Colin Cassidy: Do humans matter?
Colin Cassidy, the Australian-British voice actor behind some of adland’s top commercials, shares his thoughts on why crediting performers in advertising still matters.
Do humans matter? Pause for dramatic effect. Depends who you ask. If they don’t, what could motivate the view that they do not? Motivation was what drove the great Roman statesman, lawyer and scholar Cicero (106–43 BCE) to formulate the ultimate question to solve a ‘whodunit’ crime drama – cui bono (pronounced kwee boe-noe), a Latin phrase that translates literally to ‘who benefits’.
When it comes to human performers – in fact, all creative contributors – who is it who benefits from them NOT being ‘credited’? Ask Big Tech and they’ll tell you, we benefit – at the expense of the humans we don’t credit but profit from – silly! Fwah Fwah, fwuffwaah (…that’s how big tech execs laugh).
‘Give credit, when credit is due’, is not a cliché for nothing. Credit is surely a right. However, in today’s advertising industry, crediting performers has fallen like truth in the street. Stated plainly, no one is crediting performers in Australian advertising. But why? Are they ‘secret sauce’ and considered top secret weapons to be kept from competitors lustful eyes? Wishful thinking on the part of the performer. Whatever the reason, surely, it’s the decent thing to do. And surely, just because an entire industry has not done the decent thing by crediting performing artists for decades (along with today’s Big AI tech), it doesn’t mean we can’t start doing it now. (MUSIC: Fade up theme tune from Robin Hood – the Kevin Costner version, obviously!).
In fact, the right of attribution for a human performer was deemed so important to the authors of Australia’s 1968 Copyright Act (Part IX) that they made it ‘inalienable’ (non-transferable – it can’t be assigned or given away). But alas, certain lawyers (not the type Cicero would deem worthy, I’m sure) found a way to strip performers of ‘even the simple right’ to be acknowledged and credited – by making performers themselves ‘omit’ or ‘discard’ it. These lawyers created a clause stating that artists ‘omit their moral rights’, and if you didn’t sign it the dynamics were such that you didn’t get the work – ‘…welcome to the acting world, kid’.
Today, we’re witnessing wholesale ‘AI voice-clone theft’ by Big Tech in what sociologists are calling ‘the third industrial revolution’. Human performers and creators are once again not being credited, and their work is taken without permission, credit or compensation and sythnetised (a conflation of synthesisation and digitisation), then reassembled with other ‘search-relevant data’, fused at mind-bending speeds to reproduce – it has to be said – increasingly impressive work and phenomenal revenue. I know, because it’s happened to me (Newscorp interview, March 2026): when, in breach of contract and without consent or compensation, my voice was ‘allegedly’ cloned on a YouTube channel which I’d already helped get to 600K, then fed into an AI ingestion system and monetised in a further nine languages and countries. And you guessed it – no credit or attribution either. One common misconception is that there is no law against Ai Voice Clone theft, because there IS. It is ‘contract law’, but that’s another article entirely.
(Video courtesy of News Corp Australia)
So, do human performers matter? Do ethics, respect and decency matter? When the name of the designer of a thumbnail appears in a magazine credits list for a ‘radio’ advert, but the voice or voices of that commercial are nowhere to be seen, has anyone ever thought: ‘That’s a bit odd, isn’t it?’ It is beyond odd; it is among the saddest oversights I’ve seen in the Australian ad industry. Yet, far from being malicious, this practice is more often than not simply a case of innocent ignorance – an industry stuck somewhere in the rogue ‘like it or lump it’ 80s wild west. To be fair, most in today’s advertising world are too busy simply staying afloat to indulge in reminiscences about those halcyon days.
The irony of ‘human contributors to creative work’ being important is this,…it requires a human to empathise with a human, does it not? And the creative industry is overflowing with good ones – beautifully hearted, creative humans. I know because I voice for them, ideate, collaborate, get directed until I bleed for them. They’re the kind, sensitive ideas-folk of our creative and media industry, I see them everywhere I go, and THEY, are why I love what I do. In fact, every producer and creative I’ve ever asked about crediting me for our collaborations – whether on publications, online or otherwise – is overwhelmingly gracious, respectful and supportive of the idea that the performers who literally breathe their scripts and brands to sparkly life should be credited. This support has only ballooned given the battle AI is waging against our collective creative industry. Producers, creatives, production houses, artists and performers all understand they need each other – now more than ever – to outsmart, outperform and (while we can) outrun the robots.
So the next time an artist asks if it’s possible to amend a standard contract which demands they ‘omit their (human) rights’ – even if the moral rights need be simply ‘itemised or bullet-pointed out’, a clause for the ‘right to object to defamatory depiction’, versus the separate ‘right of attribution’ – please think twice before denying them credit. Before demanding their talent and human identity be ignored; their name wiped from historical records linking them to ‘the finished work’. Cicero almost certainly knew Big Tech’s motivations would be money over humans. But for those of us left in the race, WE are the human difference that makes the difference.
Colin Cassidy is an award-winning voice actor for clients worldwide. He’s based out of Sydney – represented in Australia by his agent EM Voices.
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