Touch…I Remember Touch
What can I bring to the table that AI can’t?
It’s a question I ask myself a lot in these uncertain times, with Generative AI no longer the stuff of science fiction but very much a reality that presents at the very least a challenge, at worst an existential threat, to creatives and their livelihoods. As a voiceover you only have to see the amount of localisation firms flaunting cheap but fancy AI text-to-speech as a replacement for old-fashioned human voices to realise that you need to adapt - and fast - if you’re going to survive.
But much as it worries me, I don’t think it’s helpful or realistic to just complain and hope it all goes away.
So what do we do about it?
Last Friday I was lucky enough to get to see The Cure bring their new album Songs of a Lost World to The Troxy in East London. It’s a stunning piece of work, informed by shattering loss and the grief that follows. It is raw, painful and human, immediately one of their most important works, and one which will forever cement their legacy. To witness it played live in that intimate setting was an experience I will never forget.
Later that night I found myself revisiting Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories, in particular the song Touch, which falls around the halfway point of the album and features the soulful lyrics and vocals of multi-faceted singer-songwriter-composer-actor Paul Williams as a robot who yearns for something more from his existence.
If you haven’t listened to the album - and you really should - it’s a bonkers and brilliant voyage through a whole host of different musical styles and genres, loosely based around a central conceit of an artificially intelligent being who wishes they were human. Like the 1999 Robin Williams film Bicentennial Man but, well, good. The record switches effortlessly between orchestral and digital compositions, often within seconds of each other, with an impressive list of collaborators that make up some of the most influential musicians of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
In Touch, Williams pines for a time when life had meaning, as though singing from a far off future where feeling is artificial and humanity, with all its abstract notions of emotion and experience, is but a distant memory long buried as data in a hard drive somewhere. Pictures, dreams, songs, a kiss, happiness, hunger, love. How can a machine even begin to make sense of these? The song (and album) conclude with the notion that, for all our faults, perhaps it is better to be human after all. Human After All being, of course, the title of Daft Punk’s previous album.
For an act who made their name as robots creating groundbreaking and distinctly electronic music, it makes the clear point that none of this technology, none of this invention, musical or otherwise, would be possible without the passion and creativity of the human mind, just as no GenAI simulation of The Cure could possibly come close to producing Songs of a Lost World; it would have no concept, no experience whatsoever, of the emotional and physical weight of the loss that informs it.
Random Accesss Memories came out in 2013, when today was tomorrow and AI was still a concept for most of us. Now that it’s here and actually competing with us, that album and song took on a whole new layer of meaning for me.
And I found myself asking, what is that touch? How can I show it in my work? What can I bring to the table that is unequivocally human?
Well, for a start:
Empathy
Humour
Experience
Passion
A very particular set of skills (no, not that kind)
This is only a starting point, but just these four alone are unique to any one individual person. They inform everything we do in life and yet so often we find ourselves suppressing what makes us stand out in order to conform to an idea of what we think others want and expect from us. Which is exactly what ChatGPT does. So if we want to compete we have to be able to offer something different.
So when I approach any job these days, whether gaming, commercial, corporate, stage or screen, the first question I ask myself is this:
How can I use my personality, my experience, my touch, my humanity, my voice, to bring these words to life and give the client something more than AI can deliver? And if it is here to stay, can I harness it to serve that purpose? The reality is that there will be certain subsectors of voiceover work that will inevitably be taken over by AI voices as the technology continues to evolve, just as analogue media gave way to digital. But for those that value craft and feeling above else, any robot can tell you that nothing beats that human touch.
What can you offer that AI can’t?
———————
Maxim Reston Voice
Deep, rich and lyrical human voice for characters, commercials, narration and everything in between. Email me at maxim@maximreston.com to set up a free, no obligation 15 minute call.