As An Audiobook Narrator... Worrying About AI Will Get You Nowhere

When is the public going to stop listening to billionaires, especially tech billionaires? I mean it genuinely.

If you haven't noticed the pattern yet, here it is. The so-called leaders of our society manufacture a thing called hype. There could be very practical economic reasons for this: manipulating markets through the cultural zeitgeist, pleasing the angel investors, pleasing the board. I tend to take a more esoteric view.

I believe perception creates reality, and the more collective attention you pour onto a thing (say, "AI is going to put you in the soup kitchen line"), the greater the chance that thing has to solidify in the actual three-dimensional world we live in.

Thus the constant AI fear porn, ad nauseam.

Every single day there's a post on Facebook, or wherever you scroll, about this exact topic. And here's the part nobody clocks: the thing spiking your cortisol was probably written by some other paranoid narrator who also has no work.

Two anxious people feeding each other's panic.

Meanwhile, while you doomscroll and marinate in the dread, other people are quietly raking it in. Think about that for a second.

Fear precedes freezing

I am not immune to this. I have spent countless nights thinking about my future. Should I change career paths? Should I just give in and work at a warehouse the rest of my life, or at least until a robot takes that too?

Then something curious happened as more time passed. I noticed the creative people around me were doing exactly what they've always done. Which is create. And yet there I was, frozen. Doing nothing. Letting the fear of a future that has not transpired freeze me in my tracks, killing every creative pursuit I'd worked tirelessly for before this so-called "age of AI."

This is exactly what they want.

Somewhere in the middle

Here's a simple test. By 2026, if everything the doomers swore was coming had actually arrived, there would be no work left at all. The entire audiobook world would be 100% machine-narrated, ACX wall to wall with synthetic voices, not a human left working. Look around. That is not the world you woke up in.

So what's really happening? The truth lives in the middle, not at the extremes they're selling.

Is AI slop proliferating across the internet, making things shittier and lower-brow by the day? Yes.

Has the job market been affected by AI in some way? Yes.

Is it shifting the strategies we need going forward? Yes.

Has it completely replaced everyone and made us all destitute the way they said it would? No.

Are people rebelling against it and still preferring human-made art, because we are, well, human? Yes.

Are large quantities (if not more) human-written books and audiobooks still being produced? Yes.

And are they more respected and standing out more than ever? Also yes.

Will some people confuse AI-generated content for the real thing? Sometimes. It's happening. But just as artificial foods and ingredients mimicked the real thing, people caught on fast. Artificial food made us sick, and that's exactly why the whole market pivoted to "all natural" and "organic." The same correction is already happening with artificial intelligence.

This big beast we're all so scared of trains on itself. So it's training on worse and worse slop. And if you missed that day in high school science class, here's the memo: human beings are extremely adaptable.

We choose

What does the future look like once we adapt to these emerging technologies? I don't really know. But I know for sure it isn't the future these billionaires are painting. The fear is the product. The fear is the point.

So you have a choice with the time you'd otherwise spend worrying. You could be auditioning. Making videos. Putting yourself out there. Continuing on, business as usual. Or you could worry about that soup kitchen line so hard, so completely, that one day you manifest your seat in it.

And the solution is not complicated. It's a strong social presence. Your face. Your voice. Your work out in the open, consistently, where people can actually find it. The narrators who win the next few years are not going to be the ones with the best mic. They'll be the ones people know exist. Audition. Post. Show your face. Build the audience now, while everyone else is frozen, scrolling, waiting to be either saved or replaced.

Choosing to keep making art is a psychic act of defiance. We choose to keep creating. We choose human art. That is the mindset. That is the paradigm shift.

Make something real.

Produce a 100% human-made audiobook with CineSonic Productions. Real voices, real craft, no slop. Start your project today with CineSonic.