AI is Coming for the Creatives

FranMorelandJohns
4 min readMay 21, 2024

Writer? Voice Actor? Audiobook Reader? Our livelihoods are up for grabs

Photo by Andrea De Santis on Unsplash

A recent New York Times story tells of two voice actors, Linnea Sage and Paul Skye Lehrman, who were stunned to hear his A.I.-stolen voice coming from a podcast. They’re suing. The case is being reported elsewhere, amid theories of potential satisfaction for the couple — or not.

Nobody wants to clone my voice. Whew. Although I still do public talks and presentations, mainly on end of life issues for a nonprofit I support, my voice is old and raspy and revered primarily by my children, who advise me to think of it as sexy. (Good luck with that, Fran.)

But my words? Trillions of them are out there in cyberspace. A.I.’s for the taking. And the world population’s for the using.

It’s possible that not many people want to clone my words either. But I have worked extremely hard, over many decades as a reporter, essayist, author, speech-writer, blogger, you name it, to put them together in a fashion that hopefully provides information, entertainment and — most importantly — Truth.

A.I. does not recognize truth. Nor does it recognize empathy, persuasion or compassion, among other valuable emotional traits.

If you’re a writer, you probably seek to build a reputation (or not) for writing truth. It…

--

--

FranMorelandJohns

Lifelong newspaper & magazine writer, author, blogger at franjohns.net, agitator for justice, kindness & interfaith understanding.