Matthew McConaughey has never been shy about turning himself into a brand, and he’s been happy to lean into the many memes based on his performances. His latest move is to trademark his own voice saying “alright, alright
alright” and video clips of himself standing on a porch, as first shared by The Wall Street Journal. That might seem odd until you realize it’s not about a new product, it’s a kind of legal preemptive defense against the onrushing AI celebrity cloning wars.
Fractured protection
Almost no legal framework has caught up to the age of easy deepfakes. Some state-level “right of publicity” laws offer celebrities protections from unauthorized commercial use of their name, face, or voice, but it’s hardly universal, and the rules vary wildly internationally. Trademarks like McConaughey’s make sense at first glance, but are actually a poor fit. Trademarks are best at protecting logos, slogans, and distinctive commercial identifiers. They’re not built for filtering deepfakes from fan art or fair use satire from full-on digital impersonation.
McConaughey’s lawyer admitted as much to the WSJ, saying outright that they don’t yet know how the courts would rule if someone pushed back. This is preemptive maneuvering, a legal scarecrow planted in a field full of fast-growing weeds. On the other hand, no one knows where the real lines are yet.
An actor might successfully stop a brand from deepfaking them into an ad. But what about the open-source model trained on hundreds of YouTube interviews? What about an indie filmmaker using AI to recreate McConaughey’s voice for parody? Or an influencer building a synthetic “romance sim” using the voiceprints of multiple celebrities? The law doesn’t have a clear answer, and that’s not an oversight. It’s a symptom of how quickly the tech is moving.
If you’re not a celebrity, it’s easy to assume this is a problem for richer, more recognizable people to worry about. But synthetic identity isn’t just coming for the famous. AI tools are already capable of scraping publicly available audio and video data to build custom voice models. You don’t need a famous catchphrase to become part of a training dataset.
But most of us don’t have lawyers on retainer or the resources to monitor the internet for unauthorized AI clones. So when AI begins generating synthetic people at scale, the power imbalance between those who can control their digital likeness and those who cannot is likely to deepen.
Hollywood arms race
For Hollywood, this isn’t theoretical. Actors fought hard in the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike to win protections against AI replication. That included clauses about informed consent, compensation, and limits on how synthetic versions of themselves could be used.
That’s why SAG-AFTRA President Sean Astin made a trip to CES this year to engage with AI companies and try to better understand and position his organization to best serve its members amid the chaotic changes.
“There’s a moment at which, well, I see things all of civilization needs to be paying attention to it,” Astin told TechRadar’s Lance Ulanoff. “But my focus as a labor leader is to figure out the point at which it crosses over as an entertainment or as a business…and moves into our area where it affects our members and their name image and likeness and their – the things where we have jurisdiction over covering and so forth.”
The negotiations haven’t stopped some studios from experimenting with AI actors. There are digital doubles that perform in scenes the real actors never shot. There are “de-aging” projects using AI to make older stars appear decades younger. And then there are the AI tools capable of generating entirely synthetic performances without a camera ever rolling. Trying to keep up on the labor side when the technical aspect moves so quickly is tough.
“We knew, when we were achieving certain language in our last agreement, which was foundational, new, novel stuff about different guardrails and things, that…it would be out of date,” Astin said.
Fake faces and real consequences
There’s a deeper shift underway here, one that trademark law can’t resolve. As synthetic media becomes easier and more convincing, the question of ownership becomes not just legal but cultural. If people expect to be able to remix and regenerate anything, then the law alone won’t be enough to stop them. There will need to be new norms, new taboos, and new expectations around consent.
McConaughey’s line is clear: if you want to use his voice, ask him. That shouldn’t be controversial. Consent and attribution are low bars, and yet they’re absent in much of today’s AI landscape. Most AI voice tools don’t tell users where the source material came from. M
In some ways, McConaughey’s actions set a precedent. If a famous phrase or moment can be legally protected, maybe yours can too. If not through trademark, then through pressure on platforms to flag synthetic content, on lawmakers to draft modern regulations, and on AI developers to build with consent in mind. The truth is, most people won’t have the means to file lawsuits every time their face appears in an unauthorized AI video. But maybe they shouldn’t have to.
We need a broader shift in how synthetic identity is treated, including penalties for violating consent. We’re all walking toward an uncertain era where the most persuasive versions of ourselves might not even be ours.
This era demands new legal constructs, regulatory clarity, and international cooperation to govern how AI can use and reuse personal identity. Without that, celebrities might end up fighting a series of narrow battles without winning the larger war. And even someone who just likes to upload videos of themselves telling stories could find their voice snatched away without their permission to sell a product they’ve never heard of. And that’s not alright, alright, alright.
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