{"id":133372,"date":"2025-11-14T18:19:13","date_gmt":"2025-11-14T18:19:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/133372\/"},"modified":"2025-11-14T18:19:13","modified_gmt":"2025-11-14T18:19:13","slug":"ai-voice-cloning-complicates-estate-planning-for-celebrities-legacies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/133372\/","title":{"rendered":"AI voice cloning complicates estate planning for celebrities\u2019 legacies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Before Franz Kafka died in 1924, he had a simple wish for his friend<\/a> and literary executor Max Brod: burn all of Kafka\u2019s unpublished writing and papers.<\/p>\n

Fortunately for the rest of the world, Brod largely ignored what Kafka had said, which is why today we have works like The Castle and The Trial, not to mention the word \u201cKafkaesque.\u201d But Kafka\u2019s story does raise the question of what rights artists, musicians, writers, and celebrities more generally should have over their work once they die. And those questions are going to be more important in the age of AI, when it\u2019s not just someone\u2019s work that could live on after them, but their actual voice.<\/p>\n

Michael Caine talks like this<\/p>\n

The AI audio startup ElevenLabs, which generates amazingly realistic synthetic speech, just rolled out<\/a> an \u201cIconic Voices\u201d marketplace that lets companies legally license AI versions of well-known voices \u2014 some living, many deceased \u2014 for ads and other content.<\/p>\n

On the living side, the actors Matthew McConaughey and Michael Caine have both signed on. McConaughey \u2014 an investor in the company<\/a> \u2014 plans to use his synthetic voice to translate his \u201cLyrics of Livin<\/a>\u2019\u201d newsletter into Spanish, which shows how the technology can be used to localize content across the world. (Muy bien, muy bien, muy bien, as Spanish AI McConaughey might put it<\/a>.) Caine, one of the most celebrated actors in England, is joining the marketplace as a marquee voice and has argued<\/a> that the move should be seen as amplifying human storytellers, not replacing them.<\/p>\n

As weird as it is to imagine an AI speaking with Caine\u2019s inimitable Cockney accent \u2014 and frankly, no AI can do Caine better than these two guys in The Trip<\/a> \u2014 at least he made the active choice while alive to sign it away. But ElevenLabs has also struck estate deals that let users hear narration in the voices of historical figures, like Judy Garland, James Dean, Maya Angelou, and AI pioneer Alan Turing. (That\u2019s right, the genius who once said<\/a> that if computers became smarter than humans, \u201cwe should, as a species, feel greatly humbled,\u201d will now be lending his posthumous voice to the machines.)<\/p>\n

This is a long way from projecting a holographic Tupac Shakur<\/a> for a \u201cduet\u201d with Snoop Dogg at Coachella in 2012. We\u2019re generating new readings<\/a> in the vocal style of someone who can\u2019t consent today.<\/p>\n

The incentives are obvious. Synthetic voices are cheaper than staging a hologram tour and more scalable than booking an A-list narrator. With a modest archive, you can generate hours of multilingual audio that sounds plausibly like the original. In the company\u2019s defense, ElevenLabs says its marketplace routes everything through deceased figures\u2019 rights holders to address ethics and misuse concerns. That means heirs get paid, and it\u2019s better than a deepfake AI-for-all<\/a>, but the core fact remains: Once a voice is an asset, the estate becomes a product manager for a digital ghost.<\/p>\n

This is where the Kafka lesson comes in. If you\u2019re a famous person who wants control over posthumous AI content based on yourself \u2014 or really anyone who works in creative fields \u2014 get an estate lawyer to write those demands down now. Do you permit the creation of a synthetic voice after death? If so, for what? Are archival restorations and documentaries okay, but not ads, political content, or interactive chatbots? Who holds the kill switch: a literary executor, a family council, an independent trustee? If you don\u2019t want your AI voice talking on ChatGPT 55.7 in 2060, don\u2019t leave that decision to a board meeting taking place well after you\u2019ve ended up on the Oscars \u201cIn Memoriam\u201d segment.<\/p>\n

Kafka\u2019s fame is a standing argument that, sometimes, betraying an artist\u2019s last wish serves the world. But if you, famous person, absolutely don\u2019t want to leave the fate of your voice to chance, learn from the example of British fantasy novelist Terry Pratchett. Per his very specific wishes, a hard drive containing his unfinished books was ceremoniously flattened<\/a> by a steamroller in 2017. Try reconstructing that.<\/p>\n

A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect<\/a> newsletter. Sign up here<\/a>!<\/p>\n

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Swati Sharma<\/p>\n

Vox Editor-in-Chief<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Before Franz Kafka died in 1924, he had a simple wish for his friend and literary executor Max…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":133373,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[343,114,83218,1503,268,12740,85,1720,46,397,266,267,125],"class_list":{"0":"post-133372","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-personal-finance","8":"tag-artificial-intelligence","9":"tag-business","10":"tag-celebrity-culture","11":"tag-culture","12":"tag-finance","13":"tag-future-perfect","14":"tag-il","15":"tag-innovation","16":"tag-israel","17":"tag-movies","18":"tag-personal-finance","19":"tag-personalfinance","20":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133372"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133372\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/133373"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}