With AI, Dead Celebrities Are Working Again And Making Millions

Can you think of a better way to get into the spirit of Halloween than listening to The Legend of Sleepy Hollow read by the ghost of James Dean?

The actor’s career may have ended tragically in 1955, but his estate is keeping his paycheck alive through artificial intelligence. Alongside the estates of Judy Garland, Laurence Olivier and Burt Reynolds, it signed with AI voice-cloning startup ElevenLabs in July as part of the company’s “iconic voices” project. The actors now narrate books, articles and other text material put into ElevenLabs’ Reader app; essentially, Garland can now read you The Wonderful Wizard of Oz or your tax return-the choice is yours.

The dead-celebrity industry has proved lucrative. Despite Michael Jackson being about $500 million in debt at the time of his death, his estate has amassed a fortune of $2 billion, according to People, thanks to projects such as a jukebox musical and even featuring work made while he was alive. Yet advances in AI mean a late artist like Jackson can still generate new art.

Mark Roesler, an intellectual-property lawyer, has represented more than 3,000 celebrities, most of whom are dead, and has made some 30,000 deals on their behalf since founding his company CMG Worldwide Inc. more than four decades ago. Among current clients including Rosa Parks and Malcolm X, he’s negotiated Jerry Garcia his own ElevenLabs deal.

There are two key ways a living celebrity makes money, Roesler says. The first is personal services, which, for a musician like Prince, would have been income from his concerts and songs. The second is intellectual property, which is independent of those services and could be anything from the copyright of music to pictures.

When a celebrity dies, their personal services revenue expires immediately, leaving to their estate just the intellectual-property revenue, which, Roesler found, used to decline on average by 10% annually, but now can rise. “I’ve been assisted by all the technological changes, like AI,” he says. “With intellectual property, there are so many different uses of it.”

For instance, Travis Cloyd, founder and chief executive officer of Worldwide XR (where Roesler is chairman), has cast Dean in the movie Return to Eden, currently in production. With dead celebrities, there are now two pathways for filmmakers, Cloyd says: “You could either hire an actor, or now, because of the technology, you can create a digital human of James Dean.”

The latter process begins with a base of source material, so-called legacy assets that even include family videos. These are put through machine learning to create a digital model of the actor. From there, other elements are created by using body doubles for skin texture and movement, and vocals get layered on top.

It’s similar to how Paul Walker (Furious 7) and Peter Cushing (Rogue One: A Star Wars Story) made their controversial CGI appearances almost a decade ago. A large role by Ian Holm, who died in 2020, in this summer’s Alien: Romulusinflamed critics and did little to quell the ethical debate around AI, even though his widow, kids and estate signed off.

Hollywood is slowly getting on board after last year’s actors’ and writers’ strikes brought the industry to a standstill over a number of issues, chief among them AI. In August, SAG-Aftra reached a deal allowing brands to replicate living actors’ voices in AI audio ads on a job-by-job basis.

For dead ones, Cloyd says, enormous demand will dictate the terms. The potential for AI projects to become the main driver of income for celebrities’ estates in the next five years is massive, he says: “With the rise of digital platforms, streaming services and virtual experiences, there are ample opportunities for celebrities to monetize their legacies in new and exciting ways.”

Consider ABBA Voyage, which opened in London in May 2022 and has been making more than $2 million a week with concerts featuring de-aged, virtual-reality avatars of the Swedish pop stars. Although the foursome collaborated on the show and were all still alive as of press time, these CGI renderings could theoretically keep minting money for their estates long after their deaths.

Not everyone is convinced. Jeff Jampol, who manages “inactive artists” including Janis Joplin and the Doors, sees AI as a “nonstarter.” He’s turned down offers to replicate Jim Morrison’s voice and casts the technology as a fad akin to nonfungible tokens, or NFTs. “There’ll be something else next,” he says, noting his decades in the industry seeing “waves come and go.” But mostly, “I can’t put anything in Jim Morrison’s mouth that he didn’t say ever. That would be a travesty.”

Jampol compares handling the legacy of an artist to having six matches on a fireplace. Each venture they sign on to is like striking a match. “They hold it into the fireplace, and the fireplace glows, and then nine seconds later the match goes out. You’re left with an empty, cold, dark fireplace and one burnt match. Just repeat that five times, and it’s the end of a legacy for 25 years,” he says. “How they lived, what they said and what they created is their legacy. I can’t change that.”

Svana Gisla, the Emmy- and Grammy-nominated co-producer behind ABBA Voyage, which didn’t use AI in cloning the singers, thinks there’s one key place the new technology falls short. “We will always be seeking that emotional connection that lies within that communication that art brings,” she says, “and AI will never provide that communication or replace artistry in any form.”

Perhaps the biggest test of AI will arrive next spring, when Elvis Evolution premieres at ExCeL London and sees the King of Rock ‘n’ Roll performing for the first time in more than 45 years. For the almost two-hour immersive biopic-think piped-in scents of earthy cotton fields and cranked-up humidity to evoke rural Mississippi-capturing the icon’s stage presence in hologram form has been no easy task, says Andrew McGuinness, founder and CEO of Layered Reality, the show’s producer.

“It’s not a kind of fabrication or the work of a digital artist,” he says. “It actually comes from his real-life performances, his real-life facial movements, his real-life voice structure,” and it takes hundreds of hours of performance and home videos fed into AI software to create his digital double. Layered Reality had access to the full archive of his home-turned-museum Graceland.

“If you wish to, you can see what he had for lunch on a certain day 45 years ago,” says McGuinness. Elvis’ favorite dishes might even be available to fans in the bar that keeps the 1960s atmosphere going as they exit the show.

Will the infamous peanut butter, banana and bacon sandwich be on the menu? McGuinness won’t say.