Thomas Burt was halfway through a voiceover contract when he was told his voice had been cloned and he would no longer be needed for the job.
The Sydney-based voiceover actor was working full-time in the industry for more than a decade before his work dried up so drastically he had to make a complete career pivot.
“AI has completely pushed me out of the industry,” he says. “I still do [voiceover work] on the side these days, but it’s hard to trust people.”
At his peak, Burt, who has been in the voiceover industry for 15 years, says he was bringing in six figures a year. “I never thought I’d get to that point as an artist or actor, so I was crazy-proud,” he says. “Now I sell storage to pay my rent.”
While Burt says people have been talking about the threat of AI for at least the past four years, he says it wasn’t until 2024 that things started declining rapidly.
“That was when I started seeing more and more AI training jobs out there,” he says. “They were getting voice actors to participate in their own demise.”
That was the year Burt felt the impact personally for the first time.
“The real visceral moment, that kick in the pants, was my voice being cloned,” he says. “A previous client took recordings that we completed together, cancelled the contract and fed those recordings into an AI model.”
The same year, Burt lost 40 per cent of his annual turnover. Now, he says it is down 90 per cent.
“It was a really dramatic decline, and it’s only gotten worse from there,” he says. “My mental health took a massive hit, and it’s been a really slow process rebuilding my life.”
Workers in the arts, including Burt, are among the first to have their jobs upended by AI as people increasingly use it to complete jobs that were once done manually, wiping out swathes of work.
It’s not the only industry likely to be affected, and questions are being raised about the ethics and legality of using people’s work to feed into AI algorithms – or even getting them to effectively train their own replacement.
Companies such as Mindrift, CrowdGen and Outlier offer roles in which people can help train and improve AI.
But there are also more sinister cases where employers are getting workers to use AI without them knowing they are about to be replaced by AI, according to Australian Council of Trade Unions national secretary Sally McManus.
“We had a few instances last year with the banks where workers trained up chatbots that then replaced them,” she says.
The country’s biggest bank, CBA, last year backtracked on its decision to axe 45 roles, apologising after finding the customer service roles it had initially planned to cut were not redundant after it introduced an AI-powered “voice-bot”.
McManus, who used to be a sceptic about AI’s impact on the workforce, says it is now front of mind, with these sorts of practices becoming more widespread, especially in areas such as law where junior and administrative roles are being replaced by AI.
“I don’t think we’re talking about 10 years’ time,” she says. “We’re talking about a couple of years time before there’s quite significant impacts on knowledge workers.”
AI is already causing some companies to hit pause on recruitment. Tech giant Atlassian has quietly frozen hiring for swathes of engineering and related roles as the $31 billion software firm weathers a brutal tech sell-off and investor jitters over artificial intelligence. The slowdown began in early February, with some candidates in final interview stages reportedly iced out. Internally, the message is that this is a “temporary” reset to focus on critical roles – think AI, customer-facing sales and graduates – rather than a permanent retreat from headcount growth.
Publicly, Atlassian insists the move is not about replacing humans with algorithms, even as its own AI features become central to the product pitch and analysts warn that AI could shrink the very pool of software developers who use its tools.
Telstra, meanwhile, is in the midst of a sweeping AI-first overhaul that will cut up to 650 roles, with hundreds of jobs offshored to India as part of a $700 million AI and data partnership and broader Connected Future 30 strategy. Telstra says roles are being “restructured” and not directly “replaced” by AI, but its own guidance concedes the telco expects to have a smaller workforce by 2030 as automation kicks in.
Last year, OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman told a Federal Reserve review that “entire classes” of jobs would disappear. Pressed about what these jobs could be, Altman said customer support staff were an example of a role that would be “totally, totally gone”.
Dario Amodei, chief executive of another AI firm, Anthropic, told Axios last year that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years, with unemployment skyrocketing to 10 or 20 per cent.
Westpac chief economist Luci Ellis wrote last year that concerns about AI causing mass employment were overblown, but that the impact would cary depending on occupation and experience level.
“Clerical and administrative work will be more susceptible to AI automation – caring occupations and trades, less so,” she said. “History shows that new technologies reduce the share of employment in the affected industries, but economy-wide production and employment rise.”
While there is no overarching national law covering AI in the workplace in Australia, many employees in Australia are covered by awards or enterprise agreements that mandate consultations when major changes, such as the introduction of new technology, are likely to have a significant impact on employees.
McManus says she has her eyes on employers who are being secretive with their use of AI and that the unions will be chasing them down through the courts and industrially.
“We are putting corporate Australia on notice,” she says. “We’re going to start ramping up pressure on employers across Australia on their legal obligation to consult workers when they introduce AI, not when they decide they’re going to sack people.”
Burt, who describes his own experience as an “incredible violation”, says that while he wasn’t prepared for his particular circumstances, it was an issue that required broader change.
”My contract was written before any of the technology existed, and quite frankly, I didn’t think we would have to cover ourselves with an incredibly strict contract,” he says. “We need to see more transparency in data systems about where people are getting [their inputs] from.”
For now, Burt is resigned to continue working outside of voice acting to make ends meet. “I don’t think the industry will exist in any meaningful way in 10 years,” he says.
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Millie Muroi is the economics writer at The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. She was formerly an economics correspondent based in Canberra’s Press Gallery and the banking writer based in Sydney.Connect via X or email.
David Swan is the technology editor for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald. He was previously technology editor for The Australian newspaper.Connect via X or email.