Matthew McConaughey trademarking himself saying 'alright, alright, alright' is a preview of Hollywood’s coming AI identity crisis

The legal battles over synthetic celebrities are only beginning

16 Jan 2026, 12:46 · TechRadar

Opinion By Eric Hal Schwartz published 16 January 2026

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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.

Filing a few trademarks now might scare off a few rogue YouTubers using AI to imitate his catchphrases. But McConaughey and other celebrities are uneasy for a reason. Movie stars, singers, and famous people of all stripes see the viral fake Drake songs that sound real enough to fool Spotify, or the videos showing Tom Cruise in movie roles he never booked. And they know those aren't made with approval or compensation of the humans they're based on.

What McConaughey is really doing is preemptively staking a legal claim on the parts of himself that AI could soon reproduce at scale without his involvement, permission, or benefit. That iconic three-word drawl and slow porch stare are now registered and protected. But putting up a fence around your digital likeness will likely prove more complicated than filing a few applications.

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.

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