AI Voice Actors
Darth Vader, Google Veo, and Me
Are you suffering from AI whiplash?
Do your eyes roll every time a new AI tool drops with a headline like This Changes Everything? If so, welcome. You might be entitled to compensation, or at least a newsletter. I can’t fix the world, but I can walk you through the latest installment in our collective techno-spectacle.
Darth Vader Returns
Legendary actor James Earl Jones, prior to his passing, allowed Disney & Lucasfilm the right to utilize his iconic voice in perpetuity across all future iterations of space daddy Darth Vader. With the support of his family, who now control his estate, his voice forever exists imprisoned within data, sitting in Disney's vault, possibly next to Walt's head. As a means of cashing in on this product and with no new Star Wars film in sight, James's data was pimped out to Epic Games, creators of what might be the most popular video game of the decade, Fortnite: Battle Royale. Marketed as a quirky part of your crew, Darth Vader is now an AI chatbot that reacts and responds to voice inputs from players. Shortly after launch, gamers did what players do and broke the rules about what Darth Vader could say, ending with online compilations of this villainous character reaching further into the dark side and compelling the now fully robotic Darth Vader to make sex jokes and ethnic slurs. BAD DADDY!
Let's be honest: the internet eats moments like this for breakfast. The more revered the icon, the more there's a desire to drop them down to anarchy. James Earl Jones’ voice didn't stay a respectful tribute; it immediately became a toy, passed around among gamers to break. Here is a video by VideoGameDunky that gives a good summary of how this went.
For a while now, publicly available tools like ElevenLabs, Synthesia, and AI roleplaying platforms have only poured gasoline on the fire. The trend isn't new, but the access is. And while James Earl Jones did give his blessing for his vocal resurrection, this is another important moment in corporations push towards perpetual monetization on intellectual property.
I won’t wade into the full ethical mess here (maybe another post), because what really gnaws on me besides the product, is the ease. With today’s consumer AI tools, anyone can steal a voice. No permission, no effort, no resistance. You can make your own Darth Vader clone in under an hour, you just can’t upload it to Fortnite. Like in every other creative field genAI touches, the labor of the author is bypassed entirely. Most people don’t seem to mind. Companies and consumers alike are happy to embrace low-effort, algorithmically generated IP slop, so long as it fits inside a meme, a game, or a TikTok. The product doesn’t even have to be good, it just has to sound familiar, make us laugh, or rub up against our nostalgia receptors. I feel crazy to ask, but why do we need Darth Vader to live on forever?
All space daddies will eventually turn into space grandpas and retire in Florida.
-Ari Temkin
-Quote me on that-
Tech's collaboration with the entertainment industry won't let voices die in The Villages (a famous retirement home in Florida). Instead, they'll be puppeteered forever: polished, disembodied, eternal and monetized into oblivion. Everything is capitalized with a capital CASH, and we are too apathetic to care. Ironically, this sounds like an excellent sequel for "Weekend at Bernie's." Forever & Ever With Vader
Sasquatch is Real and Loves to Vlog
Enter Google Veo, which introduced various tools to be further pipelined: AI video and voice combined in a single prompt, no longer distinct. No actors, cameras, or microphones, type what you'd want and attach a generated image. Out comes something entirely watchable, surreal, but often uncomfortably close to coherent, albeit in ten-second scenes.
This has already produced a strange and very particular phenomenon to legitimize this process: a surge of talking Sasquatches and Bigfoots on TikTok.
I am guilty of finding these amusing at first. There's something inherently absurd about Bigfoot delivering motivational speeches, a day in the life, or dating advice. But the more of them appear, the more it becomes clear: this isn't a one-off gag. It's a content template.
What Veo and other such tools enable are new ways of repetition. The synthetic voice, the auto-generated face, and the plug-and-play aesthetic all come together to produce frictionless, familiar content, ready to sell.
And yes, it's slop. But not by accident. Slop is the goal.
It's a temptation to laugh, and maybe we should. But it is also worth noting how easily a mythic beast can be turned into a synthetic spokes beast, how easily voice is boiled down to a layer, something you drag and drop, modulate, rebrand, and send out into the stream.
There is no tragedy here. Just a soft blur, between product and parody, content and character, capital and creativity.
Yes, I am Guilty of Adding to the Chaos
For my project, The Last Two Jews, now on view at the SVA Chelsea Gallery through July 15, I built two AI voice actors: myself and a fictional Orthodox Jewish character named Yitzak. In true hypocrite fashion I stole Yitzak's voice from recordings of Yiddish-speaking men in Brooklyn giving sermons. I layered and pitch-shifted their speech in Audacity and uploaded that file to Elevenlabs, rerunning it until a solid synthetic voice emerged. This process is unique to me (I have never heard of anyone doing this) and created a unique character I've grown attached to
The theft was easy. The performance took months.
Most AI voice clips, whether Vader or Sasquatch, rarely last more than ten seconds. And even when they do, no one complains if the delivery's off. But I needed my voices to hold attention across entire scenes. To argue. To hesitate. To mean something. I wasn't just mimicking tone, I was trying to manufacture emotion.
My voice was too smooth, too flat. It didn't carry. Yitzak, on the other hand, had conviction. Cadence. Life. But even then, stitching him together meant brute-forcing sincerity. Running the same line dozens of times until it almost sounded like it believed what it said.
What I had in the end wasn't very good. However, it was something close enough to pass, like a wax statue in low light. Convincing until it tries to blink. I built a 35-minute, fully voice-acted script from scraps I found online. It's not perfect. I'm still not happy with it. But it plays.
There is no real climax here. Just a slow, curving fade-out, in which everyone sounds familiar, no one sounds alive, and even our best impressions can't quite pretend to be there.
The revolution is not coming.
But the show runs through July 15.
If you read all this comment, "Sasquatch was my roommate in college."
Sasquatch wasn’t my roommate in college but I went to a party with him once