AI Can Copy the Voice. It Can’t Copy the Person
When imitation gets easier, the value of real experience rises
Hi everyone,
How’s your week going?
I’ve been thinking about a question that may sound simple at first: What happens when AI can sound like you, use your face, and imitate your writing, but the thinking behind the words isn’t yours?
A recent case in Japan brought that question into sharper focus. A well-known voice actor said that TikTok videos used an AI-generated imitation of his voice without permission. The Tokyo District Court recognized that a person’s voice can be protected under publicity rights, though it dismissed his request to have the videos removed because they had already been deleted.
The case was about a voice. But I think the question reaches much further.
We’re getting better at copying the surface
AI can reproduce recognizable features of a person’s expression. It can generate a voice that sounds familiar, write in a particular style, or create an image that resembles someone.
That ability is impressive. It is also unsettling.
For a long time, we treated the visible signs of a person’s work as evidence of the person behind it. We heard a voice and assumed the speaker had said those words. We read a piece of writing and assumed the named author had shaped the thinking. We saw a photograph and assumed the person pictured had been there.
Those assumptions are becoming less reliable.
The result is not simply that we may encounter more fake voices or images. It is that we may have to work harder to understand what we are looking at, who created it, and what it represents.
Sounding like me isn’t the same as being me
I think about my own writing. I use AI as a sounding board and an idea generator. If someone fed enough of me into an AI system, it might learn how I phrase things, the kinds of examples I use, and the way I move from one point to another.
It could produce something that sounded a lot like me, and it has. There are times I look back at some of my older writings, and it's hard to distinguish me from AI. I know, pretty scary!!
But the words are only the surface. Underneath them are the experiences that shaped what I believe: the businesses I’ve built, the decisions that worked and the ones that didn’t, the people I’ve listened to, and the things I’ve changed my mind about.
Those things don’t appear in a writing style. They show up in the experience behind the writing.
That distinction matters because judgment is not just having an opinion. It is knowing who, and what to pay attention to, and more important, what's just noise. Because our world is changing so fast, it's critical to question, because the answers that worked last time may not worked now.
AI can imitate the way someone expresses an idea, but it can never reproduce the reasons they reached it. That comes from living a life, not just correlating other people's.
Experience shows up in the choices
People sometimes talk about expertise as if it were a collection of facts. Facts matter, of course. But experience changes how a person uses them.
Two people can know the same information and make very different decisions. One may see a familiar pattern and move quickly. Another may notice the detail that makes this situation different. That kind of judgment often comes from having been wrong before, having seen the consequences, and remembering what the textbook left out.
It is also why real expertise is not always dramatic. It can look like asking a better question. Recognizing that the obvious answer won’t work here. Knowing when to stop adding complexity. Or admitting that the facts have changed and the old advice no longer applies.
Those choices are part of a person’s work, even when they are not easy to capture in a post or a polished presentation.
The trust question is moving upstream
This matters in business because people often form an impression before they speak with the person they may hire. That's an IMPORTANT point.
A prospective client might see a LinkedIn post, visit a website, look at past work, hear about someone through a referral, or receive a link from a colleague.
Each piece gives them a fragment. They use those fragments to decide whether the person behind them is worth a conversation.
Now imagine that some of those fragments can be generated or imitated with little effort. A convincing voice or a well-written post may no longer tell us much on its own.
So how do we go deeper:
We will look for more than polish. We want signs that the work connects to a real point of view and a history of doing the work.
Are the ideas and thoughts consistent and hold together across different settings? Does the person explain how they think, not just what they opine?
Can they show what they learned from doing the work, including what didn’t go as planned? Sometimes knowing what didn't work well and how thyey adjusted tells more than the successes.
A strong body of work helps answer those questions. Not because every piece has to be perfect, or because volume proves expertise, but because different pieces can reveal the same mind at work: a consistent perspective, developed through practice.
AI can help tell the story
I don’t see this as an argument against using AI. I use it as a tool, and I believe it can help people do more with what they know.
It can help a person organize years of material, find a clearer structure, test an idea, or express something that has been difficult to put into words. It can help turn scattered knowledge into something other people can understand and use.
That can be valuable, especially for people who have spent years teaching, advising, speaking, writing, or solving problems but have never found a useful form for what they know.
The question is not whether AI touched the work. The more useful question is whether the person’s thinking is still shaping it.
Did they make the central choices? Can they explain why they believe what they say? Are they willing to stand behind the result? Does the finished work reflect their experience, or merely imitate the appearance of expertise?
AI can assist with expression. The person still has to supply the judgment, the responsibility, and the experience that give the expression meaning.
Authenticity may become easier to claim and harder to prove
As synthetic content becomes more convincing, we may see more people describe their work as authentic. The word itself won’t settle the question.
Authenticity is not a tone of voice or a set of personal details. It is not an informal style, a photograph of someone at work, or an anecdote added to make a message feel personal.
To me, authenticity means that there is a real connection between the person, the experience, the thinking, and the work being presented. It means the person is not hiding behind a performance they cannot explain or defend.
That connection is built over time. It appears in what someone chooses to say, what they are willing to question, and how their thinking changes as they learn. It is visible in the relationship between their ideas and the work they have actually done.
That may be why a recognizable body of work matters more now. One post can be imitated. A voice can be cloned. But a history of decisions, ideas, conversations, and lessons is harder to reduce to a convincing surface.
The person behind the work
The more AI can reproduce, the less we should rely on resemblance alone.
A voice may sound familiar. A paragraph may have the right rhythm. An image may look convincing. But the deeper questions remain: Who is responsible for this? What experience stands behind it? What judgment does it show? And can the person explain the thinking that produced it?
Those questions are not only for audiences. They are for all of us creating work with AI, too.
We have an opportunity to use these amazing tools to make our experience more accessible, reach more people, not to pretend we have experience we don’t.
We now have the ability to communicate our thinking more clearly, not to replace our thinking. IT'S IRREPLACEABLE!
To create better, help more people, while remaining accountable for what we put into the world.
That is where I think authenticity will matter most. Not as a claim that everything was made without help, but as evidence that a real person with real experience is still making the important decisions.
The original post reached far beyond my network. I’m glad it did, because the question deserves more than a quick reaction.
As AI gets better at imitation, what will help you decide that there is a real person, real experience, and real thinking behind the work?
More soon.
Warmly,
Jan
-30-
In a world of noise, your authentic voice is the rarest asset there is.
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