Would you let AI Michael Caine read you the ‘Odyssey’?

Michael Caine (Wikipedia)

By ALEXANDRA ALTER

In a new audiobook edition of the “Odyssey,” Homer’s nearly 3,000-year-old epic poem, the voice of British actor Michael Caine delivers the story’s soaring opening lines in his distinctive, gravelly staccato.

“Tell me, O Muse, of that sagacious man who, having overthrown the sacred town of Ilium, wandered far and visited the capitals of many nations, learned the customs of their dwellers, and endured great suffering on the deep,” Caine’s voice intones over a soft, melancholy orchestral score.

Caine is the latest celebrity to lend his voice to Homer’s epic, following acclaimed narrations of the “Odyssey” by actors Claire Danes and Ian McKellen. But Caine isn’t really telling the story. Instead, he licensed his voice to ElevenLabs, a company that produces audiobooks and other content voiced by artificial intelligence, which used an AI clone of his voice for the project.

A team of four producers created the 13-hour audiobook, which came out on June 23 and is available free on the company’s ElevenReader platform. The production features Caine’s voice clone and a supporting cast of 20 different AI voices layered with AI-generated sound effects and a musical score, and was put together in just over six weeks.

The project, explained Jack McDermott, who leads mobile growth and marketing at ElevenLabs, is meant to showcase the creative potential of voice clones and AI narration — all while capitalizing on heightened interest in the “Odyssey” before Christopher Nolan’s Hollywood adaptation, which comes out this month and stars Matt Damon, Tom Holland and Anne Hathaway.

“The idea was, ‘What would be an amazing piece of content, to show what’s possible in the responsible use of AI voice featuring an iconic voice?’” McDermott said. “On the one hand, it’s about great storytelling. At the same time, this has a really great effect of showing creators around the world, and authors, what can be done with ElevenReader.”

In a way, the “Odyssey,” about the warrior Odysseus’ long and dangerous journey home to Ithaca after the Trojan War, lends itself particularly well to the audiobook format. The poem, along with the other great work attributed to Homer, the “Iliad,” was composed to be recited by performers.

“If you want to be pedantic, the real way to experience these epics is to listen to them,” said classicist Daniel Mendelsohn, whose translation of the “Odyssey” was released last year.

But some listeners may find it unsettling to hear an oral masterpiece from ancient Greece recounted by AI-generated voices, and may question whether such a rendition can capture the emotional and dramatic scope of Homer’s tale.

The audiobook is landing at a moment when the “Odyssey” is splashed all over social media, thanks to Nolan’s film. The timing is deliberate. Seeing an opportunity to seize on the increased interest in Homer’s poem to showcase ElevenLabs’ technology, the company’s executives tapped Caine for the project.

Caine, an Academy Award winner, was an obvious choice: He had struck a deal with the company in the fall to feature his voice in the ElevenLabs Iconic Marketplace, which allows companies to license famous voices.

The AI edition of the “Odyssey,” with its high-profile synthetic narrator and splashy rollout, could become a test case for whether audiobook listeners are open to an AI version of a beloved actor’s voice.

While synthetic narration has spread in recent years, with AI-generated audiobooks now available on major platforms both legally and illegally, it’s unclear how popular they are with listeners, who often value a narrator’s performance as much as the book itself. According to a survey released in June by the trade group Audio Publishers Association, only 16% of audiobook listeners reported listening to an AI-voiced audiobook.

That hasn’t stopped professional narrators from fearing a future where publishers and audiobook production companies can cut out human narrators entirely by ordering up faster, cheaper AI narrations featuring facsimiles of famous voices.

“The slippery slope of synthetic celebrity voices is, of course, that publishers will simply license those voices for more and more projects, resulting in fewer possibilities for everyone else,” said Edoardo Ballerini, a prominent audiobook narrator who believes that synthetic narration poses a threat to the industry.

ElevenLabs executives say that the company uses AI narration mostly to create audiobooks for titles that probably wouldn’t have otherwise gotten audio editions, and that the technology is adding to the audiobook landscape rather than threatening the careers of human narrators. As for whether AI narration results in an inferior experience for listeners, the company’s executives say the marketplace will be the judge.

“Audiences will decide, at the end of the day,” said Dustin Blank, who oversees ElevenLabs’ talent and strategic partnerships, including the Iconic Marketplace. “It’s up to them. No one’s forcing this in our ears.”

Scholars and translators have mixed feelings about whether an AI narration can do justice to Homer’s poetic lines.

Translator Emily Wilson, whose groundbreaking translation of the “Odyssey” was released in 2017, worries that synthetic voices can’t re-create the emotional nuances of the text. The “Odyssey” is an adventure tale, but it’s also an intimate story about marriage, memory, family, loss and home.

“So much of both translation and other interpretive activities is about human judgment,” Wilson said. With a human narrator, “the voice and the thinking behind the character can emerge over the course of the performance,” she said, adding: “It’s hard to see how AI can really do that.”

Others see the potential for AI to draw new audiences to the “Odyssey,” either because the narration is free and widely accessible online or because people are curious to hear an AI Michael Caine.

Mendelsohn, who narrated the audiobook for his own translation of the “Odyssey,” noted that the poem had been adapted many times over into new narrative forms, like fiction and film.

“The reason that these works survived is that they keep having something to say to every new generation, in every new historical period,” Mendelsohn said. “AI is another new technology, and if it can be used to bring out everything that is wonderful in this work, why not? These things have been infinitely adapted.”