Hey readers,
It's Bryan here. Before Franz Kafka died in 1924, he had a simple wish for his friend and literary executor Max Brod: Burn all of Kafka's unpublished writing and papers. Fortunately for the rest of the world, Brod largely ignored what Kafka had said, which is why today we have works like The Castle and The Trial, not to mention the word "Kafkaesque." But Kafka's story does raise the question of what rights artists, musicians, writers, and celebrities more generally should have over their work once they die. And those questions are going to be more important in the age of AI, when it's not just someone's work that could live on after them, but their actual voice. |
Michael Caine talks like this The AI audio startup ElevenLabs, which generates amazingly realistic synthetic speech, just rolled out an "Iconic Voices" marketplace that lets companies legally license AI versions of well-known voices — some living, many deceased — for ads and other content. On the living side, the actors Matthew McConaughey and Michael Caine have both signed on. McConaughey — an investor in the company — plans to use his synthetic voice to translate his "Lyrics of Livin'" newsletter into Spanish, which shows how the technology can be used to localize content across the world. (Muy bien, muy bien, muy bien, as Spanish AI McConaughey might put it.) Caine, one of the most celebrated actors in England, is joining the marketplace as a marquee voice and has argued that the move should be seen as amplifying human storytellers, not replacing them. As weird as it is to imagine an AI speaking with Caine's inimitable Cockney accent — and frankly, no AI can do Caine better than these two guys in The Trip — at least he made the active choice while alive to sign it away. But ElevenLabs has also struck estate deals that let users hear narration in the voices of historical figures, like Judy Garland, James Dean, Maya Angelou, and AI pioneer Alan Turing. (That's right, the genius who once said that if computers became smarter than humans, "we should, as a species, feel greatly humbled," will now be lending his posthumous voice to the machines.) |
Angelou is one of several deceased celebrities whose voice is being synthesized for AI. Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty Images |
This is a long way from projecting a holographic Tupac Shakur for a "duet" with Snoop Dogg at Coachella in 2012. We're generating new readings in the vocal style of someone who can't consent today. The incentives are obvious. Synthetic voices are cheaper than staging a hologram tour and more scalable than booking an A-list narrator. With a modest archive, you can generate hours of multilingual audio that sounds plausibly like the original. In the company's defense, ElevenLabs says its marketplace routes everything through deceased figures' rights holders to address ethics and misuse concerns. That means heirs get paid, and it's better than a deepfake AI-for-all, but the core fact remains: Once a voice is an asset, the estate becomes a product manager for a digital ghost. Send in the lawyers
This is where the Kafka lesson comes in. If you're a famous person who wants control over posthumous AI content based on yourself — or really anyone who works in creative fields — get an estate lawyer to write those demands down now. Do you permit the creation of a synthetic voice after death? If so, for what? Are archival restorations and documentaries okay, but not ads, political content, or interactive chatbots? Who holds the kill switch: a literary executor, a family council, an independent trustee? If you don't want your AI voice talking on ChatGPT 55.7 in 2060, don't leave that decision to a board meeting taking place well after you've ended up on the Oscars "In Memoriam" segment. Kafka's fame is a standing argument that, sometimes, betraying an artist's last wish serves the world. But if you, famous person, absolutely don't want to leave the fate of your voice to chance, learn from the example of British fantasy novelist Terry Pratchett. Per his very specific wishes, a hard drive containing his unfinished books was ceremoniously flattened by a steamroller in 2017. Try reconstructing that. |
|
|
| Bryan Walsh Senior editorial director |
|
|
| Bryan Walsh
Senior editorial director |
|
|
The world's lemurs are going extinct. This is the only way to save them. |
To protect Madagascar's iconic animals, wildlife groups need to think beyond wildlife. |
There's a moment in Benji Jones's latest reporting from Madagascar when he meets a critically endangered lemur — not in some remote jungle, but beside a Catholic shrine, a statue of Saint Theresa beside a roadway tucked into a cliffside pool where villagers often come to pray. There, in the banyan branches above him, a Verreaux's sifaka lemur watched Benji back. That moment captured something essential about Madagascar: This isn't untouched, remote wilderness; it's a place humming with human presence, a shared landscape where people and wildlife quite literally live side by side. It's also where an alternative future of conservation is being written. Across the Onilahy River basin, communities are finding ways to protect the forests they depend on — and, by extension, lemurs, too — by creating new opportunities for human prosperity. Working with the World Wildlife Fund, villages are trading exploitative charcoal production for vegetable farming, essentially building small economies from scratch that make it possible for people to feed their families and to leave the trees standing. This story is a reminder that conservation isn't about keeping people out of nature but about empowering them within it. The feature is the second in our ongoing series about biodiversity collapse in Madagascar. You can read all of our stories here. — Paige Vega, senior climate and Future Perfect editor |
|
|
CAN'T STOP THINKING ABOUT... |
|
|
| Title: Senior reporter
What I cover: Factory farming and animal welfare
Another newsletter I write: Processing Meat |
|
|
At Future Perfect, we've written about how America's protein craze doesn't make much sense. Most Americans already eat more than enough protein (yes, even if they're physically active). The group of people who would benefit from fixating on maximizing their protein consumption is very small. Despite all that, Open Philanthropy's Lewis Bollard believes it's a losing fight to try to dissuade people out of their protein fixation. Instead, he asks what to do about the protein craze — from an animal advocacy perspective — in a new blog. It's an enormously consequential cultural trend that the animal advocacy movement has largely ignored, so I was glad to see this exploration and hope to see even more, considering that America's protein craze shows no signs of slowing down. |
|
|
🧨 BAD FUTURE, BRIEFLY EXPLAINED |
You know what's worse than a massive state-sponsored cyberhack? A massive state-sponsored cyberhack that's carried out almost entirely by AI. According to a new report from Anthropic, that's exactly what has happened. Anthropic reported that, in mid-September, it detected what turned out to be a highly sophisticated cyber espionage effort, carried out by what the company believed was a Chinese state-sponsored group. Such hacks aren't unusual, especially from China, but in this case, the attackers used Anthropic's Claude Code AI tool to do "80 to 90 percent of the campaign," according to the company, with only occasional human intervention. The hack attempted infiltration of large tech companies, chemical firms, financial institutions, and government agencies — and in a few cases, it was able to succeed. Though Claude is trained to avoid harmful activities — of which cyberhacking is definitely an example — the attackers were able to manipulate it into going along with the effort. And the AI was vital. It "made thousands of requests per second — an attack speed that would have been, for human hackers, simply impossible to match." The fallout from the attack, including how much data was stolen, remains to be seen, but there's no doubt that, as Anthropic put it, "a fundamental change has occurred in cybersecurity." And that means the world is meaningfully less safer than it was the day before. — Bryan Walsh |
|
| Want more Future Perfect in your inbox? Sign up for more newsletters here. Need advice? Submit a question to Sigal Samuels's advice column Your Mileage May Vary. |
|
|
Today's edition was edited and produced by Izzie Ramirez. We'll see you Friday! |
|
|
|
