To avoid breaking this link, with the agreement of Aurore Bergé, daughter of Alain Dorval and current French Minister of Equality between Women and Men and the Fight against Discrimination, the company ElevenLabs has chosen to reproduce its timbre by artificial intelligence. “One March 2025, Armor will premiere in France as the first feature film to use our AI dubbing, the company said on. We collaborated with Lumière Ventures and the estate of Alain Dorval, the iconic French voice of Sylvester Stallone, to ensure that his work lives on and that French audiences hear Stallone’s characters as they always have. ‘We wanted to do something that paid homage to my father’s expertise and legacy,’ said Aurore Bergé, Alain Dorval’s daughter. We founded ElevenLabs to enable stories to reach audiences in their native language without losing the emotion and nuance that makes them captivating. Recreating a voice so deeply tied to collective memory is an exciting example of how technology can honor tradition while creating new possibilities in film production.”
In principle, we can understand the homage. But the result is distressing. In the trailer, Sly’s voice no longer has any emotion, no more life: he lacks everything that makes it a real interpretation and not a simple recitation of text. Judge for yourself…
The result is so mediocre that Aurore Bergé herself insisted on dissociating herself from these extracts: “I gave my agreement for a test. Only a test. An agreement strictly guaranteeing me that my mother and I would be in final validation before any use/publication. And that nothing could be done without our agreement. I discovered …on
Not a tribute but “an insult to his talent”
But among fans and dubbing professionals alike, his explanation remains stuck in the throat. “But why even try? wrote Donald Reignoux, French voice of Andrew Garfield, Jesse Eisenberg and Paul Dano. Your father was a great man in dubbing and I think, this is only my opinion, that he would not have liked to take the first step towards the destruction of the profession that he loved so much and what’s more… defended.”
Point of view shared by Pascale Chemin, Rose Byrne’s understudy and many Japanese animated series: “Madam, the result is not up to your dad’s standards, it is on the contrary an insult to his talent. Given his commitment to defending the profession, I am very surprised that you accepted even a trial. AI on the microphone is crap on the bar and it’s killing the profession.”
Reactions like these are pouring in on social networks. Quite simply because it is another step towards replacing dubbing actors with soulless but much cheaper voices. In Argentina, Alejandro Graue said he could no longer find work because of AI. Here, the Belgian voice actors of My Little Pony: Tell your story were replaced by AI for the second season. And in the USA, for The Mandalorian, artificial intelligence was used to complete certain sequences when the actors were unavailable. So many “developments” which raise fears of the disappearance of an entire profession, with an impoverishment of quality and originality.
Despite himself, Sylvester Stallone finds himself at the heart of a big controversy, for a voice that is not his, but with which he is so associated that it becomes painful to listen to his tasteless plagiarism generated by the ‘AI.
Already available in the USA, Armor will only be released on Amazon Prime in a few months. But without a change of voice, the controversies risk being more important than the audiences…
