Matthew McConaughey clearly has no intention of letting artificial intelligence improvise for him. In recent months, the actor has obtained approval for eight trademark filings from the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The content is very concrete: short video extracts where we see him smiling, looking at the camera or chatting quietly, but also audio recordings.
You will need to ask for authorization before cloning the actor
The most emblematic element is undoubtedly this famous “ alright, alright, alright ”, pronounced in Dazed and Confused and become, over time, a sort of sound signature. Other protected material includes a short video of the actor standing on a porch and footage showing him sitting in front of a Christmas tree. Apparently innocuous moments, but recognizable enough to serve as ideal raw material for image or voice generators.
In theory, American law already protects personalities against the appropriation of their image for commercial purposes. But with AI, the line becomes less clear. Does an algorithm-generated video, distributed on a platform and financed by advertising, really sell anything? It is this vagueness that Matthew McConaughey seeks to circumvent. His lawyers readily admit: if someone decided to challenge these marks in court, the verdict would be far from guaranteed. The objective is above all to send a clear message and to calm the heat before a trial even becomes necessary.
Unlike other Hollywood figures, Matthew McConaughey is not a technophobe. He is even an investor in the company ElevenLabs, specializing in synthetic voices, and collaborates with it to offer a Spanish version of its newsletter “Lyrics of Livin’”. In other words, AI is not a problem for him, as long as it does not take over his identity without knocking on the door.
In a message sent to the press, the actor summarizes the philosophy of the approach: he simply wants to know that, if his voice or his face are used, it is with his green light. “ We want to create a clear perimeter around ownership, with consent and attribution as the norm in an AI-dominated world “, he explains. There is no question of banning the technology, but rather of setting some rules of the game. Ultimately, the actor hopes that the law will evolve and make this type of approach unnecessary. A bill to ban digital replicas without consent was presented to the US Congress in 2024, but the vote is still awaiting its time. Until then, Matthew McConaughey prefers to have his back.
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