J. Michael Collins

Voiceover has developed a new purity test.

In recent weeks, there has been increasing discussion and considerable opprobrium surrounding AI-generated graphics used to promote voice talent, demo producers, coaches, and other industry services. Someone posts a flyer featuring a suspiciously flawless human with seven knuckles and the emotional warmth of a hotel-lobby mannequin, and VO Facebook immediately convenes a tribunal.

The broad criticism is understandable. Fully generated AI graphics often look cheap, generic, and strangely disconnected from the person or service being promoted. They can make an otherwise credible offering feel disposable. Worse, many artists see their use as a betrayal of the creative community at a moment when performers, illustrators, designers, photographers, and writers are fighting to protect the value of human work.

I largely agree.

A fully AI-generated promotional flyer is usually a bad look. It may save money, but it can also communicate that the person making the offer was unwilling to invest in the same kind of human creativity they expect others to value. When you are marketing to artists, using an automated system to imitate artists is not exactly a subtle choice.

It is the branding equivalent of arriving at a farm-to-table restaurant with a microwave burrito and asking whether anyone has an outlet.

But does this conversation lose an important distinction? Is something generated by AI the same as something created by a human and touched up with AI?

Those are not identical processes, and pretending they are makes the discussion less useful. And many traditional graphic editing software programs are now incorporating AI elements without always clearly requiring an opt-in.

I pay human graphic designers to create templates, layouts, branding systems, and visual identities. Those designs begin with a human being making creative decisions. They involve taste, judgment, communication, revision, and an understanding of the brand.

I may later use AI-assisted tools to sharpen details, resize elements, improve legibility, or fill an existing human-created template with new text. The foundational creative work remains human. The tool is helping maintain consistency or adapt a template.

That is very different from typing, “Create an inspirational voiceover conference flyer featuring a diverse group of smiling actors in a futuristic recording studio,” and allowing a machine to produce the entire concept, composition, and final image while one unfortunate microphone melts into a nearby elbow.

Unfortunately, social platforms do not always communicate that nuance. Content that has merely been sharpened, reformatted, or adjusted with an AI-enabled tool may still receive an “AI Info” label. A viewer may reasonably assume the entire graphic was generated from scratch when, in fact, a human designer created the original and the AI involvement was closer to retouching or production assistance.

That difference matters.

It also raises a larger question that the voiceover community—and the artistic community more broadly—needs to answer honestly:

Where do you stand?

Is AI completely forbidden?

Does paying for an AI subscription make someone complicit, even when the tool is used for research organization, data cleanup, formatting, marketing lists, transcription, or improving human-created material?

Is there an acceptable middle ground in which generative impersonation is rejected, but non-generative assistance is treated like any other productivity technology?

Or are you fully pro-AI and comfortable using it wherever it saves time or money? I’m often surprised by how many VO’s are.

There is no shortage of loud opinions. What is often missing is a clearly defined principle.

If your position is that all AI use is a betrayal of artists, that is at least coherent……but it requires consistency. It means examining the AI features quietly embedded in editing software, smartphones, search engines, email platforms, photo applications, transcription tools, and countless other products.

If your position is that AI is acceptable only when it does not replace human creativity, define what “replace” means. Does sharpening a human-designed graphic qualify? What about generating a background? Removing an object from a photograph? Suggesting a headline? Reformatting copy? Filling in a template? Airbrushing that little mole on my nose? (Thanks iPhone.)

If you are completely comfortable with generative AI, you should still consider the message your choices send to an industry whose central product is human performance. Something can be legally available, inexpensive, and efficient while still being strategically tone-deaf and based on plagiarism.

And then there is the question of calling people out.

Do voiceover professionals who blatantly use fully generative AI to market themselves deserve public criticism? What do you think?

To me, the useful conversation is not whether AI is angelic or demonic. It is whether a particular use replaces human creativity, assists human creativity, misrepresents its origins, damages trust, or meaningfully undermines the artistic community.

So think about your line.

Not the line that earns the most applause in a Facebook thread. Not the line that changes depending on whether you like the person being criticized. Your actual line.

What tools will you use? What work will you protect? What choices will you disclose? What compromises are acceptable to you—and why?

AI is not going away. Probably. Neither is the need for human judgment.

And right now, judgment may be the most important creative tool we have.

Voice actors have legitimate grievances.

Rates have been stressed. Usage has become broader and murkier. Payment terms can stretch from inconvenient to absurd. Access to meaningful opportunities is uneven, competition is relentless, and too many companies seem to believe “in perpetuity” is a reasonable thing to request in exchange for the financial equivalent of a moderately enthusiastic grocery run.

Add artificial intelligence, unauthorized voice cloning, opaque casting systems, predatory pay-to-play models, and the expectation that talent should continuously invest in training, equipment, demos, marketing, and technology, and there is plenty worth fighting over.

None of those concerns becomes less legitimate because someone else has it worse.

But perspective still matters.

This past weekend, I got to visit with two of my favorite colleagues on a quick jaunt to Louisville and Nashville. After flying into Louisville for a dinner and unexpected graveyard tour with AJ McKay, I ordered an Uber to Nashville to meet with Kayla Jackson the next day. My driver was a disabled veteran. He was thoughtful, capable, and easy to talk to, and over the course of the trip we discussed the economics of what he does.

He was being paid approximately $185 for the ride. He told me Uber had taken roughly half of what I paid.

That $185 represented three hours driving me to my destination…..and, in all likelihood, another three hours driving home without a passenger. Six hours of his time. Gas. Taxes. Maintenance. Depreciation. All the invisible little expenses that quietly nibble away at the number displayed on the screen.

Still, he was thrilled.

It was the best fare he had ever received. It clearly made his day.

As we approached my destination, his phone offered him another ride for $15. He laughed, and I assumed the laugh was derisive. Fifteen dollars after what he had just earned? Surely he was amused by the absurdity of it.

I was wrong.

“Can’t pass that up,” he said as he accepted it.

The pickup location could have been as far as ten miles from where he dropped me. He would drive that distance, collect the passenger, complete the trip, and receive $15 before accounting for gas, taxes, vehicle wear, and the value of his time.

And he was genuinely happy to get it.

After three hours with me and a three-hour unpaid return still waiting, a day totaling roughly $250 before expenses was going to make his week.

That stayed with me.

In voiceover, we sometimes discuss a $250 job as though it were beneath consideration. Depending on the usage, client, market, and rights being requested, it may well be. A few hundred dollars is not automatically a fair rate simply because the session itself is short. We are being paid not only for minutes behind the microphone, but for our skill, training, equipment, availability, performance, and the commercial value of our voice.

We should understand that value. We should defend it.

But we should also understand our position in the larger solopreneur economy.

Many voice actors have the ability to earn several hundreds or thousands of dollars—or considerably more—for work completed from a home studio in under an hour. That possibility is not universal, consistent, or guaranteed. Building a career capable of producing those opportunities may require years of labor and substantial investment.

It is nevertheless a form of privilege.

That word should not make us defensive. Privilege is not an accusation, and gratitude is not surrender. Recognizing that we occupy a comparatively fortunate corner of the freelance economy does not require us to accept exploitation. It simply asks us to look beyond our own tiny professional ecosystem occasionally.

Other creatives often work longer for less. So do photographers, musicians, editors, writers, actors, designers, delivery drivers, and countless independent contractors whose expenses are every bit as real as ours. Many have no agents negotiating for them, no established rate guides, no residual structures, and no industry community loudly insisting that their labor has value.

This is not an argument for lowering voiceover rates. The existence of worse exploitation elsewhere does not justify exploitation here.

It is an argument for awareness.

We can advocate for better rates without behaving as though every imperfect opportunity is an insult. We can criticize unfair systems without losing sight of how extraordinary it is to make a living with our voices. We can fight for transparency, consent, access, and appropriate compensation while remaining generous toward people whose working lives operate on far thinner margins.

Perhaps it should also influence how we treat the people we hire, tip, mentor, or encounter during the day. Perhaps it should make us more honest when discussing this career with newcomers…….not only about its difficulty, but about the remarkable upside available to those who succeed.

I still believe voice actors should push for better. Better rates. Better protections. Better contracts. Better access. Better behavior from the companies profiting from our work.

I also expect I will remember that driver for a long time.

I will remember the best fare he had ever received. I will remember the six hours behind it. And I will remember the genuine delight in his voice when a $15 offer appeared on his screen.

Advocacy and gratitude can coexist.

One keeps us from being exploited.

The other keeps us from becoming insufferable.

A lot of voice actors prepare auditions this way: one solid take, then a second take that is a little different.

The first is warm. The second is warmer…….but slightly faster.

Technically, that is two takes. Creatively, it may still be only one idea.

The problem is that professional sessions rarely stay inside such a narrow lane. In a callback, you may be asked to read the same copy twenty different ways. Make it more intimate. Less polished. More playful. Now suspicious. Now confident without sounding authoritative. Now imagine you are talking to one exhausted parent at 6:00 in the morning. Now forget everything and do something strange. Can you be a weird little car? Now an SUV?

Then, once you book the job, someone may simply say, “Let’s mess around with it.”

That instruction terrifies actors who have prepared only one or two approved versions of the script. They know how they planned to read it. They do not yet know how many other lives the copy can have.

That is why you need more than two takes ready. You might need nine.

Not nine recordings to submit. Nine genuinely different interpretations available in your body before you press record.

The difference should not come only from pace, pitch, or volume. Change the relationship. Change the objective. Change what happened five seconds before the first word. Decide whether you are reassuring someone, challenging them, sharing a secret, solving a problem, hiding your excitement, or trying not to laugh.

The words stay the same. The reason for saying them changes.

This matters even when a casting director hears only one take. Experienced ears can often detect whether a performance is flexible or carefully balanced on a single creative choice. They can hear when an actor understands the copy deeply enough to move inside it…….and when the actor is simply recreating a rehearsed result.

Your audition is not only demonstrating that you can deliver one good read. It is quietly answering a larger question:

What will happen when we direct you?

Can you adjust without losing truth? Can you surprise us? Can you make a bold choice and then abandon it without becoming rattled? Can you play?

Before your next audition, try reading the script nine ways. Some will be wrong. One may be ridiculous. Another may reveal something in the copy you completely missed on the first pass.

That is the point.

You are not searching for nine usable takes. You are building the creative range required to produce the right take when someone asks for it.

Because eventually, someone will lean into the talkback and say, “Great. Now let’s try something completely different.”

And the actor who prepared only two takes will start searching.

The actor who prepared nine will smile.

 

Last week, on separate coasts, voice actors of all stripes gathered in the Pacific Northwest and Bethlehem, Pennsylvania to learn, laugh, and enjoy two of the newer entries on the conference calendar, Jessica Mathison’s VO Summit, and Jen Tophoney & Mike Cunningham’s Get Outta Your Booth!

Let’s get this part out of the way first:

No, you do not have to attend voiceover conferences, awards events, meetups, workshops, retreats, or industry gatherings to build a voiceover career.

It is entirely possible to stay home, build your booth, sharpen your reads, market consistently, audition well, cultivate direct clients, and make money without ever becoming part of “the voiceover community.”

Plenty of people do it.

Some people prefer it that way. They don’t want the social side. They don’t want the Facebook groups. They don’t want the hallway conversations, mixers, award shows, late-night hotel lobby chats, Jenn Henry appearing like Beetlejuice when you say her name, or the slightly surreal experience of realizing half the people you know by voice are much shorter or taller than you expected.

Fair enough.

But it’s always painful watching the trolls come out every time the industry comes together to play.

Because voiceover is not just a performance business. It is a relationship business. And an anti-community ideology is, in this year of the World Cup, a serious own goal.

That does not mean it is a popularity contest. It does not mean there is a secret handshake. It does not mean there is some shadowy voiceover Illuminati sitting in a velvet room deciding who gets the glamorous jobs and who has to narrate industrial safety modules about forklift battery corrosion until retirement. Full disclosure: I do own voiceoverilluminati.com and voilluminati.com and we might have secret pins.

But really, these things are running jokes except for the nutters who think they are real.

There are, however, PEOPLE.

And people hire people they know, like, remember, trust, and feel good about recommending.

That is not corruption. That is business.

Casting directors remember talent who make their jobs easier. Agents remember talent who are professional, responsive, and pleasant to deal with. Producers remember talent who were good in the room, easy on the session, and not weird when asked for pickups. Coaches remember students who showed up prepared and improved. Other actors remember colleagues who were generous, grounded, and not constantly trying to turn every conversation into a sales funnel.

Those relationships matter.

Sometimes they lead directly to work. Sometimes they lead indirectly to work. Sometimes they lead to a referral two years later from someone you barely remember chatting with near the coffee station. Sometimes they lead to nothing obvious at all, except that you become more visible, more informed, more connected, and more aware of how the business actually moves.

The voiceover industry is small. Much smaller than people think.

Once you get past the beginner stage, you start seeing the same names everywhere: agents, casting directors, producers, demo people, coaches, conference speakers, top-booking talent, audio engineers, publishers, ad people, game people, animation people, e-learning people, promo people, and the handful of folks who somehow seem to be everywhere at once despite allegedly needing sleep.

In a small industry, relationships compound.

That does not mean talent is irrelevant. It means talent plus relationship is stronger than talent hiding in a cave.

You can be great and unknown. You can be skilled and forgettable. You can be technically excellent and still not top-of-mind when someone needs a voice like yours right now.

Events help solve that.

They are not magic. You do not buy a conference pass and come home with a career in your tote bag. You still have to do the work. You still need competitive demos, a good studio, professionalism, stamina, business sense, and enough emotional regulation not to treat every audition like a referendum on your worth as a human being.

But conferences give you access to something home study alone cannot always provide: proximity.

Proximity to decision-makers.
Proximity to peers.
Proximity to current industry conversations.
Proximity to people who may become friends, collaborators, advocates, referral sources, or simply useful reality checks.

That proximity is worth something.

And, frankly, compared with many solo-preneur and small business industries, voiceover conferences are often underpriced.

Look at the current public pricing landscape. VO Atlanta has listed general admission in the hundreds, with X-Sessions at $209 presale and bundle options that combine VO Atlanta and One Voice for under $900. One Voice USA has listed full-weekend in-person options in the hundreds. MAVO is in that same general range. Get Outta Your Booth has built its brand around accessibility and keeping costs low. VO Summit Pacific Northwest includes not just the conference, but lodging, meals, socials, and airport shuttle service.

Now compare that to conferences in broader marketing, tech, creative, business, and entrepreneurship spaces, where full passes of $1,000 to $2,000 are completely normal before hotel, airfare, meals, and ground transportation ever enter the chat.

In that context, most voiceover events are not outrageous luxury purchases. They are professional development expenses.

Are they still real money? Absolutely.

Should everyone go to everything? Of course not.

If money is tight, choose carefully. If you are brand new, maybe you need coaching or a better home studio first. If travel is impossible, virtual options, local meetups, online workouts, and smaller events can still help. Nobody should be guilted into spending money they do not have.

But the idea that conferences are useless, silly, corrupt, or only for “the cool kids” is lazy thinking.

And when someone loudly builds a brand around telling you not to attend conferences, enter awards, network, or participate in industry spaces, it is fair to ask what they gain from that posture.

Sometimes skepticism is healthy.

Sometimes contrarianism is marketing.

If someone’s message is essentially, “All those other industry spaces are fake, but my course, my coaching, my system, my group, my webinar, or my worldview is the real path,” you should at least notice the sales mechanism.

The truth is less dramatic.

Conferences are not mandatory.

Awards are not mandatory.

Community is not mandatory.

But neither is having a website, sending direct marketing, working with agents, coaching, auditioning on casting sites, posting content, building a CRM, or doing any one specific thing.

A career is built through accumulated advantages.

Better skill. Better relationships. Better visibility. Better timing. Better business habits. Better follow-up. Better confidence. Better information.

Events can contribute to several of those at once.

That is why they matter.

Not because you need permission from the industry.

Not because there is a secret room.

Not because attending one conference will make you successful.

But because people hire people they know and like. People recommend people they trust. People remember people they have actually met. And in a business where your voice may be heard before your face is ever seen, giving people a reason to connect the two is not weakness.

It is strategy.

So no, you do not have to attend voiceover conferences to have a career.

But if you can afford to be in the room, and the room contains people, information, and relationships that could help you grow…why would you make the road harder on purpose?

 

 

 

One of the most persistent myths in voiceover is that your voice is the thing you’re selling.

It’s understandable. The word is right there in the job title. Voice-over. Voice actor. Voice talent. Voice this, voice that. We talk about tone, range, texture, warmth, grit, authority, youth, maturity, resonance, conversationality, (I may have coined a word,) and all the other sonic ingredients that make up the instrument.

But at the highest levels, your voice is not really the product.

Your taste is. And not your taste in music, clothes, or food, which in my case would be a crash course in why the ’80’s went out of style.

That may sound counterintuitive at first. After all, a great voice still matters. Of course it does. A compelling sound can open doors. It can get you noticed. It can make someone stop scrolling, stop scrubbing through auditions, or stop checking email long enough to say, “Okay, who is that?”

But once you move beyond the most basic threshold of professional viability, vocal quality is rarely the whole game. Thousands of people have attractive voices. Thousands of people can sound like an asylum of alliterative adjectives, (which would be a great band name but there goes my taste in music again.) There are many actors who live in similar vocal neighborhoods.

What separates them is not merely the neighborhood.

It’s the interior design.

Two actors can read the exact same piece of copy with roughly the same vocal range and demographic profile. Same gender. Same age range. Same general sound. Same mic quality. Same room quality. Same basic “professional voice actor” competence.

One read feels alive.

The other feels like HR sent an email with the subject line: “Friendly Reminder: Authenticity Initiative Launches Monday.”

That difference is taste.

Taste is the instinct that tells you where the joke actually lives. Not where the punctuation tells you it lives. Not where a less imaginative actor would put a big shiny bow on it. Where it actually lives.

Taste is knowing when sincerity needs to be held lightly instead of squeezed until it turns into oatmeal.

Taste is understanding that “conversational” does not mean “casual mush,” and “premium” does not mean “slowly describing a watch to a fireplace.”

Taste is rhythm. Taste is restraint. Taste is knowing when to leave air in a line and when to keep the momentum moving. Taste is knowing when the copy wants charm, when it wants clarity, when it wants a little mischief, and when it wants you to get out of the way entirely.

This is where many developing voice actors get stuck. They work very hard on the sound of the read. They chase the tone. They try to sound friendly, confident, warm, cool, real, edgy, funny, luxurious, grounded, whatever the spec says. And there is nothing wrong with that as a starting point.

But specs are often blunt instruments. They point in a direction. They rarely tell you how to walk there.

“Conversational” could mean relaxed and dry. It could mean intimate and thoughtful. It could mean quick, smart, and lightly amused. It could mean a person making a confession, a friend sharing a shortcut, or a brand trying very hard not to sound like a brand while absolutely still being a brand.

Your job is to interpret the moment.

That’s taste.

The strongest actors are not just executing vocal qualities. They are making decisions. Often small ones. Almost invisible ones. A slightly unexpected pause. A smile that appears for half a word and disappears before it becomes salesy. A little drop in energy that makes the next phrase feel more honest. A refusal to overplay the obvious joke. A choice to let a serious line stay simple instead of dragging it into melodrama by the ankles.

This is why “range” is so often misunderstood.

Range is not just doing six cartoon voices, three accents, and one wizard who sounds like he has opinions about soup. Wizards can be like that. Especially bearded ones. Jerks. That can be useful, sure. But in commercial, narration, promo, and even much of animation and gaming, some of the most valuable range is emotional and interpretive.

Can you shift from warmth to authority without changing your entire vocal identity?

Can you make a line feel fun without making it goofy?

Can you create tension without shouting?

Can you sound premium without sounding sedated?

Can you make copy feel human even when it was clearly written by a committee of twelve people named Strategy?

That is the work.

And the beautiful thing is that taste can be developed. Taste comes from listening deeply. Watching great work. Studying timing. Understanding genre. Reading widely. Living enough life to know what people sound like when they are amused, wounded, skeptical, thrilled, tired, in love, lying politely, or trying not to cry in a grocery store parking lot. Eleven bucks for a bag of nuggets? WTF?

It also comes from self-direction. From asking better questions.

What is this line doing?

Why is it here?

What changed from the sentence before it?

Where is the turn?

What does the audience need to feel?

What would be too much?

What would be not enough?

Where is the human being inside this copy?

The actor who asks those questions will almost always be more interesting than the actor who simply asks, “What should this sound like?”

Because “what should this sound like?” keeps you trapped at the surface.

“What does this mean?” takes you to the product.

And the product is your taste.

Your voice is the instrument, yes. Keep it healthy. Train it. Learn it. Respect it. Know what it does well and where it betrays you if you get lazy.

But your taste is the reason someone chooses you when a dozen other people could technically hit the same notes.

Your taste is the thing that makes the read feel inevitable.

Because you understood the assignment underneath the assignment.

Because, for one brief and beautiful moment, the copy stopped sounding like copy.

And started sounding like someone worth listening to.