Morgan Freeman recently sat down for a conversation, and when the conversation turned to AI systems that mimic his unmistakable voice, he didn’t hold back. He made it clear that he was fed up of people taking his voice and pushing it into projects he never touched. Freeman also said he was tired of being cloned by AI tools without a phone call.
Morgan Freeman criticizes AI
He explained, “I’m a little PO’d, you know. I’m like any other actor: Don’t fake it. I don’t appreciate it, and I get paid to do stuff like that, so if you’re going to do it without me, you’re robbing me.” GuardianHe did not mention names, but he hinted at more than a few culprits,
“Well, I tell you, my lawyers are very, very busy,” he said, a line that speaks for itself. Entertainment Weekly noted that the disappointment comes at a time when actors everywhere are concerned about AI voice theft becoming routine.
A sound he worked hard to create
Freeman didn’t magically wake up as the storyteller the world knows. He explained that he put real effort into shaping that tone after Professor Robert Whitman, who coached him in his community-college days.
He recalled, “If you’re going to speak, speak clearly, hit your last consonant and do exercises to lower your voice.”
He said that Whitman taught him how most people raise their voices higher than necessary because they never learn to relax. That early training remained with him throughout his decades of film work.
ALSO READ: Why did Morgan Freeman wear the same black glove at the Oscars 2025?
Calling out synthetic “actors”
The Oscar winner also talked about Tilly Norwood, the AI-generated artist who caused a stir in the industry when news broke that agencies were considering signing her.
He said, “Nobody likes her because she’s not real and she plays a real person, so it wouldn’t work very well in movies or on television. The job of the union is to keep the actors acting, so there’s going to be conflict.” SAG-AFTRA released its own clarifying statement shortly after the Norwood discussion began.
The union wrote, “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 actors – without permission or compensation.” It added that the creation “has no life experience, no emotion and from what we’ve seen, audiences have no interest in watching computer-generated content separate from the human experience.”
Freeman’s stance fits perfectly with the Hollywood mood: AI can’t just sneak its way out the door if it wants to.