The Odyssey gets new audiobook adaptation read by AI Michael Caine

1 hour ago 1

Here’s yet another soul-numbing generative AI-related announcement: There's now an audiobook of Homer’s The Odyssey voiced by Michael Caine’s AI doppelgänger. The digital facsimile of Caine’s voice will appear alongside other AI voices with AI music. It’s available through ElevenReader, which is owned by the audio company ElevenLabs.

Caine partnered with ElevenLabs not just for this audiobook,but to make his voice available for virtually everything on the platform (unlike in cases where other AI companies allegedly stole actors' performances).

"The Odyssey is one of the greatest stories ever told. For nearly three millennia, its themes of perseverance, loyalty, temptation, and the enduring call of home have resonated across cultures and generations," Caine said in a statement. The idea that this epic poem, kept alive over centuries through human tenacity, is now being "passed on" by machine-trained voices is a good shorthand for why AI “art” is such a bummer: These voice-overs may reach a point where they sound technically competent, but they can't achieve the same personality as a human performance. It would be interesting to know what Homer, or the multiple people who authored the Iliad and the Odyssey, would think about this situation (after you spent several days explaining the concept of computers and the internet to him/them, of course).

Jack McDermott from ElevenLabs said: “For centuries, stories like The Odyssey have been passed from one generation to the next through written and spoken word. This production builds on that tradition, combining human creativity with the latest AI production capabilities to create an audiobook experience that feels truly immersive.” It is a bit unclear where human creativity comes into play when feeding an existing epic poem into an AI model.

ElevenLabs’ stunt is clearly designed to piggyback off hype around Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film adaptation of The Odyssey, as readers flock to the source material to try and remember who the heck the Laestrygonians are. Caine has appeared in many of Nolan’s films, including the Batman trilogy, Inception, and Interstellar, making this connection all the stronger.

While ElevenLabs’ technology has been praised for the quality of its AI voices, this high-accuracy mimicry has already been abused. ElevenLabs ran into controversy when4chan users utilized their model to generate fake statements from celebrities filled with hate speech (one included an AI version of Emma Watson making anti-Semitic comments). Critics have pointed out that ElevenLabs’ models can be used to create deepfakes and spread misinformation, something particularly dangerous given the proximity to a major U.S. election.