If anyone can make the Dark Side sound, it’s James Earl Jones. The actor, who died Monday at age 93, provided the voice for Darth Vader in more than a dozen Star Wars properties, from A New Hope on Star Tours. He made the Force look bad in a way that made it attractive. With his passing, it seems like all the power and gravitas and respect he brought to the character is gone.
not at all. It is in the hands of AI.
A few years ago, when Jones gave some lines of dialogue as for Vader The Rise of Skywalkerhe has expressed interest in ending his time as a Sith Lord, according to Vanity Fair. Lucasfilm, needing a way to continue the character—and specifically to continue having a version of the character’s voice as it sounded in those early Star Wars films—turned to a Ukrainian company called Respeecher to use artificial intelligence to recreate the Vader voice based on Jones’ previous performances. (The actor signed off on using his archive to train the speech model.)
Ultimately, Respeecher’s work, which ended amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, came to an end Obi-Wan Kenobiand what, if any, future Vader performance may now depend on its AI. (Representatives for Respeecher and Lucasfilm did not immediately return emails seeking comment.)
Jones’ passing marks a pivotal moment in the future of AI-powered performances. In last year’s protracted Hollywood actors’ strike, one of the biggest sticking points between the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, or SAG-AFTRA, and the studios was whether or not the studio to obtain permissions to use past performance to train AI models. In the end, SAG won guardrails around the use of AI in recreating performances. Now the question is: How will those play with Darth Vader?
This is a particularly interesting question when it comes to voice acting specifically. The full entertainment of the vocals may be more palpable than the full entertainment of the entire performance, but they also feel more intense.
When Paul McCartney used AI to help create a Beatles song from tapes made when the Fab Four were still alive, the results were haunting. When OpenAI released a demo of its voice assistant Sky and Scarlett Johansson believed it was similar to the voice she used in himhe was “shocked, angry, and in disbelief” that the company “would go after a voice that sounded as scary as mine.” OpenAI denied being the inspiration, but the demo was paused. Video game voice actors are now on strike to get protections for their vocal performance. Voices, it seems, are currently at their highest value.
In the end, what happens now with the voice of Darth Vader is not really a question of rights—Jones has given permission—but rather an emotion. Will Lucasfilm, or its parent company Disney, want to make future Star Wars shows or movies featuring AI Vader after Jones’ death? Will people respond positively to them? With a character as iconic as Vader, should there be a point where fans let go?
From Audrey Hepburn selling Dove chocolates to the Tupac hologram, posthumous performances have been part of pop culture for years. But unlike Audrey and Pac, Jones is on board; he seems to be the first celebrity to allow his iconic presence to be recreated using AI before his passing. What will likely decide how well the AI ​​Vader will do is how it is handled. A Darth Vader feature film might not be as well-received as, say, a Force ghost cameo or a flashback. It’s a test to see how acceptable the character is now that the person behind it is gone.
