IS THERE A MORE BORING VOICE THAN A I?

Most nights I sit with my cat in my lap as I scroll through the political offerings on YouTube. I have a TV, but I gave up trying to figure out how it works without cable. Thats how old i am. Like most things media, there are good Podcasts, and there are guys in muscle shirts. There are also historical snippets among the hysterical snippets. Some of them are very good and the narrators successfully run the gamet between professorial and subtle irony. Few are boring. It's not hard to tell the difference. The most disappointing historical snippets are the ones with digitally created voice-overs. 

I used to know a fellow who was a pretty good actor, no one you would know, but one who strode the boards of local theater groups with characters that were believable; the aim of every actor. When I met Doug, he had been at it for about 10 years, after mustering out of the airforce at the end of the Cuba missile crisis. He completed his acting career in 2005 when his twenty-year battle with throat cancer had run its course. Throat cancer in an actor is a thing that robs you of more than life. It robs you of your livelihood. Yet he starred in a one-man play called Krapps Last tape, in Boston. The single role was an old man who had been an announcer his entire life. He was reviewing his old footage. The speaking was mostly on tape so Doug did the tape rolls when his voice was strong. I was privileged to watch him act pre-cancer, listened to his stories over too many drinks, and even shared some readings in front of small audiences. He was not just my best friend, he taught me about Scotch whiskey, wine, and other delights. He advised me how to pace my drinking to not get drunk. A quest that I was more successful at, after a while, than he. He was my Best Man when I married, was in the waiting room when both my kids were born, and we supported each other through hard times. He had a deep, resonant voice. One that he had developed over those many theatrical productions that he had been part of. Unfortunately he had a face for radio. He did a lot of voice-over work in his spare time. He had that ineffable quality to look at a script, make some accent marks and other scribbling on the script, and give a blind reading effectively. He knew the clock, as he called it. He could do 45 seconds, one minute, or five minutes and come pretty close to the goal. What he knew even better than all of these acting skills, was how to draw out the emotional qualities demanded by the script. 

This is a quality that A I fails at. Artificial Intelligence is not much different than artificial insemination. No emotional build-up, no excitement, no thank you. The A I voice has an irritating quality. No regional accent you can detect.  A flat delivery, and no upper or lower registers. It is like the phony in human life. Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson captures that A I quality.  The A I voice does not follow the punctuation marks in the script. It's as empty of punctuation as Marjorie Taylor Greene is empty of Enlightenment. Doug could display warmth in his voice,  his face, and body. A second later he could be so cold that it froze the flop-sweat on your forehead. He would extol the subtle hand gestures of Robert Duvall, the intensity of Rober Deniro, or Al Pacino. We would often catch a double feature at the Blue Mouse, and discuss the movies over a potato Knish at Daves delicatessan. There is no way digitally created speech will ever be able to portray that. It was somewhere around 60 years ago when 2001: A Space Oddysey, hit the movie theatres. I saw that film loaded out of my mind, and I never forgot it. The H A L 9000 computer had empathy in its voice, as you would expect from a human rendition of a mechanical voice before the creation of any digital media. A I has an emotional depth measured in centimeters. Uncommon words are often embarrassingly rendered by Artificial Intelligence, like George W Bush speaking extemporaneously. Chemekata becomes Chem a-kata. There's also what must be considered a digital hiccup. Like an 8-track tape in the middle of a track. In all these things digitally rendered speech disappoints. 

What do you expect? Somebody in an ad agency, who makes a $million-two, plus bonuses, doesn't want to pay a voice actor a $thousand-five, plus renew it in three years if it replays. Instead of a speech pathologist, they hire speech pathology, with no renewal clause. And what you get is a boring listening event. I think we've all seen a historian who overplays their voice-over, sort of like Sen. John Kennedy overplays the cornpone. We have all heard a historian who drones on without emphasis. They are still human beings and their success should be based on the knowledge of those qualities, not how someone develops an algorithm. Another hint to the producers of these A I podcasts: please, please, if the speaker is alive, let them speak. If it's  not history and is political, it will be history. Let AOC speak for herself, let Elissa Slotkin speak for herself, or Jasmine Crocket, or Bernie Sanders, or Jared Moskowitz. If they are members of the other, more fascist party, let them speak too. The tone they project is a key to the message they carry. It's  not hard to discern. 

There are sound recordings on audio rolls that Alexander Graham Bell recorded of Mark Twain, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, even Huey Long. These are important because those who are lucky enough to hear them on audio, or view them on movie film can be sure of the context those recordings are addressing. They are delivered by a real human being, not an algorithm. A real human voice, when used well, is a thing to behold. A mechanical voice can by its nature, not be used well. And when some ad industry exec uses it, they are looking for a bonus, not the truth.