Morgan Freeman’s distinctive voice has been the bane of everybody who has a “funny co-worker” for the last 20 years and counting—and now it’s apparently the bane of his lawyers’ workloads, too. This is per a new interview that Freeman gave to The Guardian this week, in which the veteran actor talked briefly about his reaction to the inescapable fact that his distinctive, warm tones were one of the first targets for AI voice copying—in many ways, now the irritating “office clown” to humanity as a whole.
To put it in Freeman’s (apparently congenitally folksy) terms, “I’m a little PO’d, you know,” he said of the way his specific voice and cadences get copied by every huckster trying to peddle new AI tech. “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.” When asked about whether he pursues legal remedies when he finds out that his voice is being copied, Freeman makes it plain: “I tell you, my lawyers have been very, very busy.”
(Freeman was also, of course, asked about the whole “Tilly Norwood” thing, to similarly hardline results: “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 … The union’s job is to keep actors acting, so there’s going to be that conflict.”)
AI being used to imitate well-known actors has been one of the many prongs making up the gnarly, multi-tined sticking point that’s been Hollywood’s response to artificial intelligence in recent years, especially after the estates of certain actors with highly distinctive voices—notably James Earl Jones—signed off on official copies. The topic was a major area of contention in the strikes that happened back in 2023—and apparently a big talking point for the Now You Seem Me actor and his reportedly tireless legal team.
