The Android's O-Face and Other Corporate Fantasies

The glass is half-empty, the ashtray is half-full, and the internet is, as always, completely out of its goddamn mind. I’m staring at a headline that says, “AI doesn’t know what an orgasm sounds like.”

And I think, hell, most men I’ve met don’t either. So maybe the machines aren’t so far behind after all.

I take a drag from my cigarette and a pull from the bourbon. The smoke and the liquor have a little party in my lungs. It’s a real party, a human one. Messy. Probably carcinogenic. But real. That’s more than you can say for the latest brilliant idea coughed up by the algorithm factories.

So Amazon’s Audible and the rest of the tech behemoths want to have robots read us bedtime stories. They’re rolling out AI-generated voices to narrate audiobooks. They say it’s about giving more authors a chance, about “lowering the barrier to entry.” That’s the kind of sanitized corporate poetry that always means one thing: we found a cheaper way to do it and we’re going to fire a lot of people.

Every time one of these companies talks about “accessibility” or “democratization,” you should check your wallet. They’re not building a library of Alexandria for the masses. They’re building a digital slum, a content favela stacked high with cheap, mass-produced audio slurry. It’s the literary equivalent of a fast-food burger. Sure, it fills a hole, but you feel sick afterwards and you know, deep down in your gut, that it wasn’t really food.

This actress, Annabelle Tudor, she hit the nail right on the head. She’s narrated 48 books. She’s breathed life into words, probably while fighting off a cold or worrying about rent. She’s done the work. And she says the AI can’t do a raunchy sex scene. It doesn’t know the sound of an orgasm. Or a birth.

Of course it doesn’t. How could it? An orgasm isn’t a data point. It’s not a waveform you can just replicate. It’s a loss of control. It’s ugly and beautiful and embarrassing and divine. It’s the sound of a nervous system getting fried by its own wiring. It’s the most un-robotic thing there is.

I can just picture the board meeting. A dozen guys in identical grey fleeces, sipping artisanal coffee. “Okay, Johnson, on the orgasm module. What’s the progress?” “Well, sir, we’ve analyzed 10,000 hours of audio. We’ve found the optimal frequency is between 250 and 500 Hz, with a decibel spike at the 4.7-second mark. We’re calling it Pleasure Synthesis 4.0.” “Excellent. Ship it.”

And what you’ll get is the sound of a Speak & Spell falling down a flight of stairs. You’ll get a sound so sterile, so perfectly modulated, it’ll make you want to take a vow of celibacy.

This isn’t about sex scenes. It’s about everything. It’s about the catch in the throat when a character is about to break. It’s the sound of a genuine laugh, not a pre-programmed ‘ha-ha.wav’. It’s the subtle shift in tone that tells you a character is lying. It’s the goddamn soul of the thing.

A human narrator spends days, weeks, with a book. They live with it. They understand the characters, the rhythm, the heart of the story. They take a drag from their own cigarette, pour their own damn drink, and they channel all that messy, broken, beautiful life experience into their voice. They give you a piece of themselves.

The AI gives you nothing. It’s a void. A parrot squawking back patterns it’s been fed. It has no life experience. It’s never been drunk. It’s never been heartbroken. It’s never stared at a ceiling at 4 a.m. wondering where it all went wrong. It has no story of its own, so how the hell can it tell you someone else’s?

The suits will tell you it’s “good enough.” That’s the mantra of the modern age. Good enough. Don’t strive for greatness, don’t pay for artistry. Just churn out something that’s… adequate. Something that fills the silence while you’re jogging or doing the dishes. They’re banking on the fact that most people won’t notice, or won’t care. And the sad, ugly truth is, they might be right. We’re a culture drowning in “good enough.”

Then there’s the next grimy step in this little dance: voice cloning. They’re offering to let narrators create digital dupes of themselves. “Expand their production capabilities,” the corporate pamphlet says. What it means is, “Sell us your voice, your soul, your unique brand, and we’ll turn you into a piece of software. We’ll pay you once, a pittance, and then your ghost can work for us, 24/7, for eternity, with no bathroom breaks.”

Imagine that. You spend a lifetime honing your craft, developing a voice that people recognize and trust. And then you sell it off to be used to narrate anything. Your rich, thoughtful baritone could be used to read a trashy vampire romance, the terms and conditions for a new app, or a manual on how to assemble Swedish furniture. Your voice, the thing that is uniquely you, becomes a mass-produced robot sound that people get sick of. You become the new Comic Sans.

Another shot of bourbon. It bites back. Good. Reminds me I’m alive.

The real danger here isn’t just that some poor actor in Melbourne or Sydney loses a gig. The danger is that we forget what quality is. We cheapen the whole damn enterprise. We get so used to the synthetic taste that we forget what real food tastes like. Storytelling is one of the oldest human traditions. We’ve been doing it since we were huddled around fires, scared of the things in the dark. A voice in the night, telling you a tale—it’s an intimate, primal connection.

Trying to replace that with a machine is a “foolish move,” as one of the guys in the article says. But these companies are run by fools. They’re fools with billions of dollars and a messianic belief in their own code. They don’t understand value, only price. They see a human being—an artist—and all they can think is, “How can we automate this? How can we get this pesky, expensive meat-sack out of the equation?”

And the kicker is, they’ll probably succeed for a while. They’ll flood Audible and Spotify with tens of thousands of these audio-zombies. People will consume them. Sales figures will go up. Some guy in a boardroom will get a huge bonus. And something small but important will die. The space for real art will shrink just a little bit more, crowded out by the cheap and the easy.

So can we just listen to people instead of robots?

It’s a nice thought. A hopeful one. But hope is a dangerous thing. It’s like a good woman or a full bottle—it never lasts as long as you think it will. In the end, it always comes down to the money. And there’s no money in being human. Not anymore. The profit is in the imitation.

I stub out my cigarette. The room is quiet except for the hum of the old machine I write this garbage on. I think about all the voices I’ve loved in my life. The raspy voice of an old bartender telling a dirty joke. The soft voice of a woman in the dark. The angry voice of a poet spitting truth from a stage. None of them were perfect. All of them were real.

Let the robots have their ones and zeros. Let them calculate their perfect, soulless orgasms. I’ll take the messy, flawed, drunken, beautiful, human noise every single time. It’s the only story worth hearing.

Time for another drink.

-H.C.

Source: ‘AI doesn’t know what an orgasm sounds like’: audiobook actors grapple with the rise of robot narrators