Hollywood icons of the past are coming back in AI voice cloning deals

Stars from Hollywood’s golden age are being reborn through celebrity estate AI voice cloning deals, a sign of how some of the “Wild West” concerns about unauthorized AI impersonation are being addressed by new business models.

ElevenLabs, an audio technology startup funded by venture capital firms including Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia has penned multiple deals with the estates of legendary actors for its IconicVoices tool that allows users to have AI-generated voices read to them via an audiobook app. The stars include Burt Reynolds, Judy Garland, James Dean and Sir Laurence Olivier.

ElevenLabs, which launched in 2023, creates audio for books and news articles, video game characters, film pre-production, and social media and advertising. The company already works with publishers including the New York Times and Washington Post and earlier this year, the company was selected by Disney to join its accelerator program.

“You need around 30 minutes of high-quality audio to create a professional voice clone,” said Sam Sklar, a member of ElevenLabs’ growth team, and the voices are generated from the celebrity’s catalog. Once created, it can be called upon to read text (articles, PDFs, ePubs, newsletters, or other text content). However, the voice and content are not able to be exported, with all of the listening in a reading app. 

A user could, for instance, have articles narrated to them by James Dean within the app, but users cannot access the voices for any content not already in the app. 

These kinds of deals could help set the boundaries for a future in which AI-generated voice content is less contentious and more of a controlled, curated terrain. Google Play and Apple Books utilize AI-generated voices to some extent already, though there are high hurdles to recreating human voice pacing, intonation and emotion.

The AI industry has been plagued by concerns about use of celebrity voices, with OpenAI doing an about-face in Mayafter actress Scarlett Johansson accused the company of ripping off her voice after she rejected offers to license it.

“We’re very alive to the risks associated with synthetic media and take the safe use of our tools incredibly seriously,” Sklar said. Safeguards include active moderation of content, accountability enforceable with bans, and special provisions for safeguarding the impact of AI voice on the 2024 election. 

Among the current generation of actors, there remains significant anxiety surrounding the use of AI in generating voice content. Voice actors for video games have raised concerns, and last year’s film and television strike had significant roots in anxieties over the use of AI. The use of iconic voices sold by estates is a market niche that potentially avoids these pitfalls, representing a new income stream from AI rather than a lost income stream because of AI.

The use of soundalike celebrity voices is an issue that predates AI, such as the 1988 case of Frito Lay using a Tom Waits soundalike in their ads,…