A.I. to exhume dead celebrity voices to read you PDFs or whatever

It is with no pleasure that we inform you of the latest ghoulish artificial intelligence endeavor, an app that makes dead celebrities read stuff to you. Eleven Labs, a company that specializes in using A.I. for text-to-speech purposes, has entered into partnerships with the estates of a number of high-profile deceased stars: Judy Garland, James Dean, Burt Reynolds, and Laurence Olivier. Their voices are now available on the company’s “Reader App,” which “takes articles, PDF, ePub, newsletters, e-books or any other text on your phone and turns it into an emotionally rich, context aware voiceover,” according to the website. Honestly… do you really need James Dean to recite a PDF for you? Is this the glorious, technologically advanced future we’ve been promised? Really?

It’s bad enough that the proliferation of A.I. allows tech to use someone’s face or voice, frequently without their consent, for whatever purposes any random user might dream up. It feels all the worse when the face or voice belongs to a dead person, especially those who never could have foreseen the need to add to their will, “Don’t let them steal my voice like Ursula from The Little Mermaid.” (Most of the people we’re talking about here wouldn’t even understand a reference to Disney’s The Little Mermaid.) Unfortunately, we can’t stop any of these stars’ estates from signing on the dotted line, whether for the money or because they earnestly believe it will be good for that celebrity’s legacy.

“It’s exciting to see our mother’s voice available to the countless millions of people who love her,” Garland’s daughter, Liza Minnelli, said in a statement as the representative of her mother’s estate. “Through the spectacular new technology offered by ElevenLabs, our family believes that this will bring new fans to Mama, and be exciting to those who already cherish the unparalleled legacy that Mama gave and continues to give to the world.”

Eleven Labs is protecting the long-dead “talent” insofar as the use of their voices is “exclusively available through the app for individual streaming and are not part of our broader Voice Library for creating content to share.” This is all part of the company’s “mission to make content accessible in any language and voice.” The example given is that you could have Garland read Frank L. Baum’s classic The Wizard Of Oz (the book upon which her most famous movie is based) to you.

But is The Wizard Of Oz not already incredibly accessible in many languages and voices? We can read it ourselves, in one of the many language translations that have been done over the years, or we could listen to an audiobook performed by an actual person, who can actually emote while reading. And if we want to hear Judy Garland’s version of it, we could just watch the freakin’ movie. It’s no great loss to miss out on a computer’s impression of Burt Reynolds reading horny fanfiction or Sir Laurence Olivier reading an A.V. Club newswire. In fact, to debase Olivier’s voice in such a way feels like it should be punishable by law. Can everyone in tech just please be normal and use their big brains to come up with ideas that are actually useful?