Morgan Freeman Calls AI Voice Replication ‘Robbery,’ Warns Hollywood on Synthetic Actors

You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who didn’t recognise Morgan Freeman’s signature voice. 

From Driving Miss Daisy to The Shawshank Redemption and beyond, Freeman’s unmistakably deep cadence, powerful delivery and commanding use of speech has helped establish him as one Hollywood’s most in-demand actors and voice-over artists. 

Indeed, Freeman’s masterful narration for 2005 nature film March Of The Penguins arguably contributed to it winning Best Documentary Feature at the 78th annual Academy Awards the following year. 

But a growing reliance on cost-effective AI technology to accurately replicate famous acting voices – among them Freeman, 88, and the late James Earl Jones – has infuriated the veteran star, who believes it has cost him valuable work.  

‘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.’ 

While Jones had agreed for his deep, rumbling voice as Star Wars nemesis Darth Vader to be replicated by artificial intelligence after parting ways with the franchise, Freeman is less charitable. 

And perhaps with good cause, after discovering numerous projects where his voice has been replicated without prior consent. 

‘Well, I tell you, my lawyers have been very, very busy,’ he admitted. 

Unsurprisingly, Freeman – whose career began in the 1960s – takes a dim view of Tilly Norwood, the entirely fictional, AI generated actress created by technologist Eline Van der Velden and unveiled over the summer. 

Norwood’s development as Hollywood’s first synthetic actress has sparked inevitable backlash, not least because a growing reliance on AI was at the heart of industry crippling SAG-AFRA writers strikes in 2023. 

Guilds, actors and filmmakers have met the product with an immediate wave of backlash, protesting that artificial intelligence should not have a starring role in the acting profession. 

In a statement Tuesday, the Screen Actors Guild said that “creativity is, and should remain, human-centered.”

‘To be clear, `Tilly Norwood´ is not an actor, its a character generated by a computer program that was trained on the work of countless professional performers – without permission or compensation,’ the guild said. 

‘It has no life experience to draw from, no emotion and, from what we´ve seen, audiences aren’t interested in watching computer-generated content untethered from the human experience.’ 

Van der Velden, founder of the AI production studio Particle6, recently promoted Tilly Norwood at the Zurich Summit, the industry sidebar of the Zurich Film Festival. 

She said then that talent agencies were circling Norwood and that she expected to soon announce a signing.

‘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,’ Freeman said of Norwood. 

‘The union’s job is to keep actors acting, so there’s going to be that conflict.’

Present frustrations aside, Freeman insists the future still has plenty to offer – and he has no intention of following in his The Bucket List co-star Jack Nicholson’s footsteps by retiring. 

He said: ‘Sometimes the idea of retirement would float past me but, as soon as my agent says there’s a job or somebody wants you or they’ve made an offer, the whole thing just boils back into where it was yesterday: how much you’re going to pay, where we’re gonna be?

‘The appetite is still there. I will concede that it’s dimmed a little. But not enough to make a serious difference.’