AI, according to audio book narrators, is already driving away business.

People are preparing for the disruptive effects of artificial intelligence on employment and daily life, but individuals in the audio book industry claim their industry is already changing.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the capacity to produce recordings that sound like people – at assembly-line speed – while omitting at least some of the services of the human specialists who have long made a career using their voices.

Many of them have already noticed a significant decline in business.

For 20 years, Tanya Eby has worked as a full-time voice actress and narrator. In her house, she has a recording studio.

But her workload has decreased by 50% during the last six months. In a typical year, her bookings would stretch through August, but they currently only go through June.

Numerous of her coworkers report comparable decreases.

She told AFP that, despite the possibility of other causes, “It seems to make sense that AI is affecting all of us.”

Although AI-assisted recordings do not have a label identifying them as such, experts claim that thousands of audiobooks now in circulation employ “voices” created from a databank.