There was a radio station in the town I grew up in that at night would broadcast old comedies like the Jack Benny Program, Fibber McGee and Molly, and Our Miss Brooks starring Eve Arden. I’d schedule my bath time around these shows, thinking as I lay there that most of the kids in my elementary school, then my junior high and high school, were probably not bathing by candlelight, much less while listening to jokes written decades before they were born.
I’d tune in to talkshows as well, even if they were about subjects that didn’t particularly interest me, sports, for instance, or God or birds. Anyone who was passionate had my ear, and still does. I love audiobooks, and podcasts, and was delighted when newspapers and magazines started offering audio versions of their articles. The golden age of that lasted for all of three years before they started using AI voices as opposed to human narrators, and lost me completely.
I’m as interested in an artificial voice as I am in an artificial author, which is to say not at all. The difference between “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends” and “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends” is so vast I’d rather tune into the BBC and listen to a cricket game – and nothing used to be worse than a cricket game.
AI narration is, in my opinion, immoral. I mean, really, will we not be happy until we take everyone’s job away?
This is the thing: you think it won’t come for you, but it will. Luckily, I’ll be dead
“You’re like someone in 1910 complaining that the horse and buggy is disappearing,” you might say, but the cars that replaced the horse and buggy employed hundreds of thousands of people the world over. People who made tyres and windshields and, I don’t know, trunks. People who came up with ad campaigns, and new designs. People who washed cars and raced them and sold them.
The new technology companies employ, by comparison, only a handful of people. The woman who used to produce my audiobooks was promoted by my publisher to the innovation department and I remember her telling me with great excitement about a project she was involved with five or so years ago – AI before it was commonly called AI. “We can now get Jack Benny to narrate your book!” she said.
But what if he doesn’t want to? I thought. I knew he was dead, but what if he didn’t want his great comic legacy associated with the likes of me? A living Jack Benny could have made that decision himself while now it would be left to who – his heirs?
And what of all the wonderful actors who make a living narrating books and articles? How can you kick them to the kerb and then walk out your door feeling good about yourself?
It was inevitable that my old producer who went on to work in the innovation department was fired, her job taken by the very machines she’d helped to create.
This is the thing: you think it won’t come for you – but it will. Luckily, I’ll be dead or retired by then, but what about my niece, who’s just 20. Where will she be safe? What field can she go into?
The AI that today feels clunky, will eventually improve, and know which words to emphasise. I’m aware that there’s no stopping it. After my death my voice could easily be used in commercials for semiautomatic weapons, or in far-right wing political campaigns, the rights purchased from my lazy little whore of a niece who will have never worked an honest day in her life.
© David Sedaris, 2025
Photograph Leonardo Cendamo/Getty Images