Narration
No AI was used in the creation of this file, just my own skills as an announcer and audio producer.
Song: "Ray Bradbury Was Right About Everything"
I mentioned on my About page that I'm a former voiceover artist, but I never really expounded upon that. In order to get into why I'm a former voiceover artist, we need to get into storytime a bit.
First of all, what even is a "voiceover artist"? That's a neat way of saying "voice actor and announcer" to put onto your curriculum vitae. It's sort of like saying "Optical Drive" instead of "CD/DVD/BR-ROM Drive"; it's shorter but it still gets the point across. Up until late 2021, I was making probably not enough money being an announcer for local commercial spots. I was even the voice of my local cinema chain's COVID19 mask announcement. It's something special, hearing your voice over Dolby Surround Sound cinema speakers. However, those days are over. Why? Well...
I used to have a profile on Voices.com. In early 2022, I started hearing about professional voice actors with filmographies as long as my arm taking to social media to call out people who had fed their voices into 15.ai and were making internet memes with them saying stuff they would never say. Such as Erin Fitzgerald's voice spouting homophobic slurs and David Hayter's voice being used for fake rightist re-election campaign videos. But also, just the fact that these people's voices were able to be duplicated passibly by AI meant no one would ever need to hire them for anything ever again. More than just politics, it was the fact that people's voices were being stolen because "oh, well, it's a transformative work and you're in the public domain anyway, so fuck you." At first, it was just voice actors; cartoon voice actors mainly, like Jason Griffiths and Kristen Schaal; then they started doing everyone with a demo reel, and now they're doing A-list celebrities, like Gene Hackman and Scarlett Johanssen.
But, let's back up a bit and unpack "then they started doing everyone with a demo reel". The thing that finally drove me off Voices.com was a sudden influx of audition requests from Google. They were targeted specifically towards users with free accounts and had very odd requirements for acceptable auditions: no music, no room noise, lossless FLAC files only, and be sure to use this copy that we provide, click there to download it. In elementary school, kids were always trying to trick me about something or other, so I developed my sense of suspicion earlier than most. So, to have this huge, wealthy corporation with the biggest name to drop in a circle of starving artists suddenly drop its name into our zoo enclosure raised a big red flag. This wasn't an isolated incident, either. I had just discovered that the agencies I was preparing demo reels for had changed their reel requirements to 15 seconds' worth of ALL the standard announcement styles (eg. personal, professional, cheerful)! I was like, that's 1.5 minutes' worth of audio, who the hell's gonna be listening to that? Especially since they probably get something like 50 demo reels every single day, that's an incredible backlog. Feeling the same ick as I would later get on Voices.com, I decided to check the agencies' sample contracts. It turned out that all 3 of them had amended their contracts to include a "fraud protection" clause, which stated quite clearly that the agency would be at liberty to convert any and all demo reels into AI-generated speech synthesisers. The "fraud" they were "protecting" themselves from was workers trying to get paid. I have absolutely no doubt that all the suckers Google managed to con into auditioning for their illusory commercial spot ended up being the company's first generation of AI TTS engines.
It seemed unreal to me how many people, even established voice actors like James Earl Jones, were just bending knee to this technology that was going to take away their livelihoods whether they wanted it to or not. And, of course, the American courts are all political machines in and of themselves that are all paid not to care when someone who isn't a giant multinational corporation decides to come with a copyright infringement suit. The suit that would have prevented all this AI fuckery ever happening at all was Standing v. TikTok, wherein Bev Standing alleged her voice had been stolen by Oracle and turned into "The TikTok Lady" speech synthesiser without her consent. The judge decided not to hear the case, effectively ruling in favour of Oracle. While Bev made enough of a stink about it to get TikTok to change the TTS engine to someone else, the lack of any clear ruling opened the doors on voice theft and now permits huge multinational corporations to record voices without the subject's knowledge and convert them into speech synthesisers without the subject's consent. Amazon has tried to sugarcoat this process with feelgood sob-stories about little kids having their dead grandmas tell them they love them or to have mum or dad read them bedtime stories without their actually being there, but the principle is the same: use AI to duplicate someone's voice. And, may I ask, what exactly happens to that voice once it is no longer needed? Does it just get deleted and forgotten? No! It gets stored in the company's datacentre forever and, if the company decides to use it for monetary gains, that's its right and there's nothing anyone can do to stop it.
In spite of all this, I still thought I had an advantage, living in this particular US state. Conservatives like to say that "Nebraska values" are better than everyone else's for unspecified reasons. Not "Nebraska family values", but just "Nebraska values", covering everything that happens here under a single umbrella of "Nebraska values". Moreover, people in power positions here seemed to have an innate distrust or hatred of anything "West Coast"; so it seemed like advertisers here would be the last ones to adopt AI voice duplication. But, it was not to last. As with everything else, the corporate feudal state corrupts everything it touches. The last straw that made me realise I had zero future as a voiceover artist was when I went to the grocery store one day last year and I heard that B&R Stores had stolen the voice of their young male announcer, turned it into a speech synthesiser with a cheap duplicator like 15.ai, and was having it read a statement of values for the Russ's Market brand. I hope you can appreciate how ironic that is: a statement of values and integrity being made by a speech synthesiser built from the voice of a living person who hadn't done anything more sinister than come in to record an announcement one day in 2016. This was right before I discovered that they had also stolen the voice of their young female announcer in the same way and was using it to advertise a wine and cheese event at the executive hotel downtown. Nebraska values could not save these people from having their voices nicked by the corporate feudal state, so what chance did I have? Especially when they don't even need any more than your demo reel to steal your voice for all time.
Perhaps the worst thing about generative AI in general is that it's made people forget that they have skills. "I can't be bothered to read this, I'll just have ChatGPT summarise it for me." "I can't be bothered to announce my own YouTube video, I'll just paste the script into a Google voice prompt." "I can't be bothered, I'll have AI do it for me." You're never going to get me onto the AI hype train so stop trying. I've seen the damage that generative AI has done to every single facet of society, how much it's corrupted the human soul into accepting mediocre content rather than striving for even a single degree of excellence, how people have lost their jobs to AI systems that don't even work unless you have a team of 15 interns standing by to fix its mistakes. And, despite it all, generative AI is still an environmental suck-hole. It still empties aquifers, eats entire glaciers, burns down forests, and pollutes beyond belief. I see people ask a lot, "How is ChatGPT or whatever other AI system going to improve in 10 years?" The answer is, the planet is not going to last for 10 years unless ALL generative AI systems shut down tomorrow.
Didn't want you thinking I'd forgotten about that.