Morgan Freeman condemns the use of AI to replicate his legendary acting voice as ‘robbery’ and admits his ‘lawyers have been very, very busy’ after criticizing Hollywood’s first synthetic actor
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You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who didn’t recognize 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 have helped establish him as one of Hollywood’s most in-demand actors and voice-over artists.
Indeed, Freeman’s masterful narration for the 2005 nature film March of the Penguins arguably contributed to it winning Best Documentary Feature at the 78th Academy Awards the following year.
And perhaps with good reason—Freeman has discovered 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, particularly because the growing reliance on AI played a central role in the industry-crippling SAG-AFRA writers’ strikes in 2023.
Guilds, actors, and filmmakers have met the product with immediate criticism, protesting that artificial intelligence should not replace human performers. In a statement on Tuesday, the Screen Actors Guild said, “Creativity is, and should remain, human-centered.”
“To be clear, Tilly Norwood is not an actor; she is a character generated by a computer program that was trained on the work of countless professional performers without permission or compensation,” the guild said. “She 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 AI production studio Particle6, recently promoted Tilly Norwood at the Zurich Summit, the industry sidebar of the Zurich Film Festival. She said at the time 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 on 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 the footsteps of his The Bucket List co-star Jack Nicholson by retiring.
“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,” he said.
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