The controversial actor Morgan Freeman can’t stand: “Nobody likes her”
Back in the day, it was a novelty to have a celebrity voice narrating a sat nav, but times have changed. Now, we live in a world where artificial intelligence has the capabilities to recreate anyone’s voice, and it’s a technological evolution that Morgan Freeman utterly abhors.
He’s far from the only one, obviously, and it’s quickly exploded into one of Hollywood’s most hotly contested debates. If anything, he should probably have a word with his six-time co-star and friend, Michael Caine, who agreed to let his voice become the subject of the latest AI abomination.
It goes without saying that one of Freeman’s signature assets is his unmistakable and soothing voice, but even though he loves making money and has starred in multiple films for the sole reason that they fattened his bank balance, he wouldn’t dream of officially licensing his dulcet tones out to an AI product.
James Earl Jones, who has a cadence every bit as iconic as Freeman’s, saw no such issues and signed away his voice rights to a company that will allow the Star Wars franchise to use Darth Vader as much as it wants for as long as it wants to. Not everyone is against it, which is concerning, but the Academy Award-winning veteran has drawn a very clear line in the sand.
“I’m a little PO’d, you know,” he told The Guardian. “I’m like any other actor; don’t mimic me with falseness. I don’t appreciate it, and I get paid for doing stuff like that, so if you’re gonna do it without me, you’re robbing me. I tell you, my lawyers have been very, very busy,” Freeman said his legal team has shut down “quite a few” unauthorised reproductions, which led him to round on a monstrosity.
When it was announced that a company had created an avatar called Tilly Norwood, who was designed to be the world’s first artificial actor, it would be selling the situation very short to say it didn’t go down well. It failed a quarter of a century ago with Aki Ross, and it’ll fail again, because the percentage of actors, filmmakers, and industry figures who’d buy into such nonsense is infinitesimally slim.
Since he’s already dispatched litigators to end any and all AI experiments that use his name or likeness, there are no prizes for figuring out how Freeman feels about the controversial Norwood. “Nobody likes her because she’s not real, and that takes the part of a real person, so it’s not going to work out very well in the movies or in television,” he reasoned. “The union’s job is to keep actors acting, so there’s going to be that conflict.”
Channel 4 already underlined the perils of the current fad when it didn’t reveal until the end of the documentary, Will AI Take My Job?, that the ‘person’ who presented it, Aisha Gaban, was generated by AI. Norwood isn’t going to catch on, fingers crossed, and anyone who agrees to use it as part of a feature or TV show will more than likely find themselves ostracised from the rest of the filmmaking community.
Freeman might be pushing 90, but he knows a technological menace when he sees one.
