AI is resurrecting the voices of dead famous people

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Franz Kafka died in 1924, he had a simple wish for his friend and literary executor Max Brod: burn all of Kafka’s unpublished writing and papers.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