Voice actors fighting AI exploitation is the resistance we need in this dystopian tech landscape.
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this post was submitted on 27 Feb 2025
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When Star Wars (1976) came out, it cost 12 million to make and had almost no advertising. The "advertising" was word-of-mouth.
Modern games and movies wouldn't need to set aside 100 million dollar advertising budgets (on TOP of the cost of their product) if they would simply stop writing shit.
They had word of mouth AND the difficulty of getting a film made and distributed. That meant very few movies existed. It's easier to stand out in a small crowd.
Now anybody with a phone can film and distribute. Marketing is more important for getting your idea in front of people than anything else these days.
You can't really compare budgeting and advertising with 50 years ago.
Regardless of inflation, it's hard to stand out in the flood of new stuff and information being thrown at us from every direction. You didn't have any of that back then.
Star Wars was released in 1977, and what does "simply stop writing shit" mean?
sounds like EA
What blows my mind is that when it comes to costs I feel like voice actors are probably less than 5% of the budget on a video game. Unless they hire a famous actor I can't imagine this being that worthwhile. It's just penny pinching.
The one use case I can see being valuable is dynamically reading a custom name. In Skyrim for example, all NPCs refer to you by your title as Dragonborn. But some smart person made a mod that uses AI trained on the NPC voice lines to embed your character's name into dialog!
As long as voice actors are appropriately compensated/protected, say with royalties for every game that uses their likeness or an ironclad contract making sure the company can't stiff then out of future work, I feel like that could be a great thing.
It’s just penny pinching.
Imagine the pace you can just dump out new voice lines for items, maps, general quibble etc that you'd never get the budget to bring a bunch of VAs into studio to do for updates
Honestly it's probably an agility thing. You remove the entire. Getting another human to do the work thing
If you believe it hasn't occurred to them that they won't have to pay wages any more, I have a bridge to sell you.
Oh I agree with you. I just don't think they are doing this just because of that.
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The great thing about ai is you don’t need to get a voice actor to do it
Just some random person that knows it won’t be a career and could use $5
You don't even need that. You can generate a voice entirely through AI (or even non-AI tools that have existed for a long time before generative AI was a thing).
So let’s hear it. Hand an AI Leviathan Wakes, the first book of The Expanse, and see how it does. My money is on it being garbage, but let’s hear it.
Jefferson Mays is tough to beat as a human.
Worse, hand an AI a Terry Pratchett book, see how that goes.
I only ~~read~~ heard him read the last 3 books+ novellas after watching the show, and he REALLY did the accents well
*Except Bobbie, not enough southern hemisphere OZ/NZ twang
Audiobook narrators don’t “read”. They act. They vocally act the entire book. The ones who don’t generally get returned, unread, to either your audiobook platform choice or the library.
Voice actors in games also don’t just read. They act. They vocally act their entire role.
Jennifer Hale vs AI, who would win? Would any human other than Kate Mulgrew as Flemeth have made the character as compelling?
Technology will of course change, but I did complete an (unreleased) experiment where I made an animation with AI, using AI to provide voices. This was a few months ago.
All of the models used to generate vocal lines out of nothing are very basic and robotic. But I had a lot of success recording the lines (and songs) myself and then using an AI tool to convert it into someone else's voice. I blended two or three voices per character and for voices where the character was a different gender or age from me, it sounded like a real actor of that demographic giving the same performance I gave.
So, context matters here. Is the tech ready to replace actors completely? Not at all. But could you have an actor record all the lines in different styles and then use licensed voice models to have it sound like a given voice actor? Absolutely. Actors should think very hard before agreeing to any licensing agreements using their voices. Because it might just result in a lot of the acting removed from their job role. And potentially worse quality dialogue in the end depending on who they hire to record lines in bulk. Not to mention that it's only a matter of time before the fully AI models advance far enough to do the job completely.
Hence, why I never released my animation. People wouldn't be able to tell whose voices I used. But I would know. And I don't want to be on the wrong side of history.
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Calling it now, EA is going to do it anyway if they haven't already, and tell them all to go pound sand.
We trained it our own games that we own
I can almost guarantee it
Hopefully it’ll finally usher in their downfall. Can’t imagine the slop they’ll kick out with AI generated voices, models, scripts, and other assets.
I’m gonna be disappointed when it somehow makes them the most profitable game company of all time instead.
Considering EA is known for making sports games clones of each other that only change the year in the title and people still buy it, I wouldn't be shocked if nothing comes out of this.
With judiciary cos playing lapdogs for oligarchs... Why wouldn't EA fuck the pedon
Good for them
AI will replace them. All they're doing is buying themselves more time. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but it will happen.
I think it is wrong, but this is inevitable.
The next time they hire actors they will just require them to train the AI as well. Voice actors will in a huge part die out. There will be some, but far less. Even A-list celebrities will in the future have to give the companies their likeness and their voice. So that companies can provide dubbing for other languages, make toys etc.
Not the A-list celebrities we have now necessarily, but the coming generations. I can't see a situation in which everyone have a united front and won't take the money
Edit: I realized this is a bit defeatist. A solution would be unions, I should have mentioned that
Since being replaced by AI is inevitable, it would make more sense for us to be figuring out how to make that world work instead of swinging swords at the ocean.
It doesn't have to be inevitable. You, a gamer, can openly and loudly refuse to buy games that are made with the use of generative AI
Recently, a thread cropped up about indie devs putting "No GenAI used" stamps in their pages, and the amount of people questioning the value of the initiative or outright criticizing it is absurd.
People saying disingenuous things like "It's just another tool, I didn't hear anyone complaining about the brush on photoshop", and "games already used AI, are you also against procedural generation?" or the ridiculous "I need AI to make things. Why are you all against me learning and growing as a person?"
There is a vocal, often severely technically-uninformed crowd that strongly likes GenAI, doesn't care about and refuses to understand the harm it causes, and needs everyone to be like them so they can stop receiving backlash for contributing to creator exploitation.
You mean people took opposing sides on a topic on a debate forum? Color me surprised.
The problem isn't opposition. It's spreading misinformation, framing critics as luddites, refusing to acknowledge their misunderstandings about the relevant technologies and how they impact others. There's no "two sides" to it when one of the sides thinks 2 + 2 is 5.
Sure, but that means everyone who disagrees on that point is arguing in bad faith, which is not possible. People argue what they think is right, and change their minds over time. Everyone was wrong about something at one point.
Just because they have faulty logic doesnt make them bad faith. You have faulty logic in this case, should I assume you are bad faith?
This attitude of "only one side follows facts and it just happens to be mine" is so amnesic, you never were always on the right side.
that means everyone who disagrees on that point is arguing in bad faith
It doesn't, that's not my point. Bad faith implies they're lying despite knowing better, which isn't what I described. I never claimed bad faith, I said they're factually wrong in this instance, and that their discourse is harmful regardless of their beliefs.
Just as not all anti-vaxers argue in bad faith, but are wrong nonetheless. Like many other groups who honestly and earnestly defend(ed) everything from racial segregation to genocide. I'm not saying these groups and the harm they cause are equivalent—this should be obvious, but I'm saying it anyway.
Everyone was wrong about something at one point.
When one being wrong hurts innocent people, something has to be done. I expect folks in aforementioned groups to stop being wrong about those things at some point. Otherwise, it's up to the rest of us to act to protect the victims, not the moral standing of the aggressors because they're sincere.
This attitude of "only one side follows facts and it just happens to be mine" is so amnesic, you never were always on the right side.
That's a gross misrepresentation of my position, which I hope is born of misunderstanding or lack of knowledge on the topic. I tried to clear up any misunderstandings. If you don't think they're wrong or causing harm, I'm willing to have a conversation about this to explain it, if you want.
And why does it fall on the consumers and workers to figure out how to not exploit people, instead of the companies currently doing it?
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