On Tuesday, dozens of cultural figures, tech luminaries and finance titans gathered for an inaugural summit held by ElevenLabs, an AI company that focuses on voice generation.
ElevenLabs is based in New York and London, and the summit was held in San Francisco, but the biggest story to come out of the event had a distinctly Texan bent: Matthew McConaughey, the A-list Hollywood star who grew up in Uvalde and Longview and lives in Austin, is both an investor in the AI company and has also signed a deal that allows the company to utilize his voice, ElevenLabs revealed on Tuesday.
While the agreement amounted to a PR coup for the startup AI voice company — and perhaps a smart business move for McConaughey — it also set off alarm bells among industry workers, including in North Texas, who are already concerned about the broad direction of AI.
“My knee jerk reaction is ‘Yikes!’, because when will it stop?” said Tina Parker, a veteran North Texas-based actor who serves as co-artistic director at Kitchen Dog Theater. “Our profession — what makes it so great is that it’s real people. It’s real emotion. That’s what it’s based in, right? Whether it’s film or theater or whatever.”
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Dallas actress and theater leader Tina Parker in a scene from AMC’s “Better Call Saul.” She originated the role of Saul Goodman’s receptionist on the original “Breaking Bad” series.
Nicole Wilder/AMC/Sony Pictures Television
Under the deal McConaughey’s voice likeness will actually be speaking en español: In a video that played at the summit, the actor said that his personal newsletter is expanding with a Spanish version powered by the AI company. Upcoming content from the weekly newsletter, “Lyrics of Livin,’” will be available in McConaughey’s voice, speaking in Spanish via ElevenLabs’ technology.
“When I first met Matthew, I was struck by how genuinely he connected with our vision and what we’re trying to do,” Mati Staniszewski, the tech company’s CEO and co-founder, said in a statement. “He wasn’t just excited by the tech — he understood what we’re aiming to achieve creatively.”
In his own statement McConaughey said that he’d been an investor in the company for several years and that it was “amazing” to see how it’s grown. “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,” he added.
More details on McConaughey’s investment or the terms of his voice deal were not publicly available. In response to a query from The Dallas Morning News, a representative for ElevenLabs pointed to the company’s blog post about the partnership but declined to offer more details, adding that the company does not disclose “investment size or ownership for anyone.”
In an email to The News, a representative for McConaughey emphasized that the actor “is using the technology to test ways to engage his audience, specifically in languages that he cannot speak fluently.”
Along with McConaughey — whose distinctive, earthy drawl has served as a backdrop to everything from a series of Lincoln commercials to hit movies like Dallas Buyers Club and Dazed and Confused, the 1993 film that gave rise to his famous “Alright, alright, alright” catchphrase — on Tuesday ElevenLabs also announced a deal with the eminent British actor Michael Caine, whose native working-class Cockney accent offers a stark contrast to McConaughey’s typically laid-back Texan vibe.
Actor Michael Caine lights a cigarette using a candle, circa 1970s. The image by late Dallas photographer Andy Hanson is from his archives held by the DeGolyer Library at Southern Methodist University.
Andy Hanson Collection / DeGolyer Library, SMU
The AI startup — which early this year closed a funding round at a valuation of $3.3 billion but more recently allowed employees to sell shares at double that valuation — already offers customers an array of tech-generated voices and other products, such as personal “voice cloning” and “voice design” features.
This week, the company also launched what it’s calling its Iconic Voice Marketplace, a platform that allows businesses to license the voices of well-known people — both living and dead — to create AI-generated content. The voices already available in that platform include those of Caine, John Wayne, Maya Angelou, Babe Ruth, Thomas Edison and Mark Twain, among others. McConaughey’s voice is not part of the same marketplace.
Considering the recent rise of AI and its full-throated embrace by many celebrities, ElevenLabs’ new features and audio deals don’t exactly come as a surprise. But the company’s flashy talent deals add to a broader debate over the proper role of the powerful technology in the entertainment industry.
Actor and University of Texas Minister of Culture Matthew McConaughey gets the Texas Longhorns crowd fired up before the Red River Rivalry against the Oklahoma Sooners at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas in 2024.
Tom Fox / Staff Photographer
In recent years, as AI has proliferated into nearly every aspect of modern life, legions of entertainment industry workers, ranging from on-screen television actors to behind-the-camera visual effects workers, have grown increasingly worried about what some deem a potentially existential threat to their livelihoods. Various industry unions, including the Writer’s Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA, which represents over 150,000 actors and other industry workers, have lobbied heavily for more regulations, and in 2023 both groups enacted monthslong strikes largely over AI issues, eventually winning major contract concessions.
But since then, the debate hasn’t gone away. Last month, SAG-AFTRA’s leadership issued a condemnation of the newly popular AI-created actor known as Tilly Norwood; this week, a country song created by “Breaking Rust” — another AI artist — hit the top of the Billboard sales chart for the first time, provoking new controversy.
The public embrace of the technology by McConaughey — a generally beloved Texan who has also been instrumental in growing the state’s industry footprint — is likely to add even more fuel to an already raging cultural discourse.
“I found it interesting, because this is such a volatile conversation, and people line up on it in a really polarized way,” said David Stout, an artist and performer who teaches at the University of North Texas College of Music.
David Stout is a composer, visual artist and teacher working with emerging technologies at the University of North Texas.
Andy Jacobsohn / Staff Photographer
Stout — who said he uses AI as part of his own creative output and finds himself on the “pro-AI” side of the debate, because of its enormous creative potential — sees no problem with the famous actor’s embrace of the voice cloning technology. “He agreed to it, and he doesn’t mind that his voice is going to be everywhere.”
But it’s a very different scenario when performers’ talents are utilized without their consent, he emphasized. It’s a problem that’s particularly damaging to less famous — and less financially successful — performers.
“What I see is, the overall thing that’s happening right now,” Stout added, “is that it’s whoever has the most lawyers. So the big companies are throwing their weight around against the smaller companies, and at the very bottom are the indie artists. And they may be anti-AI or pro-AI — they may be utilizing AI — but in either case, they’re the ones that get disenfranchised.”
Parker emphasized that she’s not criticizing famous actors who choose to make lucrative AI deals. “There is no shade against Matthew McConaughey,” she said. “I think he’s great.”
But the point is he’s also a big star who has the clout and resources to retain control of his image and work out favorable business deals. Other actors — like her fellow Dallas performers — don’t have those options, she said.
Dallas’ Tina Parker in a scene from AMC’s “Better Call Saul.”
Michele K. Short/AMC/Sony Pictur / Michele K.Short/AMC/Sony Picture
“It’s troubling to me,” Parker added, “because for the mid- to lower-range actors that aren’t the A-list celebrities, what protections do they have?”
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