Being a Real Actor in the Age of AI

I lost a voiceover job to an AI last year and it sent me down a rabbit hole that I'm honestly still sitting in.

You've probably heard about Tilly Norwood by now (AI generated actress, showed up at the Zurich Film Festival, in talks with actual talent agencies). SAG-AFTRA put out a statement saying she's not an actor, which of course she's not. She's a computer program trained on the work of real actors who never agreed to it and will never see a dime. But her creator has already announced 40 more AI actors in the pipeline, and something called the Tillyverse launching this year. The Tillyverse. I still can't get over that.

And then I started looking at the numbers and I kind of wish I hadn't. The voiceover industry alone is projecting a 30 to 50% drop in jobs over the next decade, which as someone who just lost a VO gig to a computer, yeah, that tracks. Then I found out production houses are slashing costs by 40% just by switching to AI dubbing, which, great. And LA County? 41,000 film and TV jobs gone in three years. But the one that really got me was this: 80% of actors don't even understand the AI terminology showing up in their own contracts. We're signing things we can't even read properly. That's terrifying.

The gigs I'm losing are the ones that never really needed ME in the first place, the industrials, the voiceover work that kept me alive between the roles I actually wanted. Cartoon and video game roles are next, and after that, anything one-dimensional. Which stings, because a lot of us built our lives around that income.

Yeah. It's scary. I'm not going to pretend it's not.

And THEN I found the Coca-Cola thing and that's when this whole rabbit hole took a turn. So Coca-Cola remade their classic 1995 holiday ad entirely with AI. No actors, no crew, none of it was real. And people went NUTS. Called it soulless, cheap, the whole thing. Positive sentiment cratered from 24% all the way down to 10%, which, ouch. But then the CMO comes out and basically says yeah we don't care, it used to take us a year and now it takes a month. So.

And honestly the thing that keeps me up at night isn't even the robots or the lost jobs, it's watching people get slowly numb to the difference between real and not real. We've already seen what that looks like in politics, right? So why would entertainment be any different when AI starts making everything "good enough"?

But THEN (and this is where the rabbit hole got good) I found this survey that said 52% of audiences would rather watch a seven out of ten human made film than a nine out of ten fully AI made film. I had to read that twice. People are choosing the messier, more human thing over the technically better AI thing. When does that EVER happen?

And that's when this whole topic kind of flipped on its head for me. And honestly I started laughing because the answer is basically: be MORE of what we already are. Messier and weirder and more inconveniently, stubbornly human. Which, hello, that's sort of our entire job description ;-)

Because AI has never laid awake at 3 AM wondering if it wasted its best years chasing auditions that might never come (TMI?). It's got no skin in the game and no gut and no history. All that inner chaos we carry around, the fear and the stubbornness and the hope that you can't seem to kill no matter how hard this gets? That IS the thing.

The problem for most of us has never been talent, right? It's always been access, getting in front of the people who can actually hire us in a way where they can see what we can do. And here's the thing that messed with my head the most: AI is making the access problem worse AND better at the same time.

The traditional channels are shrinking, sure. The old playbook of get an agent, wait for auditions, hope someone picks you has been broken for a long time and AI is just speeding up the funeral. But the decision makers? They're drowning in AI generated everything right now, completely overwhelmed, and the actors they actually know, the ones they've sat across from and had real conversations with? Way more valuable to them now than before all this started. I cannot stop thinking about that.

This is exactly why I built the Curator Method. I stopped waiting for somebody to open the door and built my own side door, stopped showing up as a hopeful begging for a shot and started showing up as a peer with something of value to offer. AI can mimic warmth and fake connection pretty well, but it's not going to sit across from a casting director at an event I put together and have a real conversation after performing a scene. That part is still very much a me thing.

And then there's something I am so fired up about right now. Kevin Kelly wrote an essay in 2008 called 1000 True Fans. You don't need millions of fans. You need about a thousand people who really care about your work and will show up for you and are willing to pay to see what you do next. That's a living. A real one. And for actors, this is about to become the model.

I've got actors in the Curator Academy right now who've had major roles in major international productions you've definitely seen, and they're still finding it hard to make a living. The ones who are figuring it out are doing things AI literally cannot do. They're performing live, they're building real audiences of people who actually care about them and showing up in person to create experiences that only exist because a real human was in the room.

And I almost fell into this trap myself, which is why I gotta be honest about it. The second I started outsourcing my creative decisions to AI, letting it write my bio, generate my social content, all I got back was a shinier, more plastic version of me. And that is the exact opposite of what being an actor means.

It's like hiring someone to write your love letters. The words might hit a rhythm, the sentences won't stutter. But if you let someone else talk for you long enough, who's actually the one in love? One day you realize the letters are perfect and none of them are yours because they didn't come from your heart.

AI does not have lived taste. It has the average of everyone else's taste, and the average of anything is crap. Our whole deal as actors is to not be boring, to make choices nobody else would make. And that comes from your life, your specific and weird and wonderful life. Not from a data set.

I use AI to move faster. I brainstorm and research and edit and create with it all the time. But I don't hand it my brain and my heart and my soul and walk away. The creative decisions and the story and my weird take on the world, that stays with me.

Because for as long as actors have been acting, it has been our job to hold up the mirror to the messy, gooey side of being alive, to show people themselves and make strangers sit in the dark and feel a little less alone. And no algorithm is going to do that because it's never been alone. It's never walked into an audition room with sweaty palms and a racing heart and it has no idea what it feels like when the room goes quiet and you've got them.

If you want to figure out where to start, grab the free Actor Career DNA Decoder. It takes a few minutes and it'll show you what's actually in the way so you can get it out of the way and start building your own side door.