into an agreement to produce a Spanish-language audio edition of his newsletter, Lyrics of Livin’, using the company’s technology.
He said: “I’m proud to share that I’ve been an investor in ElevenLabs for several years now. It’s been amazing to see the growth from those early days to where the company, and the technology, is now. What’s remained constant is the extraordinary storytelling capabilities and creative potential that ElevenLabs unlocks – something that stood out to me from the start and that speaks to me as a professional storyteller.”
In addition to Caine, the marketplace will also feature the voices of late Hollywood stars like John Wayne, Rock Hudson, and Judy Garland, as well as living performers like Liza Minnelli and Art Garfunkel.
The full roster, which has 28 voices, will also feature historical figures like Amelia Earhart, Mark Twain, Babe Ruth, J Robert Oppenheimer, Maya Angelou, and Alan Turing.
The marketplace does not provide blanket access to the celebrity or historical voices available. Instead, it will operate as a two-way platform that connects interested companies with each voice’s rights holder.
Once both sides agree on how the voice will be used, ElevenLabs’ technology will synthesise and finalise the licensed version. According to the company, participation is limited to a curated list of “verified, iconic talent and IP owners,” a measure it says ensures that voices are generated “with permission, transparency, and fair compensation”.
Some of the available AI voices have been created using voice-cloning technology, while others have been synthetically reconstructed from historical or archival recordings. ElevenLabs has said this approach allows it to combine contemporary talent with historically significant voices for educational, creative, and commercial purposes.
In September, multiple stars spoke out after a Deadline report that said several Hollywood talent agents had shown interest in signing “AI actress” Tilly Norwood. Norwood is a white, brunette, and brown-eyed entirely virtual AI creation owned by Xicoia, a talent studio attached to the AI production company Particle6.
In the Heights star Melissa Barrera called the news “gross”, writing: “Hope all actors repped by the agent that does this, drop their a**.”
On Instagram, Matilda star Mara Wilson asked: “And what about the hundreds of living young women whose faces were composited together to make her? You couldn’t hire any of them?”
Nicholas Alexander Chavez, who played Lyle Menendez in Netflix’s Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, added: “Not an actress actually, nice try.”
The 2023 strike by SAG-AFTRA, the Hollywood union representing 160,000 television and movie actors, was partly related to concerns over the rise of AI in filmmaking.
During the strike, SAG-AFTRA alleged that Hollywood studios were proposing the use of “groundbreaking AI” to scan background performers and offer them only a day’s pay while the companies would retain ownership of the scans and use them for any project they want.
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