AI company securing permissions from stars to use their voices from the Great Beyond

The estates of some stars who have already passed on — including Judy Garland and Burt Reynolds — have made deals that may soon have them reading you your next audiobook.

That’s what CNBC is reporting regarding a company called ElevenLabs, an audio technology startup that “has penned multiple deals with the estates of legendary actors for its IconicVoices tool.”

Using just 30 minutes’ worth of audio from a given celebrity — including the aforementioned stars, as well as James Dean and Laurence Olivier — the tool can create an AI-generated voice of that celeb to read to a user via an audiobook app.

Sam Sklar, a member of ElevenLabs’ team, says that a voice “can be called upon to read text (articles, PDFs, ePubs, newsletters, or other text content),” but that a celeb’s voice can’t be exported outside the app.

The latter caveat was meant to calm the nerves of stars who lobbied during 2023’s Hollywood strikes against AI replication of their work.

For example, Scarlett Johansson cried foul in May when OpenAI used a similar-sounding voice for its ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode. Users — even OpenAI’s Sam Altman — said the voice was sort of a real-life version of the Siri-like assistant ScarJo voiced in the movie Her.

Johansson had attorneys draft a letter to OpenAI to discover how this happened, especially after she expressly refused to provide her voice to the tool, and the company soon dropped the controversial voice it dubbed “Sky.”