If anyone could make the Dark Side sound good, it was James Earl Jones. The actor, who died Monday at the age of 93, provided the voice for Darth Vader in more than a dozen Star Wars properties, from A New Hope to Star Tours. He made the Force sound ominous in a way that made it appealing. With his passing, it feels as though all the power and gravitas and respect he brought to the character is gone.
It’s not. It’s in the hands of AI.
A few years ago, when Jones provided a few lines of dialog as Vader for The Rise of Skywalker, he’d expressed interest in wrapping up his time as the Sith Lord, according to Vanity Fair. Lucasfilm, in need of a way to continue the character—and particular to continue having a version of the character’s voice as it sounded in those early Star Wars movies—turned to a Ukrainian company called Respeecher that used artificial intelligence to make a recreation of the Vader voice based on Jones’ past performances. (The actor signed off on the use of his archive to train the speech model.)
Ultimately, Respeecher’s work, completed amidst Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, ended up in Obi-Wan Kenobi, and what, if any, Vader performance that comes in the future could now depend on its AI. (Reps for Respeecher and Lucasfilm did not immediately return emails seeking comment.)
Jones’ passing marks a pivotal moment in the future of AI-generated performances. During last year’s prolonged 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 studios needed to secure permissions to use a past performance to train AI models. Ultimately, SAG won guardrails around the use of AI in recreating performances. Now the question is: How will those play out with Darth Vader?
It’s a particularly interesting question when it comes to voice acting specifically. The full recreation of vocals may feel further along than the full recreation of whole performances, but they also feel more poignant.
When Paul McCartney used AI to help fashion a Beatles song from tapes made when the Fab Four were still alive, the results felt haunted. When OpenAI released a demo of its voice assistant Sky and Scarlett Johansson believed it sounded much like the voice she used in Her, she was “shocked, angered, and in disbelief” that the company “would pursue a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine.” OpenAI denied she was the inspiration, but paused the demo. Video game voice actors are on strike right now to get protections for their vocal performances. Voices, it seems, are currently at their highest value.
Ultimately, what will now happen to the Darth Vader voice is not really a question of rights—Jones gave permission—but rather one of emotion. Will Lucasfilm, or its parent company Disney, want to produce future Star Wars shows or movies featuring AI Vader following Jones’ death? Will people respond positively to them? With a character as iconic as Vader, should there be a point at which fans let go?
From Audrey Hepburn selling Dove chocolates to hologram Tupac, posthumous performances have been a part of pop culture for years. But unlike Audrey and Pac, Jones is in on the plan; he is seemingly the first celebrity to have allowed his iconic presence to be recreated with AI before his passing. What will likely decide how well AI Vader goes over is how it’s handled. A Darth Vader feature film may not be as warmly received as, say, a Force ghost cameo or a flashback. It’ll be a test to see how welcomed the character will be now that the man behind it is gone.