New research reveals Australians’ concerns about authenticity and trust in Voice AI
Author ADM+S Centre
Date 28 August 2026
A new report exploring Australians’ experiences and perceptions of Voice AI in the media has revealed a clear desire for genuine human connection, as well as concerns about authenticity and the potential impact of AI on creative workers.
The report How do everyday Australians feel about Voice AI? from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making & Society (ADM+S) presents findings from a pilot survey of 61 participants. It explores how Australian audiences experience, think and feel about Voice AI in media, and what kinds of issues they care about, with a particular focus on questions of authenticity and trust.
Voice AI is becoming increasingly prevalent across Australian traditional and online media, with increasingly sophisticated technologies making AI-generated voices harder to distinguish from human speech.
“We were really interested to find out how people were currently experiencing Voice AI in the community, as well as how they felt in response to this technology. Though our pilot was quite small, and not representative of the Australian population, it showed us that Voice AI’s emergence into audio media is raising a range of issues for people and deserves further research,” said Dr Phoebe Matich, Research Fellow from the ADM+S at QUT and lead author of the report.
The findings reveal largely negative attitudes toward Voice AI, with many participants describing feeling “disappointed and cheated” after realising that they’d encountered Voice AI.
Participants were particularly concerned about the potential for generative AI to misrepresent real people and events. These concerns extended beyond whether audio was technically authentic to broader questions about identity, representation and trust.
One participant raised concerns about the potential for generative AI to “impact social cohesion”, highlighting the broader social implications of technologies capable of creating convincing representations of people saying or doing things they never actually said or did.
Participants were concerned about the use of Voice AI in fictional and lifestyle content but less so than factual content, suggesting that attitudes towards synthetic voices are strongly shaped by context and expectations.
Responses also pointed to a broader concern about the role of Voice AI in creative and cultural expression. For participants, authenticity was not simply about whether something was technically real, but whether it represented people, experiences and emotions in a way they considered meaningful and trustworthy.
Some participants felt AI had “compromised the quality of the media”, while others questioned whether AI-generated voices could convey the emotion, meaning and resonance associated with human communication.
“Our participants really value the human component of audio and of media in general, and they want to feel like they’re learning real things from real people, both to navigate the world and simply to experience human connection.”
These responses show that participants feel Voice AI threatens the faithful representation of personal, political, and cultural identity, not just information, and undermines rather than supports creative expression, making Voice AI integration an ethical matter as much as an economic and political one.
People may be comfortable with Voice AI in some circumstances, while being more concerned about the use of synthetic voice which has not been disclosed , or when the technology changes the nature of a communication they believed was human.
In the words of one participant, “if something is worth expressing, a human should express it. The only exception is a prosthetic for someone who can’t speak.”
These survey results provide an important foundation for further research into how Australians encounter and respond to Voice AI across different forms of audio media.
Understanding audience perspectives can help researchers, media organisations, technology developers and policymakers consider how Voice AI should be introduced and communicated, and what safeguards may be needed as its use expands.
To build on this report, there are clear directions for future research:
- Tracing the adoption of Voice AI in digital media platforms;
- Exploring stylistic differences and public reception of Voice AI across specific audio genres and formats, for example podcasting or music;
- Analysing the contextual nuances in audiences’ sensory and emotional reactions to AI voices; and
- Developing literacy approaches specific to Voice AI.
As synthetic voices become an increasingly familiar part of everyday media, one thing remains clear: knowing who, or what is behind the voice matters.
Read the full report How do everyday Australians feel about Voice AI?
The research was conducted as a pilot study within the ADM+S Generative Authenticity project
Authored by Dr Phoebe Matich, Distinguished Professor Jean Burgess and Assoc Professor Michael Richardson.
