“I refuse (voiceover) work that states they’ll take my voice and make an AI model from it,” voice actor Brad Ziffer told CNBC. “The best way to protect myself is to just stay away.”
As you should. There is a big difference between narrating and giving away personality rights.
But the article kind of negates the title.
However, experts say seamlessly replicating the way a human talks with AI is still a ways away. Human beings offer unique intonation, cadence, and emotion when they speak.
Voice artist narration for big title releases isn’t going away anytime soon. And if it does the job is going to be replaced with technical/artistic jobs fine tuning the generated narration.
What I actually see happening in the short term is it becoming profitable to do generative narration of smaller authors and books that would be profitable using traditional voice work.
In time I could see this working it’s way up the budget ladder into larger projects but that’s still a way off.
I buy a lot of Audiobooks. I wouldn’t buy a book with an AI narrator. A good narrator is vital to my enjoyment.
Some narrators really elevate a book and make it a better, richer experience. Even if they get AI narrators to sound natural, I don’t see how they can capture the emotions of a good book. Be a hard pass for me too.
I wonder, does the voice actors gets any compensation for AI generated lines? Say a flat pay for each minute of AI audio?
It would be whatever is negotiated in the personality rights contract. I think voice actors have a union so I could see a standardized contract negotiated by the union.
I recently started listening to “audiobooks” by using Google’s text-to-speech voices with epubs. It took a little bit to get used to the machine voice because it certainly isn’t perfect, but I’ve happily listened to so many non-fiction books this way now. I still buy real audiobooks when they’re available, but the TTS voices have been a great way for me to listen to books that I never would have physically read because an audio version wasn’t available. I still prefer real people, but I’m selfishly looking forward to improved AI voices too.
