Our stance on AI
Written by Sasha
Very early in my narration career, I did not realise I was narrating LLM produced material until I assumed it was too late to back out of my contract. Aside from being the worst narration experience I have had to date, that book is an frankly an embarrassment to be associated with now I have spent more than five minutes in the industry. I have since turned down many projects which were written by an LLM, some partway through recording. As advice to narrators - before you submit, simply contact ACX and tell them it is an AI book, and they will take it down and end your contract. Don’t be daft like I was, it isn’t worth giving your voice to someone who does not value it.
When building this website and taking part in Human Voices Only this month, we have both given a lot of thought to our stance on generative AI. I have broken down our stances on AI Voice, LLMs, AI Art and AI Overall, as these have their own slight nuances. These stances have been formed through experience working with various authors and other narrators and being avid readers and audiobook listeners ourselves.
AI Voice
We are categorically against the use of AI voice in narration - beyond the clear ethical concerns surrounding predatory contracts selling the rights to a voice for a pittance and prayer, and in many cases blatant theft, the quality of the audiobook produced is far inferior to what a human could narrate.
If AI voiced audiobooks did not feel soulless, or effectively manage to mimic humanity enough in the future, the issue becomes skill drift - lower price, early career narrators will have a diminishing place in the market to form a portfolio. This will (hopefully) not effect established narrators overmuch, but eventually the industry will be without real new talent, ultimately leaving indie authors with a choice between AI voice and the rate of a trained stage or screen actor in a studio.
This will all but kill audiobooks - folks will effectively be going back to text to speech to listen to most books, but now paying audiobook production rates for it.
If your project links to, requests anything regarding or is linked to AI Voice on Audible or any other AI voice training whatsoever, we will not accept it. It is in our contracts with each person we work with that we do not allow our voices to be used in this way. Please do not get in touch with us for this reason.
Large Language Models (LLMs)
LLMs (Chat GPT, Claude, Gemini etc.) are now ubiquitous, integrated into search functions, social media and the majority of word processing platforms and applications, so we cannot and do not expect zero use of LLMs from the people we work with.
There is a line at which it becomes detrimental to the industry we work in however, not to mention the serious ethical concerns. Kindle is flooded with these books, and they blatantly steal from and devalue real authors. From a narrator’s perspective, LLM audiobooks and scripts are often fodder for AI training, which feed AI voices without knowledge or consent.
If you used an LLM to produce the script or audiobook you would like us to narrate, please do not get in touch, as we will not work with you.
If it is clear to us you used an LLM to assist in the writing you wish us to narrate, we will not work with you. Overuse of AI writing tools such as Grammarly or Copilot can achieve the same derivative LLM patterns, and these tools are still stealing the words of other authors.
AI Images
For the same reasons we don’t agree with the use of LLM’s or AI voice, we also don’t agree with the use of AI images for book covers and promotional material. It’s derivative, takes work away from independent artists, and may lead to a significant skill drift in the future.
It is difficult to tell, particularly recently, when an image is made using AI, so it is trust based whether or not covers and promo material are made using it, as these are usually produced by the person commissioning our narration.
We will never use AI to produce images, and we expect the people we work with to do the same.
AI Overall
AI has its place - for example, we use Izotope RX 11 Standard, an application which is the industry standard for audio editors, which uses AI to scan audio for repair and enhancement in many of its tools. AI has also been revolutionising medical imaging tech, spotting anomalies humans could not and would not have seen. AI is not one monolith technology and does have some benefits, and we are not moralising or claiming to be experts.
There does however appear to be something of a difference between AI tools which serve to make it easier for us to create, and AI tools which create for us. This line can get blurry and people see it differently, but our stance is that it is fundamentally important to keep learning these skills.
Storytelling and art are a canon. This means writing your own stories and using the work of industry professionals to create your book and audiobook, whether that be hiring people or using their expertise to learn those skills yourself.