This video of David Attenborough narrating a programmer’s life shows Hollywood actors were right to be afraid of AI::If you’ve ever wanted acclaimed broadcaster and documentary filmmaker Sir David Attenborough to narrate your life, you’re not alone — and you don’t have to keep merely wishing for it anymore.
I wonder why we didn’t have a slew of articles about how “model makers and make-up artists were right to be afraid of CGI.”
Could it have anything to do with the people writing the articles having an implicit bias in covering a subject that’s been said to be effective at doing the same thing they do (like taking the popular post on Hacker News and mashing it up into a more clickbaity headline and ‘article’)?
New technology changes the status quo. But generally the status quo isn’t something that we should be overly concerned with preserving over progress.
The demo is using Attenborough to get attention, but in practice this could have been a kind of Morgan Freeman and Attenborough mashup that doesn’t sound exactly like either but ends up as “deep and smooth narrator voice” which isn’t directly infringing on anyone’s likeness.
And because it’s AI, it would mean anyone else could copy it freely because AI isn’t protected.
People are focusing way too much on direct infringement of IP during this early stepping stone period and not realizing that we are largely moving into a post-IP world quickly as this tech scales up. And really, that’s going to be a very good thing for society.
Media is moving away from being a product to being a service, and fighting the tide of change right now is just going to lead to a bunch of quickly outdated legacy red tape like the DMCA which holds back smaller operations while the larger players move with the inevitable tides.
The status quo is that people have jobs that help them get survival necessities. The impact is to those people. The benefit is largely to corporations. That is the history of technology.
While I agree, there is nothing sacred about specific people being recognized narrators or actors or makeup artists, there is something sacred about people being able to feed and house themselves. And because our systems has no redress, it is in the working classes’ best interest to protect the status quo at this time.
You might want to familiarize yourself with the economics paper “The Nature of the Firm” which in part won its author the Nobel for economics.
The premise is that the reason why large corporations make sense is because of high transactional costs in the operational elements of labor.
A decade ago this was relevant to predicting how things like Uber might displace taxi and limousine companies. If you had wanted to get paid to drive people around, there was a high transactional cost where that had to be your career effectively, until tech came along that allowed it to transition by lowering transactional costs.
But now tech is poised to lower costs for everything. For legal. For HR. For management. For marketing.
The tech is going to prove to be a death knell for large corporations as transactional costs fall. The advantages of being a mega-corp reduce significantly when the point of diminishing returns on size get scaled back to mid size organizations because costs have been decimated.
The future will be one where Mom and Pop stores can have access to legal comparable to Walmart to prevent unfair competition, or where recording artists can directly market and negotiate contracts with venues or streaming services cutting out labels.
And in terms of voice acting, the assumption that labor demand is capped to the status quo supply is quite wrong, as tech like this means orders of magnitude greater demand across what will eventually be 1:1 media.
You’ll continue to see voice actors employed for key roles, increasingly with less middlemen taking a cut and more competitive negotiation for their services, while seeing voice licensing increasing as a market driving a massive increase in personalized media along the lines of being able to ask a question to your TV during a Planet Earth 2025 show about what you just saw and getting an answer narrated back by the same narrator as provided the original voiceover, with the actor themselves getting a residual or additional flat fee for having provided that capability.
The talent industry right now is a lot like the MPAA/RIAA in the early 2000s, fiercely fighting to protect the status quo of CD and DVD sales and cable/radio from the scary new Internet, and as a result of opposing it rather than embracing it for themselves out of owning the inevitable future paving the way for tech companies to restructure the market. The trade groups had very rough years because of their own idiocy opposing change while streaming has become a massive industry, when had they embraced that change early on they’d be the ones owning that streaming revenue.
Similarly, if talent unions were smart, instead of trying to fight AI becoming a thing (which will happen no matter what), they’d embrace that change and preemptively lead the changes by having their own union approved options with the cooperation of talent to create a better product than alternative services.