Alex is an entertainment and celebrity news journalist with experience as a writer and editor at In Touch Weekly, Life & Style, OK! Magazine, and Screen Rant. She earned her B.A. in Theatre, Film, and Digital Production from the University of California, Riverside, and has been writing about entertainment and celebrity news since 2020. When she isn’t reporting, Alex is developing her own creative projects, including short films and TV pilots.
The rise of artificial intelligence in the entertainment industry has been making shocking leaps and bounds — from replicating the iconic voices of stars who have passed away for post-mortem projects to entirely AI-created singers and actors. While there are many people who are open to letting AI take on a bigger role in entertainment, Oscar-winner Morgan Freeman said he’s been “a little PO’d” by the idea that he could lose work to software that could be taught to imitate him.
“I’m like any other actor: don’t mimic me with falseness,” he said in a recent sit-down with The Guardian. “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.”
The Shawshank Redemption actor, 88, confirmed that situations like this have already come up in his own life, noting that his lawyers have been “very busy” with “quite a few” potential legal cases. Freeman also weighed in on another hot topic — AI actress Tilly Norwood, who is reportedly in talks to be signed to a talent agency.
“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 in television … The union’s job is to keep actors acting, so there’s going to be that conflict.”
Unlike artificial intelligence, Freeman, who has been professionally acting for over 50 years, honed his craft the old-fashioned way — with hard work and dedication from a young age.
“I had the most encouraging teachers you could imagine,” he told the outlet of his early life as an aspiring actor. “One of my teachers told me, you can go anywhere and do anything you want.”
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
