ElevenLabs, the AI company slowly making itself synonymous with AI dubbing and narration, announced two deals with movie stars on Tuesday that are sure to irk AI opponents in wildly different ways. Aging Texan chill bro Matthew McConaughey is further intertwining his finances, and some of his minor creative output, with the AI company. Meanwhile, 92-year old Cockney legend Michael Caine is being inducted into ElevenLabs’ rather chillingly named “Iconic Marketplace.”
McConaughey will be “investing an undisclosed sum” in the company, and adding its product to one of his steady creative workflows. “Since our first conversation, I’ve been impressed by how the ElevenLabs team has taken the magic of the core technology and turned it into products that creators, enterprises, and storytellers use daily,” McConaughey wrote in a Silicon Valley lingo-tinged statement about the deal.
Gizmodo asked ElevenLabs for McConaughey’s ownership percentage, and will update if we hear back.
What McConaughey is literally doing is, well, having someone add ElevenLabs’ tech to his newsletter-podcast-YouTube thingy called “Lyrics Of Livin’ with McConaughey.”
Please do listen to it. It’s very McConaughey.
It’s a weekly newsletter of thoughts and stories from McConaughey-land that he also narrates. Judging from the audio quality and mic work, it sounds like McConaughey (quite charmingly) records the English-language audio track himself on home equipment before an animation pass is added and the product is uploaded to YouTube and emailed out.
What’s coming, it seems, will ostensibly be a Spanish-language version of Lyrics Of Livin’ with a robotic approximation of McConaughey’s own vocal timbre and inflection. According to the newsletter’s website, the new version will be called—you guessed it—”Lyrics Of Livin’ con McConaughey.”
“Now, thanks to ElevenLabs, Lyrics of Livin’ is expanding with a Spanish language edition, allowing us to reach and connect with even more people,” McConaughey said in his statement.
The other news item the company McConaughey owns some unspecified amount of announced on Tuesday at the same time is that Michael Caine is now a member, and seemingly the standard bearer, of the Iconic Marketplace. ElevenLabs describes what it’s offering in the following terms:
“License AI voices and IP of history’s most iconic figures for your creative projects. Request licensing for entertainment legends, sports heroes, musical pioneers, and transformative historical figures. Our marketplace connects creators with rights holders for the most iconic IP.”
The overwhelming majority of the voices on offer here, including Maya Angelou, John Wayne, Judy Garland, and Richard Feynman, are “speaking” from beyond the grave. In fact, it seems out of the 26 icons in the Iconic Marketplace, the only living ones other than Caine are Art Garfunkel and Liza Minnelli. What a trio.
But there’s simply no refuting ElevenLabs’ choice of word: Michael Caine’s voice is iconic. And you can now license a digitized version of it for your “projects and content” through ElevenLabs for the low low price of, well, the price isn’t provided until you tell ElevenLabs what the project is. But one can only assume it’s much less than the cost of having the actual man vibrate his tremulous vocal cords for you.
