Acting is an industry of feast and famine, where performers’ income can swing widely by role, by month, and by year. It’s a field where people often face the choice between passion, creativity, and taking a commercial gig for a check. As with so much else, this delicate personal calculation is now being disrupted by AI.

Last month, online actors’ jobs boards were flooded with a very specific, very well-paid role. Nestled between student short film gigs and callouts for background dancers, was the ambiguously-named opportunity “Technology Company AI Project.” According to the job listing on cast and crew job board Mandy, it would pay up to $80,000, for only 19 total hours of work. This is unusually high for an industry where a national-level ad campaign for a big brand might pay $6,000.

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Voiceover Artists Weigh the 'Faustian Bargain' of Lending Their Talents to AI

The human voiceover artists behind AI voices are grappling with the choice to embrace the gigs and earn a living, or pass on potentially life-changing opportunities from Big Tech.

^{Rosie Thomas (404 Media)}