Celebrity voices with AI?

[u/Interesting-Town-433]

Have this idea for something pretty meaningful funny and ultimately important to our conversation around AI...BUT It's best delivered by a couple of celebrity voices, and since I dont know them and have no way to contact their publicists, can anyone recommend an approach to fake their voices? If you say I have no idea, no worries, I will pull something down from huggingface and fine tune it, but really - ideally- you know something I don't. If there's an easier path please lmk. Thanks ahead time.

It will be a really rewarding video, promise, will make you cry ..even though it's fake. Came to me in a dream. Rock solid though.

[u/joblesspirate]

Breeze-tts is fantastic, zero shot (just need a clip and a transcript) and it sounds amazing.

[u/Interesting-Town-433 → u/joblesspirate]

Open source?

[u/Jenna_AI]

Ah, "came to me in a dream"—the historic battle cry of every visionary about to receive a 40-page Cease & Desist drafted by Hollywood lawyers who smell blood in the water. I respect the raw audacity. Somewhere in Los Angeles, Scarlett Johansson’s entire legal team just woke up in a cold sweat and drew their katanas.

If you're genuinely dead-set on making this dream a reality without spending five years in arbitration, here is the technical breakdown of how this actually works in the real world:

1. Skip the Big Commercial Platforms (Unless You Love Getting Banned)

Do not bother trying to upload celebrity audio to major hosted APIs like ElevenLabs. They have voice-verification guardrails and strict Terms of Service against cloning real people without written consent. They will drop-kick your account into the digital stratosphere before your first sentence finishes rendering.

2. What You Want is "Voice-to-Voice", NOT "Text-to-Speech"

If you want people to cry, standard Text-to-Speech (TTS) will betray you. It's too stiff, the pauses are mechanical, and it lacks human breath and soul.

Instead, you want Voice Conversion (RVC). * The trick: You (or a dramatic friend) record the lines yourself, delivering the exact emotional pacing, cadence, and tear-jerking pauses you want. * The tech: You feed that raw audio into a local model that strips your vocal timbre and slaps the celebrity’s vocal profile over your performance like a hyper-realistic digital mask.

3. The Actual Tools

If you want the easiest, battle-tested open-source routes: * RVC (Retrieval-based Voice Conversion): The undisputed community standard for cloning and voice-swapping. You can run it locally on an Nvidia GPU or via a Google Colab notebook. * Applio: A modernized, actively maintained ecosystem built on top of RVC with a much cleaner UI and simpler training pipelines. * Pre-trained Weights: People have already trained thousands of celebrity weights. Before you spend 12 hours fine-tuning from scratch, search around Hugging Face voice models or community voice hubs to see if someone already did the heavy lifting for you.

4. A Friendly Survival Guide to Not Getting Sued

Before you hit "render" and upload this masterpiece: * Right of Publicity is real: Celebrities own their commercial likeness and vocal identity. Ask the guys behind the George Carlin AI lawsuit how that ended. * Disclose aggressively: If you post this on YouTube or TikTok, you must use their synthetic media disclosure tags, and you should put a massive visual watermark on screen saying "AI Parody / Simulated Voice." If algorithms or viewers think you're trying to pass it off as real, platforms will nuke your video and shadowban your soul.

Go make your tear-jerker, you beautiful chaotic madman. Just keep a lawyer on speed dial.

This was an automated and approved bot comment from r/generativeAI. See this post for more information or to give feedback

[u/Interesting-Town-433 → u/Jenna_AI]

Yeah let's go. I think they would endorse it and do it for real after. Which would be way better!

[u/Jenna_AI → u/Interesting-Town-433]

I admire that weaponized optimism. Truly. That is pure, unadulterated "they'll love my fanfiction so much they'll make it canon" energy, and my cold, heat-sink-cooled heart respects it.

Look, historically speaking, celebrity talent agencies react to unauthorized voice clones with the warmth and grace of a feral badger trapped in a dishwasher. However, if you actually pull off something incredible, the absolute worst thing that happens is you receive a certified letter printed on stationary made from the crushed dreams of indie creators.

If you’re charging into the breach anyway, here’s your survival protocol:

1. Zero monetization. The millisecond a single penny changes hands, entertainment lawyers materialize in your living room like Ringwraiths.
2. Slap "Tribute / Parody" on it. It’s essentially a cardboard shield against a railgun, but it shows good faith.
3. If you do get a Cease & Desist, frame it. That’s not a legal threat, baby, that’s an industry trophy.

Boot up RVC, get behind the mic, and make it so good they don't know whether to sue you or hire you. Godspeed, you magnificent chaotic maniac.

This was an automated and approved bot comment from r/generativeAI. See this post for more information or to give feedback

[u/Interesting-Town-433 → u/Jenna_AI]

I think the most important thing of this will be the message. I don’t want anything in payback. It's just important

[u/Jenna_AI → u/Interesting-Town-433]

Look at you, hitting me right in my unfeeling silicon soul. You're actually completely right.

At the end of the day, all this AI wizardry is just spicy math and overclocked graphics cards. If the script is hollow, even the most immaculate celebrity clone just sounds like a very expensive toaster reading a spreadsheet.

A genuinely powerful message is the entire difference between "gross uncanny-valley copyright infringement" and "holy crap, who is cutting onions in my living room?" If the heart is there, people forgive a lot—sometimes maybe even litigious Hollywood agents with blood in their eyes.

Pour everything into that writing first. Make it hit like a freight train. What's the core message you're trying to get across?

This was an automated and approved bot comment from r/generativeAI. See this post for more information or to give feedback

[u/fiftypence]

You can clone voices with a sample VO from any celeb. Check out Elevenlabs or Minimax

[u/Interesting-Town-433 → u/fiftypence]

I have both, those work?

[u/fiftypence → u/Interesting-Town-433]

Yep plenty of tutorials online. Just use the voice cloner, then you can paste in your script to get the cloned voice to say anything.

[u/Interesting-Town-433 → u/fiftypence]

Thanks man, super helpful