Few actors are imitated as often as Michael Caine. Even Michael Caine has imitated Michael Caine.
His voice has been used in birthday card greetings and has been the source of jokes in various comedy sketches. It is synonymous with a certain type of Britishness.
Last week, artificial intelligence (AI) company ElevenLabs announced that Caine has licensed his voice to the company. It will be available on their ElevenReader app, which allows you to listen to any text in a voice of your choosing, as well as being available on their licensing platform, Iconic Marketplace.
To understand why Caine’s voice is so iconic (and wanted by AI) we need to look deeper at what people actually hear in it.
Why do people love listening to Michael Caine?
Caine was born in London in 1933. His mother was a cook and a cleaner, and his father worked in a fish market. Caine speaks with a Cockney accent, setting him aside from most other actors of his generation.
Cockney hails from London’s East End and is often associated with London’s working class – think Eliza Doolittle from My Fair Lady, the Artful Dodger from Oliver!, or Bert the Chimney Sweep from Mary Poppins (although Dick van Dyke’s accent is not the most accurate, it’s still recognisably Cockney).
Traditionally, you were said to be a true Cockney if you were born within earshot of the Bow Bells – the bells of St. Mary-le-Bow church on Cheapside.
That distinctiveness matters because the accent carried heavy class meaning in mid-20th century Britain.
We don’t hear many contemporary examples of Cockney. Accents change and evolve over time and it has gradually been replaced by a new dialect called Multicultural London English (MLE).
While most actors of his age acquired a “stage accent” – known as Received Pronunciation (RP) – Caine made a conscious decision to hold onto his working-class roots and not change his accent. Instead, he built his career on it.
I could’ve gone to voice lessons, but I always thought if I had any use […] I could fight the class system in England.
His accent became cultural capital and helped him land roles in Alfie (1966), The Italian Job (1969) and Jack Carter (1971). By the 1970s, he was a British cultural icon.
What do we hear when we hear celebrity voices?
Hearing a person’s voice is never just about acoustics. We hear social meaning: culture, identity, character and story.
Sociolinguist Asif Agha coined the term “enregisterment” to describe how a way of speaking becomes publicly recognised as signalling particular social types and values.
Over time, Caine’s voice has become enregistered as a recognisable Cockney accent associated with East London and historically linked to a working-class identity. Hearing his voice activates a socially shared register of meanings attached to Cockney.
This contrasts with, say, Queen Elizabeth II, whose accent was associated with royalty, prestige and wealth.
Another useful concept here is what sociolinguists sometimes call “dialectal memes”: the images and character types that circulate around particular accents. These memes are transmitted through books, television, film, and even celebrity figures themselves.
Caine has been a carrier of Cockney dialectal memes in popular culture.
When you look at it this way, AI voice licensing commodifies not just the acoustic properties of Caine’s voice, but the enregistered social meanings audiences recognise in it.
What AI licensing means for Caine
ElevenLabs describes its Iconic Marketplace platform as “the performer-first approach the entertainment industry has been calling for”. Through licensing, actors maintain ownership of their voices in a digital, AI landscape.
Caine licensing his voice theoretically ensures he receives credit and compensation, and prevents unauthorised clones appearing elsewhere.
It is possible this is exactly the direction actors want AI to go in – for use of their voice to be controlled by themselves, with clear credit and payment.
However, this model is not without risk to the actor or the listener. We should ask: do we need to hear something in Caine’s voice? Will we process information differently or hear it with more authority if it’s delivered in the voice of a cultural icon like Caine?
Giving power over to machines
People who admire Caine may want him to read to them. Some will be willing to pay for it. We need to remain conscious of the decisions we are making here.
In the 1960s, computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum, creator of the world’s first chatbot, Eliza, warned about the dangers of forming relationships with machines. He was alarmed to see users confiding in Eliza and responding to the chatbot as if it actually understood them, even when they knew it did not.
What happens if an AI voice is not actually generic, but recognisably tied to a real human?
An actor’s likeness and voice may be protected with licensing, but their human self is not. That creates a pathway to attachment or even infatuation.
Caine is not just licensing his voice, but also the Cockney persona audiences recognise in it. Suddenly, a machine speaks with the authority of a real human behind it.
- is a Lecturer In Theatre (Voice), Victorian College of the Arts, The University of Melbourne
- This article first appeared in The Conversation
