As I write this in late April of 2024, artificial intelligence has not had a significant impact on sound effects design for film, video, or games. But I specify the date because I expect the situation to change in the not-too-distant future. A.I. is already being used in various kinds of voice and music work, with varying degrees of success.

The most promising use of a.i. for sound effects that I know of has been done by a company called ElevenLabs. https://elevenlabs.io/ai-sound-effects-for-sora But their process is not available yet. They say they have about 11,000 people on their waiting list.

ElevenLabs have posted a demonstration in which they claim to have generated sound effects for a series of videos produced by Open A.I.’s “Sora” program, which creates moving images from a text input. The quality of the sound design in the ElevenLabs Sora demo is mediocre at best in my opinion, but the fact that they can do it at all is impressive.

As with all forms of A.I., there are lots of legal and ethical questions that need to be addressed. One of the foremost has to do with compensating the individual people and companies who produced the material used to train the a.i. Another major issue is the number of human jobs that will be eliminated if and when, most likely when, A.I. does begin to make a serious impact on sound design work.

To be honest, if I could make A.I. go away, I would. But it won’t go away. It will inevitably get more and more sophisticated, eliminating more human jobs in the process. My advice to people who have a career or want a career in sound design is to learn everything you can about A.I. for sound. That will put you in the best position to use it, instead of being replaced by it.

The jobs on projects at the low end of the budget scale will be the first lost to A.I. That’s a shame, because it’s those projects where people new to the industry usually get their foot in the door. The high-end, high-profile projects will be the last to adopt A.I. sound design because they can afford the added value they get from human creative involvement.

The creative level of the sound work in the existing Sora videos is what I would call “see a dog, hear a dog.” Obvious and not very interesting interpretations. You can outdo the current and near-term future level of A.I. sound design by going beyond the obvious.

If you are seeing a truck traveling down a road, don’t settle for finding or making an audio recording of that kind of truck. Make the truck a character by using non-obvious elements in addition to the obvious ones, and by finding ways to add believable dynamics to the sound that will contribute to the story by tweaking the imagination of the audience.

That level of sound design creativity won’t be in A.I.’s repertoire anytime soon.
 
 
Sound Ideas and A.I