VO Infusion

Deb's skeptic-to-optimist journey

Deb came to AI the way most of our colleagues did... scared of it. What moved her was a caller on VO Radio, a 23-year-old who heard veterans telling her to run from anything AI and asked, fair enough, how she was supposed to live in her own society. Deb's reaction: "we're being dinosaurs here."

I have my own stake in this. Selfishly, I don't want anybody getting access to my voice, and I've stepped away from the TTS work I used to love. But I've also watched more than one friend lose their voice to ALS, big personalities left typing through that same Stephen Hawking voice. So I'm protective and curious at the same time, and this episode is about why that's allowed.

What Deb and I get into

- Two camps is a false choice. Right now you're supposed to either be fine with AI or think it's the most evil thing ever laid upon us. I think you can live in both, and that's a healthy place to be.

- Build a philosophy before you buy a subscription. The phrase in my head constantly is "stop paying for subscriptions and start building a philosophy." Then buy (or build) the tools that serve it.

- A clone for the day your voice goes. The meat-and-potatoes voice actor makes five figures and probably has no disability insurance. A clone you own, API and all, could keep that person earning after a stroke or an illness.

- Protect the work while you learn the tools. Support the NO FAKES Act effort and read up on the ELVIS Act. Deb points to Tim Friedlander of NAVA walking away from a production that went almost all AI, and says that choice deserves respect, same as the choice to dive in.

- Room for the weirdo. Creatives have mostly carved themselves out of the AI conversation in protest, and if you have no voice in it, you won't like the outcome. Incubators have always kept out the weird person with the crazy idea, and the new ones have room for them.

The line to take away

Deb still says she has every right to be skeptical, and she does. What changed is that she decided to educate and equip herself before scaring anyone else, because that 23-year-old caller will work in a very different industry than the one we came up in.

Mentioned in this episode

- NAVA

- Tim Friedlander

- VO Radio

- ElevenLabs

- Stephen Hawking

- NO FAKES Act

- ELVIS Act

VO Infusion is co-hosted by Deb Munro and Keith Norton.

Find more at voinfusion.com.

Technology has been changing voiceover for a long time

Deb opens with the question that changed her thinking. A young voice actor called in to VO Radio and said she understood why veterans were telling her to stay away from AI, but this is the only world she knows, so teach her how to live in it. Deb took that to heart, and it's a big part of why we started this show.

I brought an article to the conversation, Jordan Bain's "What If You're the One Killing Art?", about how artists pushed back on Photoshop before it became something nobody works without. Autocorrect, the spectral cleanup in Adobe Audition, the home studio itself... technology has been reshaping our work for decades, and we tend to stop noticing it once it's useful.

What Deb and I get into

- Why the VO Radio caller's question pushed Deb to look at AI differently.

- Reel-to-reel to digital, big studio mixers to home setups, and what we lose when we stop working in studios together.

- Questions are king: the better you frame your question, the better the answer you get from these tools.

- Deb on the warnings she got about non-union work early in her career, and the real effect it had on rates.

- E-learning and cloned voices: cheaper today, but companies will eventually have to measure whether anyone is actually learning.

- A friend using AI to build a business plan for his golf brand, and why I think this could be a rebirth for entrepreneurs.

The line to take away

My fundamental belief is that AI isn't going to take anybody's job. A person who learns how to use AI is going to take their job. Creatives need to put themselves into this discussion, because so far they've been missing from it.

Mentioned in this episode

- VO Radio

- NAVA

- CAVA

- Jordan Bain, "What If You're the One Killing Art?"

- Photoshop

- Adobe Audition

VO Infusion is co-hosted by Deb Munro and Keith Norton.

Find more at voinfusion.com.

Meet your hosts, and why we started a show about AI

Deb and I kick off VO Infusion by introducing ourselves. Deb has been a non-union voice actor for more than 35 years, working from her home studio in Canada long before COVID made that normal, and she sees this moment as the start of a wave of technology that isn't really all that new. The two of us were introduced through a mentor we share, Elaine Clark.

My path was different. I spent my career as a university fundraiser before I found voice acting, and I got my demo done in about six months by taking every class I could and practicing in small, focused chunks, the way I learned to practice as a college athlete. My interest in AI goes back to my time at Stanford, where the Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence was bringing in law, policy, philosophy and business to look at the human side of the technology. That's where I figured out the philosophy interested me more than the tools.

What Deb and I get into

- Booking my first client a week after finishing my demo, and why 20 focused minutes of practice beats four unfocused hours.

- Deb's decades of working from home, and how the rest of the industry finally caught up after COVID.

- The research paper I handed in at Rutgers in 1996 with URLs as citations, and the professor who had never seen one.

- The self-driving car question Stanford wrestled with: what happens to the people who drive for a living?

- Why I started telling colleagues back in 2018 that a buyout probably isn't enough, and that we need to license our voices.

The line to take away

There's a prison of two ideas right now, where AI is either wonderful or horrible. It's much more complex than that, and working through the complexity is what this show is for.

Mentioned in this episode

- Elaine Clark

- Voice One (San Francisco)

- Trent Dilfer

- Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI)

- Rutgers University

VO Infusion is co-hosted by Deb Munro and Keith Norton.

Find more at voinfusion.com.