Meet the Humans Behind AI Voices

Hey there, this morning we have a nuanced story from 404 Media's summer intern Rosie about one industry that's feeling the pressure of AI: voiceover acting. As tech companies hire humans to play the role of robot, artists are asking themselves if they're contributing to the future collapse of the industry. In the meantime, they're getting a fascinating look at how AI voices are made. One voice actor said he was asked to “affirm” someone. “That did start to send me on a bit of a mental spiral of, oh, my God, someone needs affirmation from their home assistant," he said.

Acting is an industry of feast and famine, where performers’ income can swing widely by role, by month, and by year. It’s a field where people often face the choice between passion, creativity, and taking a commercial gig for a check. As with so much else, this delicate personal calculation is now being disrupted by AI. 

Last month, online actors’ jobs boards were flooded with a very specific, very well-paid role. Nestled between student short film gigs and callouts for background dancers, was the ambiguously-named opportunity “Technology Company AI Project.” According to the job listing on cast and crew job board Mandy, it would pay up to $80,000, for only 19 total hours of work. This is unusually high for an industry where a national-level ad campaign for a big brand might pay $6,000. 

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The post was from voice acting talent agency Voice123, casting on behalf of a project by Microsoft. According to the listing, the company was looking for voice actors across 19 languages, with specific regional dialects and accents including “French from France native” and “Arabic as spoken by Palestinian/Israeli Arab communities.” 

“I get instant notifications, and I was getting so many of them,” said Katie Clark Gray, a podcaster and voice actor. The rate stood out to her. “The jobs that I tend to see are, like, £250 [about $339 USD]... it was, like, a lot of posts. The money seemed like a lot.” She said that it’s rare to get that many notifications for a recognizable brand.

The role would include recording “conversations, character voices, and natural speech to help train AI systems,” Crispin Alfario, a recruiter for the role on the Voice123 platform, told 404 Media. Alfario could not comment further due to privacy terms, but said there was “a positive response during the castings for these projects.” Clark Gray said that advertised AI roles like this are increasing in scope and in scale, and that she now sees far fewer roles available for employee training video work or industrial roles like phone menu voices — the area she got her start in over a decade ago. 

She sees accepting AI training voiceover roles as something of a Faustian bargain: They might seem like a lot of money, but they reduce the amount of work available in the future. “You're still taking away tomorrow's meal because they're offering you a little bit more,” she said. “Those 19 hours… will scale to hundreds and thousands of hours of AI output. They would otherwise have to pay for it.”

Katie Clark Gray practicing takes for a voiceover script.

I called Microsoft’s PR to ask if I could chat to someone involved in casting for the roles that Clark Gray had spotted, on the same day that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella published a note about the “recent job eliminations” of four percent of staff and pledged to “reimagine every layer of the tech stack for AI.” The next day, less than two weeks after Clark Gray spotted the Microsoft ads, the company announced a new virtual character for Copilot, the trial version of which is currently only available in English. After that announcement, a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to me that the voiceover roles I asked about were for Copilot Voice, and that they will “continue to look for more talent as [they] expand these capabilities.” I hadn’t been sure that the audition posts were linked to Copilot, but the confirmation from Microsoft confirmed that the posts that Clark Gray had spotted had been in advance of the product announcement. 

“More and more I'm seeing AI disclaimers that, by auditioning for this, you agree to have your voice and likeness used and replicated. I hate that.”  

Hunter Saling, an actor and comic based in LA, said he’s seeing more and more roles which have an AI component or require signing an AI waiver. He auditioned for a “Siri-type AI assistant,” in May. The role would have paid an amount of money where he “wouldn’t need a job” for a long time. 

“You'd be providing a whole bunch of stuff up front,” he said, “and then be paid as a performer, as a voiceover artist, to come back on a yearly basis to do more stuff.”

Hunter Saling practicing takes for a voiceover script.

I wondered if this was another situation where an audition was the first public hint of a product launch in the space, but Saling couldn’t tell me the company he’d auditioned for, due to confidentiality. I kept an eye out for new Siri-type AI agents that might be able to pay life-changing money and, while I was writing this story, on July 17, OpenAI launched their ChatGPT agent—a Siri-type AI assistant. OpenAI is also known to use Mercor, an AI-enabled recruitment platform, which was recently posting about voice casting for a “top AI Lab.” 

The AI-assistant voice audition process was very different from usual, Saling said. He described the voice he did as “the performance of no performance;” a voice that was “not personality free, but, like, neutral, but friendly and helpful.” He describes the work he did on the audition as “not children's host, but also not robotic either… I read a story, some recipe directions, and some just general sentences.” 

On August 7, OpenAI announced ChatGPT 5 which would have several new personalities, but the company said that those personalities would not apply to voice mode. 

Being selected for this kind of windfall could alter the course of an actor’s life.

One part of the audition script stood out to Saling: He was asked to “affirm” someone. “That did start to send me on a bit of a mental spiral of, oh, my God, someone needs affirmation from their home assistant.” 

Auditioning for this role also posed an ethical question. “I will say I was surprised in myself that I was OK doing this,” he said. “More and more I'm seeing AI disclaimers that, by auditioning for this, you agree to have your voice and likeness used and replicated. I hate that.”  

The last couple of years have seen the entertainment industry in turmoil over the use of AI in screen and voiceover work. Both the four month SAG-AFTRA actor’s strike in 2023, as well as their almost year-long video games strike, which ended last month, focused on the use of AI. The agreements which ended the strikes describe different industry categories of AI use, differentiating between the kind of AI which digitally alters or replicates the work of a particular actor, and generative AI which is trained using actor’s work or creates a “synthetic performer.”

Saling does agree with this technical difference, between delivering an artistic or creative performance that can be altered, perfected, or smoothed out later, and providing a voice to be re-created for industrial use, like in an AI assistant. Creating the neutral voice of an AI assistant, to be generatively replicated, is industrial, rather than artistic; “this is something that... it's not a performance, it's not a character. It's a tool,” he said. 

Clark Gray is not financially dependent on her voice acting career, and her calculus in auditioning is different. She didn’t submit for the Microsoft role, but “wouldn't fault anybody for going out for that job,” she said. “That’s a year’s salary for a lot of people.” But she also feels a difference in applying  for creative voiceover roles vs industrial ones; “​I think the cartoon voices are much more fun. I don't know anybody who doesn't,” she said. “You do bring a sort of artistic, like, extra sauce to it. Creating a character really does take something different than reading something in a neutral voice.”

Saling said that he thinks the adoption of AI taps into the entertainment industry’s commercially-driven but counterproductive desire to create mass appeal via synthetic perfection. “Sometimes I feel like Lear yelling at a storm on the fucking cliff,” he added — with a theatricality ChatGPT could only dream of.