In 1942, after the Battle of El Alamein, Winston Churchill famously declared that a turning point in WW2 had been reached, and that while it was not necessarily the “beginning of the end,” it was, perhaps, “the end of the beginning.”
Indeed, that speech and the events surrounding and subsequent to it did in fact turn out to be the beginning of the end of the Axis war machine, and victory became more certain with each passing day.
The fight between voice actors and AI voices, if there ever truly was one, seems to have turned a corner at a similar period in the calendar, during one of the coldest January’s on record in the United States. And while our battle has been mostly against our own fear, (now Roosevelt echoes in my mind,) the era of fear of conquest by robotic impostors may be passing into the frozen night.
Across the industry, talent, agents, managers, casting directors and other players are reporting one of the strongest starts to a year in memory. It feels like 2018 again, with work exploding from the first Monday of the year, defying the traditional pattern of a slow ramp-up and strong second half of the month. More union jobs than in recent memory, more agency work in general, more walk-ins, more old clients reaching out after absences, more direct marketing hits, more volume on P2P’s which had been in decline, and, ironically enough, more “We found you on Chat GPT.” Every iron in every fire has been glowing red for a solid month now, and it shows no sign of slowing down. In fact, one of the most amusing phenomena has been the proliferation of jobs for AI products looking for human voices.
Something has changed. A shift has occurred. And it feels more than ephemeral.
Have buyers finally started to heed the drumbeat of rejection of AI creative? Have they begun to learn that an authenticity-driven under-40 consumer market has no desire for imitation anything? And that AI art has become the Temu slop of shame?
We aren’t luddites. Where AI creates ease in our lives we will embrace it. It makes cute if sloppy media that older audiences seem to dig. Maybe someday it will perform surgery better than humans can. That’s a societal good. But society is learning to take the positive and reject the negative. When the extent of its surveillance state uses are fully exposed it will become more of a pariah than ever. The human race is too independent, ornery, and disorderly to accept the numb compliance that AI developers dream of. It will have its place. It may upend professions. But we will never accept it as art.
And numbers don’t lie.
Late last year I told Anna that 2026 felt like a make or break year for voiceover.
I think we’re gonna make it after all.
So you’re it’s the whole industry that’s doing well, NOT JUST ME on a meteoric rise???!
Guess I’m cool with that… 🙂
(But seriously – what a month!)
So you’re saying it’s the whole industry that’s doing well, NOT JUST ME on a meteoric rise???!
Guess I’m cool with that… 🙂
(But seriously – what a month!)
Great thought, JMC!
I agree that we’ve turned the corner on the AI topic. To be honest, I, like you, never hopped on the fear bandwagon like so many others did.
I do think we will continue to use AI to create more efficient workflows and to provoke thoughts that many have a hard time fleshing out on their own, but I don’t feel it has a home entirely as a creative replacement for humans. It’s maybe more of one of the paintbrushes rather than all of the brushes and the paints.
Thanks for the insights,
Michael
Agree. Though my bookings were slightly down from a very hot start last January, my auditions have doubled over last year. Definitely a move in the right direction.
That’s deep J. Mike. Going into this, I knew of the possible risks. But, I see it as learning a beautiful art that doesn’t get as much credit. Even though VO is more around the world which most people don’t notice.
So true! It was one of your LinkedIn posts that really changed my perspective towards the end of last year. It was about reframing your mindset and what we look for as VAs. Around that time, I really started to turn my attention away from the “AI Takeover” as much as realistically possible.
I focused on all the good work I was getting, talking more about the positives going on, and hunting out the good news. Call it coincidental timing if you’d like, but it was around then that I did start to see more light in the industry and its future. I stopped worrying about the robots taking the jobs I wasn’t getting and just put all my effort and focus into the work I was getting.
This is not to completely disregard a very real situation that a lot of people are fighting hard against for us, but more so to say that when I as a talent stopped giving so much fear and power to AI, I could see my clients doing the same. Excited to see what 2026 has in store for voice over!
Thanks for sharing!
To date, I have only lost one client (in 2024) to an AI voice, for very basic e-learning style modules.
Fortunately, I don’t have the bandwidth (aka brainpower) to worry too much about things I have no control over.
Also- I will never do an AI voice clone….and I agree that business is booming in 2026!
Keep up the great stuff Capt!