ChatGPT. A.I. Text to speech. Speech to speech. Are the digital boogeymen finally here to decimate voice acting and beat us up and take our lunch money? [Boo! Give me your lunch money.]

Today we're going to talk about ChatGPT specifically and A.I. in general to kind of make sense out of all the fear and hype in the voice acting community.

As voice actors, we know how important it is to bring ourselves into the booth, our unique qualities, our ability to break down and interpret scripts, and to be able to use all the technical tools at our disposal, tone and cadence and pitch, and to give great performances that provide real value to the entertainment and communication worlds.

But with the rise of artificial intelligence and machine learning, a lot of us are asking ourselves, Well, hell, how do we even stay relevant in a world that is changing at light speed?

Enter ChatGPT

It's now April 2023, and I'm pretty sure that before January of this year nobody had heard of ChatGPT. And suddenly in a matter of a few months it's generated an incredible level of buzz and an incredible level of hype and striking fear into a lot of us in the voice acting community. And by the way, it's striking fear into a lot of writers as well. And I sympathize with you there, too.

But what is ChatGPT and how does it fit into the world of voice acting into our world?

ChatGPT is an AI language model that's been trained on massive amounts of data, books, articles, blog posts, even online conversations, and it's able to generate text that is so humanlike it's hard for you and I to tell what's been generated by ChatGPT and what's actually been written by a human writer.

And while ChatGPT currently can't generate physical audio, can't generate voices, when paired with a text to speech app, it absolutely can. You can go online right now and find several, already, Chrome extensions that plug in to ChatGPT and allow you to have a conversation just like you would Alexa or Siri or any virtual assistant.

Scary stuff, right?

But does that mean that ChatGPT is an instant replacement for human voice actors? No, it does not.

Look, while it's certainly an impressive tool, there's no doubt about that, it is not a replacement for human voice actors just yet. And here's why. For one thing, there's the personal touch that only a human can bring to a project.

We all, for example, break down scripts in our own unique way. We all identify nuance in emotion and detail in a unique way to each individual voice actor. We bring that level of detail to each performance and we take direction. In other words, when we don't hit the mark that the client has in mind, we're able to take direction on the fly from another human being and interpret that direction and adjust our performances on an ongoing basis.

A.I. simply cannot do that.

And let's not forget about the importance of our voices and the vocal qualities that we bring as well. And I hear you already, you're saying, "Well, Paul, we already know that A.I. can replicate the vocal qualities of a given voice actor." We learned that firsthand in our interview with Remie Michelle Clarke.

So we already know that companies like Revoicer and Respeecher and Speechelo can already reproduce our vocal qualities, but what they cannot reproduce is acting. That level of detail I was talking about in the in the nuance in the true human emotion, the authentic human emotion that we bring to each and every performance.

Yes, they can replicate our vocal qualities.

And this is why I believe that apps like ChatGPT and Speechelo, etc. will come along and decimate the entire bottom end of our business in the next couple to few years.

Now, when I say bottom end of the business, I mean work that doesn't rely on the more sophisticated skill sets that we've developed as highly trained voice actors, that doesn't rely on nuance and detail and genuine human emotion as much.

I'm talking about work like IVR, like compliance-driven corporate training, where clients are just trying to check a box and be done with something. Those genres that don't rely as much on acting and on higher levels of performance, those are the areas where AI is already making quick and early inroads and I expect that to continue.

But professional voice actors who continue to hone their craft, who continue to emphasize the acting in voice acting and to keep focused on the quality of the performance, those actors will continue to work.

That's why your number one job is to constantly be improving. If you're not getting better, you're getting worse, and to be honing your craft as an actor in whichever genres you choose to work.

My recommendation, knowing that this is the trend, is to get really friggin' good in the genres that rely more heavily on great performances, on great acting, like commercial, including political and automotive, like promo and trailer and video games and animation and fictional audio books and feature films. And in show narration and documentary and the like.

If you're an actor, and not just a reader, you will continue to work and work a lot.

What Does It All MEAN?

So what does all this mean in the bigger picture for voice acting and for our community?

I think what it means is that well-trained, professional voice actors will end up working alongside artificial intelligence in a way that I think ultimately could be very symbiotic.

A.I. can be a powerful tool for us voice actors and I think can help us begin to push the limits of what's possible. For example, creating character voices. Oftentimes we are constantly challenged to create new and interesting and unique character voices. And I think we can use a I kind of like a training partner, not as a coach, but as a training partner to begin to generate the seeds of what those new and interesting characters and voices and accents may become.

We can take the germ of whatever gives us as a as our virtual training partner and begin to develop those characters and those accents and those performances that may not have been as easily or organically generated by us as artists.

And I think we will find ways to use AI to generate passive income by licensing our voices to work for us in a way that we're financially protected. We can work while we're sleeping if our digital voice is doing the work for us, in some ways, and that's already starting to happen.

HERE TO STAY

The fact is ChatGPT, artificial intelligence, it's here to stay. It's not going anywhere.

And we better learn as voice actors to stay relevant in a world that is changing very rapidly. How do we do that?

I think first we recognize that these tools are simply that they're another tool in our toolbox, just like a word processor or a D.A.W. or a new piece of audio gear. It's another tool that we can use to help us get better at our craft and turn in better performances.

Secondly, and most importantly, to stay focused on the craft, to continue to become great actors and to hone our abilities as storytellers.

So we have two choices. In the end, we can either cower away from and rail against A.I., or we can begin to embrace it and leverage it. As Marcus Aurelius, the great stoic emperor, once said, "The obstacle is the way."

The VO Freedom Master Plan will give you a proven plan and system to start marketing your services to clients directly, which is the most stable way to build your clientele.

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As always, I am so grateful for your support. We'll see you back here next week with another episode. In the meantime, have a lovely week.