They Wanted My Voice to Train AI. So I Asked 10 Questions.

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This is documentary first, The Deep Dive, where I take an insight from a recent podcast conversation, plumb it's depths and see what gold we can bring to the surface. I'm Christian Taylor. Let's dive in. Now, a few weeks ago, I got an email from a man named Ethan Caldwell. He said he worked for a company called Gather and that they were looking for a voice talent for a short narrative piece, a suspense story called The Ashwood Curse, for an internal conference, a closed audience. Now, my voice had come to their attention during some review process. He complimented my clarity, my presence, my emotional control. I was flattered. I wrote back right away. Ethan sent a second email with more detail. The concept, the tone, the creative direction. It all sounded really legitimate. Atmospheric, character-driven. I was in. Send me everything I said. And then the offer arrived. 4,000 words, 72 hour turnaround, $2,000. MP3 delivery, which was a little concerning. No live session, no revision process, just record it and send the file.

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Now, I've been a voice actor long enough to know when something doesn't quite sound right. See what I did there? I wrote back with some questions, basic stuff. Can I see a script in advance? Will there be a director? Can I get a copy of the finished piece? I never heard from Ethan Caldwell again. Now, that silence told me everything I needed to know. They didn't want me. They wanted my voice without me attached to it. Record the lines, send the file. and somewhere on the other end, an AI trained on exactly how Christian Taylor sounds when she builds tension, changes tone and tempo, and when she pauses for dramatic effect. And then they don't need me anymore. Now, I don't know that for certain. Maybe Ethan just got busy. Maybe projects fall apart. But when a client vanishes the moment you show up with professional standards and questions, Something seems really fishy to me. But what scared me the most wasn't the scam. It was how good the bait was. Listen, I should be honest about where I stand with AI because I think a lot of people might be quietly in the same boat and nobody's saying a lot of it out loud. My voiceover business has taken a real nosedive Auditions that used to come in every day have slowed to a trickle. Rates are getting...

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undercut by clients who know they can generate a good enough voice for a fraction of the cost. My bank account can attest to this and I feel it in my gut. And at the same time, I use AI every single day. It has made me more productive than I've ever been. It's advanced my filmmaking post-production work, my podcast marketing, and my research in ways that I really never anticipated. I'm doing better work because of it. So, which is it? Is AI the thing that's killing my career or the thing that's building it? The answer, of course, is both. And I think that's the part that's hard to sit with, that the same tool can be saving you and threatening you at the exact same time. But last week, I had a conversation that reminded me this feeling, this vertigo of everything changing underneath your feet isn't new. We've been here before. Humanity has been here before. And there's a man who lived almost 200 years ago who saw it coming long before we did. Now, Documentary First Episode 275 was part two of my conversation with Eric and Christopher Ewers, the brothers who directed the new PBS documentary, Henry David Thoreau executive produced by Ken Burns with voice performances by Jeff Goldblum, George Clooney, Ted Danson, Meryl Streep and Tate Donovan.

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Now these guys have been filmmakers for decades. Chris went into film school in the late 90s, cutting 16 millimeter film on a Steenbeck physically splicing film together. And right as he was leaving school, digital cameras just blew up. The entire industry panicked. This is going to ruin film, everybody thought. This is the death of cinema. The sky is falling. Sound familiar? In our conversation, Chris made an argument that was pretty much spot on. He said, and I'm paraphrasing this, that humankind had gone through several revolutions and at each one, it seemed like the people alive at the time, that their way of life was dissolving. Everything was new. Nothing was safe or familiar farmers whose families had worked the land for five generations, watched their children leave the farm for factories. And it must have felt like was the end of the world. 40 years later, nobody could imagine life without trains. Then, Chris brought it home. Take a listen.

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What I love about Chris's perspective is that it's not naive. He's not saying there's nothing to worry about. He's actually saying it's super disruptive and that certain professions are going to be hit hard. He knows that. He's just not willing to let the panic be the final word because he's seen this movie before, literally. He watched the digital cameras go from existential threat to indispensable tool in a decade. and he believes AI will follow the same arc. The question isn't whether the revolution is coming. It's already here. The question is what to do inside of it. And this is where Henry David Thoreau walks back into the conversation. Now, if you caught Deep Dive episode six, you know I'm a fan, but I want to come at Thoreau from a completely different angle this week, because he didn't just write about self-knowledge, he also wrote about technology. He was watching the birth of the Industrial Revolution in real time. He saw the textile mills go up. in the name of commerce. He saw his neighbors starting to measure their lives by what they could buy rather than what they could experience. And he wrote one of the most piercing sentences in American literature. "The cost of a thing is the amount of life which is required to be exchanged for it." Think about that for a second.

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He's not talking about money. He's talking about life. How much of your life are you trading for this thing? That new gadget, that upgrade, that convenience. What did it actually cost you in hours in attention? in presence. Eric Ewers brought this up in our conversation, how Thoreau was seeing all of this at the actual birth of industrialization before there was even trains everywhere. And the trains are part of what I love most because here's the contradiction. Thoreau railed against the railroad. He thought it was speeding up life in ways that were disruptive, pulling people out of nature, out of themselves. He was genuinely suspicious of it. And then he rode the train 70 times because it let him travel to give lectures. It let him spread his ideas. It let him reach people he never could have reached on foot. He didn't love the train, but he used it deliberately. I think about that every single day now. I don't love what AI is doing to voice acting. I don't love that my inbox has gone quiet for voiceover jobs. I don't love that people like Ethan Caldwell are out there trying to harvest voices, but I'm using AI to do research and to organize and grammar check my scripts It is making my work better and I'm making a conscious choice about how to use it.

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That's what live deliberately actually means, not opt out, not go off the grid. It means Be awake inside the thing that's happening. Use the tool. Don't let the tool use you. Know what you're trading and decide if the trade is worth it. Let me come back to Ethan Caldwell for a second, because I think his disappearing act reveals something important about what actually survives a revolution. What did Ethan want from me? He wanted my voice, not me. My voice, the product, separated from the person. He didn't want a collaboration. He didn't want a relationship. He wanted a file. And the 10 questions I asked, Any legitimate client would welcome them. The fact that those questions ended the conversation tells you what Ethan was offering wasn't a job, it was an extraction. Chris Ewers said something else in our conversation that I keep coming back to. He said the best professional advice he'd ever been given was this, the true reward for a job well done is the opportunity to do it again. Not the money, not the credit, the callback, the fact that someone wants to work with you again because you were good and you were good to work with. AI can generate a voice. It's getting better and better at that every month, but it cannot show up to a session and ask for backstory.

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It can't close its eyes at the microphone like Jeff Goldblum did in the Thoreau say in that perfectly Goldblum-y way, I am this, I am, and then deliver something so right that the directors just looked at each other and said, Well, this is easy. That's not a product. That's a person. That's someone bringing their whole self, their curiosity, their instincts, their willingness to be directed into a room. George Clooney told Eric and Chris on his first day, tell me if I suck. That's a human being showing up, ready to collaborate, ready to be bad, ready to be corrected. No algorithm says that. The people who survive revolutions, every revolution, going back to the one Thoreau watched, are the ones who bring something to the room that machines can't replicate. Not just skill, presence, curiosity, the willingness to be in relationship with the work and the people around it. The Ethans of the world disappear when you ask them questions because questions require a relationship. And relationship is the one thing they're trying to eliminate from the equation. Every revolution feels like the end of the world to the people living through it. If farmers who watch their children leave for factories thought it was the end, the filmmakers who saw the digital cameras also thought it was the end.

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And a lot of us right now watching AI rewrite the rules of our industries, we think it's the end too. It's not. But it is the end of something. It's the end of being able to coast. It's the end of selling a product without being a person. It's the end of phoning it in because now the phone can do it for you. What survives is what has always survived. The people who show up, who ask questions, who care about the work enough to do it well and care about the people enough to do it together, who ride the train when it serves them and walk when it doesn't, who live deliberately. Thoreau saw the first version of this panic. He was scared of it too. And his answer wasn't to run. It was to pay attention, to decide on purpose what was worth his life and what wasn't. That's still the best answer I've heard. I'm Christian Taylor. This has been Documentary First, the Deep Dive. and I'll see you next time. If you haven't yet, please hit like or subscribe wherever you're watching or listening. the show