Morgan Freeman fumes over AI copies of his voice and warns imitators to stop: ‘You’re robbing me’
Morgan Freeman recently sat for a chat did not hold back when the conversation turned to AI systems copying his unmistakable voice. He made it clear he is fed up with people lifting his sound and pushing it into projects he never touched. Freeman also said that he is tired of AI tools cloning him without even a phone call.
Morgan Freeman slams AI
“I’m a little PO’d, you know. I’m like any other actor: Don’t mimic me with falseness. I don’t appreciate it, and I get paid for doing stuff like that, so if you’re gonna do it without me, you’re robbing me,” he told The Guardian. He did not go into names, but he hinted at more than a few offenders.
“Well, I tell you, my lawyers have been very, very busy,” he added, a line that says enough on its own. Entertainment Weekly noted that the frustration comes at a time when actors everywhere worry about AI voice theft becoming routine.
A voice he worked hard to build
Freeman did not magically wake up sounding like the narrator the world knows. He explained that he put real effort into shaping that tone after a professor, Robert Whitman, who gave him coaching back in his community-college days.
“If you’re going to speak, speak distinctly, hit your final consonants, and do exercises to lower your voice,” he recalled.
He said Whitman taught him how most people carry their voices higher than they should because they never learn to relax. That early training stayed with him through decades of film work.
Calling out synthetic “actors”
The Oscar winner also spoke about Tilly Norwood, the AI-generated performer who stirred up the industry when word spread that agencies were considering signing her.
“Nobody likes her because she is not real and that takes the part of a real person, so it is not going to work out very well in the movies or on television. The union’s job is to keep actors acting, so there’s going to be that conflict,” he said. SAG-AFTRA issued its own blunt statement soon after the Norwood buzz broke.
“To be clear, ‘Tilly Norwood’ is not an actor, it is a character generated by a computer program that was trained on the work of countless professional performers – without permission or compensation,” the union wrote. It noted that the creation “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.”
Freeman’s stance fits squarely with the mood across Hollywood: if AI wants in, it cannot steal its way through the door.
