How To Continue To Beat Your A.I. Competitor

Randy Thom Guest Author

Continue to Beat Your A.I. Competitor

A.I. is not going away, and it will improve at doing sound. I think eventually it will be better at it than any human. That’s the bad news for all us humans who want to make a living in the long run as sound designers, sound editors, sound mixers.

The good news for us is that for at least a while, A.I. will continue to be crappy to mediocre at it, for two reasons. We can exploit those two deficiencies, and beat A.I, for now, using it as a tool whenever it suits us.

The sound jobs where the bosses don’t really care at all about the quality of sound in their projects will quickly fall to A.I. But the jobs where the bosses do care, at least a little, are defensible positions for us for some years to come if we remember and get better at these two things:

Transcend the obvious to tell the story...

First, it doesn’t “know” yet how to transcend the obvious. By “obvious,” I mean what we used to call “see a dog, hear a dog,” meaning that if there is a dog on the screen, and you’re the sound editor, put some dog sounds in. A great sound editor/designer finds ways to go beyond what is minimally required in order to tell a more interesting story.

If the dog happens to turn its head, create a sound to motivate that turn. A.I. isn’t currently smart enough to do that. Or use a vocal sound for the dog that isn’t actually a dog, but close. It’ll be plausible as a dog, but it will also have an exotic, unexpected feel that draws the listener in. Maybe it’s a fox vocalization, a wolf, or a hyena breath.

We humans love little question marks hanging in the air, because we’re all about making up stories with the limited info we have at hand, or ear.

Finding/making sounds that have an oblique relationship to the action in a film/video is almost always a good strategy anyway. A roaring engine can often be plausibly enhanced by a roaring animal or a roaring wind. Wind for a mysterious place will take on more character and be more mysterious if it contains human whispers. A wild, out of control, screeching rocket can be enhanced by chalk squeaking on a blackboard, as I did for the film The Right Stuff.

Only a clever user of A.I. will know to use these kinds of quirky prompts. Be that clever user.


Second, the most important and most difficult part of our job is not using gear to generate and manipulate sounds. It’s using our ears, eyes, minds, and mouths to communicate with our bosses and colleagues. A.I. isn’t smart enough yet to do that either. You can give it a prompt, but it’s not sophisticated enough to ask you a question about the prompt, or to read between the lines of the prompt, or understand your particular prompt quirks.

You are not likely to truly please a director with your work until you know that person at least a bit. The social, interpersonal skill set isn’t taught in sound schools, and it sure isn’t programmed into A.I. that’s doing sound… yet.


So, don’t use the obvious sound, unless you know your boss wants you to use the obvious sound. And train your ears to listen even better to the speakers that matter most: the
speakers otherwise known as your bosses and colleagues.

I will dive deeper into beating A.I. at the creativity game in new articles soon.
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