The article uses Kafkaesque and boy I cannot think of a better way to describe having to prove to platforms your voice is real because it had been stolen at such scale that people assume it is AI.
I got a human taste of this in open source a few times: someone would suggest we use project Y rather than building it ourselves. I look at project Y and it's someone trying to make a business out of my FOSS code.
This is getting worse with AI, as things move too fast for anyone to verify, and AI is getting better at washing things.
What are you going to do when someone takes your thing with AI and then you're asked to prove it's yours, disputing their mountain of AI generated evidence? The legal system is not prepared to handle what's coming.
Voice acting has always been a dying art, but AI for sure is killing it
Unless the work is higher end theres just so much hassle working with humans. You got to do a casting call, wait weeks to get 100 applicants, listen to all of them, and pray that the VA still actually does a good job. Ive hired VAs in the past and unless the work is very high end, we choose AI and this trend doesnt seem to be stopping.
For consumers, they dont seem to notice or care. For instance, all those movie recap videos you see on youtube? All AI narration. Those still get 100k+ views
The bigger factor for quite some time has been the 10x of low-end competition since just pre-pandemic. Hard to find a decent human, hard for a human to start out and rise above the sludge. There has been a similar 10x of desire for VO, since online marketplaces made it cheap and (formerly) easy to get.
Also, a huge amount of VO has been literally unpaid. Producers often tell the story of learning from clients paying for good VO that it took them years to make the journey from having employees / friends etc "just talk it" and find out that "talking" is actually acting. "They don't pay for it until they learn they have to," one advertising agency founder told me over ten years ago. AI is slowing their journey to paying for good voice actors.
I used to hire owners of talent agencies, owners of recording studios, owners of advertising agencies to speak and train at our nearly 80 large public events (the Voice Acting Expo) at conference hotels, and learned a lot of "from the horse's mouth" info about the inside of the industry. We would record as many as 350 sessions/day, each with a studio room, coach, engineer, script and admin for every few room. Scheduling nightmare, but tons of fun.
So the VA jobs are dying are the low end side(like how we see jobs getting fired due to an overhiring prepandemic)?
Cuz i agree, if theres good acting, good voices, paying humans is a no brainer. Theres just so much sludge and it feels hard to get into contact with good VAs
We saw a trickle of decent new young-to-middle-aged talent that was prompted in part by heavy marketing of VO training 20 years ago—many weren't sure what it was.
But the animation and video game and social media meme generation knew from near birth was voice acting was, and the "instant success" of the early pandemic driving huge numbers to establised VOs on online marketplace led to the next marketing glut: "Look how I easily I make $10,000/mo".
The ease of (starting on) the marketplaces, the rise of the least-talented at age of "I want to do this", most interested in voiceover generation combined with the get-rich-quick from home just blitzed everywhere with no-quality, no business skill newbies. Just an astonishing locust storm, and virtually all of the "how to" information they are consuming is out-of-date, leading to a lowering of already low business skills. As you say, the difficulty seen in finding a good VA gives a different picture than too many buyers want AI. Almost all the NON buyers want AI.
Btw I know what I said is inflammatory, but this is what Im seeing in industry. Only exception would be in high end work like key VAs in shows and movies
You thinking this is an epiphany makes me feel you severely overlook the impact AI already has on the world, affecting everyone. This seems very minor in comparison.
i'd love to join a cooperative myself. there exist a number of them. they mostly seem to do outsourcing/contract work. i suspect that they don't attract investors because the profit distribution would be different from the usual start-ups.
I saw a similar story in Chinese media recently. It was about an actor who rented out their likeness rights to an AI company. Becoming an actor is incredibly difficult, starting with connections and all that, and they still had to make a living. So they sold their likeness rights to an AI company.
The AI company then used the actor's likeness to create AI videos with the actor's face. The problem was that the public judged the quality of the AI videos as low quality. Whether that judgment was true or just prejudice, it ended up tarnishing the actor's image as cheap as well. The actor became stuck as a low quality actor who could not land any major roles.
These days, users perceive AI as low quality, yet they create so much with it and consume so much of it. The irony is that if this keeps up, humans might end up imitating AI.
The article uses Kafkaesque and boy I cannot think of a better way to describe having to prove to platforms your voice is real because it had been stolen at such scale that people assume it is AI.
I got a human taste of this in open source a few times: someone would suggest we use project Y rather than building it ourselves. I look at project Y and it's someone trying to make a business out of my FOSS code.
This is getting worse with AI, as things move too fast for anyone to verify, and AI is getting better at washing things.
What are you going to do when someone takes your thing with AI and then you're asked to prove it's yours, disputing their mountain of AI generated evidence? The legal system is not prepared to handle what's coming.
Voice acting has always been a dying art, but AI for sure is killing it
Unless the work is higher end theres just so much hassle working with humans. You got to do a casting call, wait weeks to get 100 applicants, listen to all of them, and pray that the VA still actually does a good job. Ive hired VAs in the past and unless the work is very high end, we choose AI and this trend doesnt seem to be stopping.
For consumers, they dont seem to notice or care. For instance, all those movie recap videos you see on youtube? All AI narration. Those still get 100k+ views
The bigger factor for quite some time has been the 10x of low-end competition since just pre-pandemic. Hard to find a decent human, hard for a human to start out and rise above the sludge. There has been a similar 10x of desire for VO, since online marketplaces made it cheap and (formerly) easy to get.
Also, a huge amount of VO has been literally unpaid. Producers often tell the story of learning from clients paying for good VO that it took them years to make the journey from having employees / friends etc "just talk it" and find out that "talking" is actually acting. "They don't pay for it until they learn they have to," one advertising agency founder told me over ten years ago. AI is slowing their journey to paying for good voice actors.
I used to hire owners of talent agencies, owners of recording studios, owners of advertising agencies to speak and train at our nearly 80 large public events (the Voice Acting Expo) at conference hotels, and learned a lot of "from the horse's mouth" info about the inside of the industry. We would record as many as 350 sessions/day, each with a studio room, coach, engineer, script and admin for every few room. Scheduling nightmare, but tons of fun.
So the VA jobs are dying are the low end side(like how we see jobs getting fired due to an overhiring prepandemic)?
Cuz i agree, if theres good acting, good voices, paying humans is a no brainer. Theres just so much sludge and it feels hard to get into contact with good VAs
We saw a trickle of decent new young-to-middle-aged talent that was prompted in part by heavy marketing of VO training 20 years ago—many weren't sure what it was.
But the animation and video game and social media meme generation knew from near birth was voice acting was, and the "instant success" of the early pandemic driving huge numbers to establised VOs on online marketplace led to the next marketing glut: "Look how I easily I make $10,000/mo".
The ease of (starting on) the marketplaces, the rise of the least-talented at age of "I want to do this", most interested in voiceover generation combined with the get-rich-quick from home just blitzed everywhere with no-quality, no business skill newbies. Just an astonishing locust storm, and virtually all of the "how to" information they are consuming is out-of-date, leading to a lowering of already low business skills. As you say, the difficulty seen in finding a good VA gives a different picture than too many buyers want AI. Almost all the NON buyers want AI.
Btw I know what I said is inflammatory, but this is what Im seeing in industry. Only exception would be in high end work like key VAs in shows and movies
I'm curious to know what constitutes "higher end". Obviously a theater release isn't going AI yet, but where down the scale do they start using it?
I would say anything where the budget is more than 5-10k and has a production timeline of more than 3 months
Then your time cost of finding VA(1+ month) and paying them is a smaller fraction overall
There we are. A real-world impact to the technology we, as technologists, develop and speak/preach/mandate too-little IMO about how it should be used.
You thinking this is an epiphany makes me feel you severely overlook the impact AI already has on the world, affecting everyone. This seems very minor in comparison.
> we, as technologists, develop and speak/preach/mandate too-little IMO
Has anyone done an employee-coöperative tech start-up?
i'd love to join a cooperative myself. there exist a number of them. they mostly seem to do outsourcing/contract work. i suspect that they don't attract investors because the profit distribution would be different from the usual start-ups.
Which countries legally protect one's likeness as one's IP? (Are you allowed to transfer it in them?)
Likeness as IP is a bad framework. Nonetheless, that appears to be the dominant approach. Wikipedia has a list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights
I saw a similar story in Chinese media recently. It was about an actor who rented out their likeness rights to an AI company. Becoming an actor is incredibly difficult, starting with connections and all that, and they still had to make a living. So they sold their likeness rights to an AI company.
The AI company then used the actor's likeness to create AI videos with the actor's face. The problem was that the public judged the quality of the AI videos as low quality. Whether that judgment was true or just prejudice, it ended up tarnishing the actor's image as cheap as well. The actor became stuck as a low quality actor who could not land any major roles.
These days, users perceive AI as low quality, yet they create so much with it and consume so much of it. The irony is that if this keeps up, humans might end up imitating AI.