Perhaps you’ve always wanted to have a DMC with Billie Eilish. Or, have David Lynch give you a personalised weather report. Well, now‘s your chance.

Veritone, the creator behind the world’s first operating system for artificial intelligence, aiWare, has launched a new platform this week called Marvel.ai that lets content creators and celebrities create audio deepfakes of their voices.

The idea is this: celebrities can pay Veritone to generate a deepfake of their voice using artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to replicate someone’s voice based on a series of audio samples. This means they can monetise audio content (think: radio appearances, audiobooks, voiceovers) without ever having to step foot in a studio. 

“With complete control over their voice and its usage, any influencer, personality, or celebrity can quite literally be in multiple places at once,” the company said in a press release.

“This would open the door to a new level of scale that was not humanly possible before, allowing them to increase the number of projects, sponsorships, and endorsements they can do in any given year.”

According to Marvel.ai, customers can also choose from a particular voice model for auto-generated content. While it’s unclear who will be able to use what voice, we can only assume that it’s a matter of time until we can rent out Timothée Chalamet’s voice, or have Björk sing us to sleep with personalised lullabies.

In an interview with the Verge, Veritone president Ryan Steelberg said that customers can submit voice clips to train Veritone’s systems and produce their own voice clone to license.

“Whoever has the copyright to those voices, we will work with them to bring them to the marketplace,” he said. “That will be up to the rightsholder and what they feel is appropriate, but hypothetically, yes, you could have Walter Cronkite reading the nightly news again.”

Of course, the idea that we might soon have disembodied, digital approximations of living people poses some serious ethical conundrums (AKA who owns the legal rights to a voice?).

Marvel.ai claims it can even resurrect the voices of the dead using archived recordings to train its AI systems, which brings with it a whole other set of ethical dilemmas. Deepfake technology is already bringing loved ones ‘back’ from the dead – will this be the next logical step?