What Happened
Journalists surrounded OpenAI's Jason Kwon as he walked into NSW parliament on Tuesday. The company's chief strategy officer had flown in from the United States to explain how, in June, OpenAI's AI agents had accessed non-public files on a federal Medicare statistics portal during internal testing, and why the company took weeks to tell anyone about it. One observer noted he sounded like ChatGPT, according to reporting by David Swan in The Age.
The same week, voice actor Jacqui Duncan gave evidence to the Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence. Duncan has voiced more than 5000 commercials for Australian radio and television and, as she told the committee, she owns none of them. Last financial year she earned about 30 per cent of what she had consistently made in the three years before. She now works a second job.
"AI voices and performances have definitely played a big part," she told The Age. Clients have also used AI to push down the rates the union spent years negotiating. "It's faster and cheaper, so therefore we should be as well."
Simon Kennedy, president of the Australian Association of Voice Actors, told the same hearing: "Our members are already 62 per cent down on their work in the last 12 months."
Why It Matters
Duncan is the NSW president of Equity, the performers' division of the media union. Her central objection is not financial. "It's not about payment; it's about consent," she said. "I never gave consent for my work to be taken."
She described AI voice products as things that "only exist because mine and thousands of others' training, performance skills, experience and creative consciousness have all been whittled down to ones and zeros, fed into an LLM (for free) and then exported." Her position: "But if it's my biometric data and 20 years of industry skills that go into those performances, I should have a say."
On the question of opt-out mechanisms, she was direct: "Opting out after the fact is too late because you cannot un-violate somebody."
The issue extends beyond the creative sector. A union submission to the committee described a supermarket worker with more than 30 years' service who received a final written warning for scanning errors. She got about one item wrong in every 533, an error rate of roughly 0.18 per cent. Labour senator Tony Sheldon also pressed Commonwealth Bank chief executive Matt Comyn on the case of Kathryn Sullivan, who he said had worked at the bank for 25 years.
Key Details
- Jacqui Duncan has voiced more than 5000 commercials for Australian radio and television.
- Duncan's income last financial year was about 30 per cent of her average over the preceding three years.
- The Australian Association of Voice Actors reports a 62 per cent drop in member work over the past 12 months.
- Victoria has committed A$14 million for workers at risk from AI.
- When Ford, Toyota and Holden closed their Australian manufacturing plants, workers received three years' warning and about A$380 million in combined support from governments and the carmakers.
Background and Context
The Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence has been taking evidence from workers, unions, and technology companies on the economic and legal consequences of AI deployment in Australia. OpenAI's appearance before NSW parliament over the Medicare data incident ran alongside testimony from workers in sectors including voice performance, retail, and financial services.
The automotive industry comparison is drawn in the source reporting to illustrate the scale of transition support provided in earlier industry disruptions versus what is currently available for workers affected by AI. Victoria's A$14 million commitment is the figure cited for AI-specific worker support at the state level.
What Comes Next
The Joint Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence is continuing its hearings. Duncan and Kennedy's evidence forms part of the public record before the committee. No federal legislative response to AI voice cloning or consent requirements has been reported as at the date of this article.