Technology

How very cyberpunk, except for the fact that permission was given.

This article lacks some context. Miłogost Reczek was the voice actor for the Polish language of the game. If you played the English version of the game you would have heard the very much alive Michael Gregory as Victor Vektor.

Many commenters here are discussing the writer's and actors strikes that are in the news. Those are American unions, they have no bearing on the work of Polish voice actors who do localization work.

I was just thinking earlier today, games could probably use AI to seamlessly work the player's name into dialog. They would still hire voice actors, but insert whatever name the player chooses into the lines where it is mentioned. I feel like this isn't too far away.

With advances in AI, Reczek’s performance could be recreated, but CDPR made sure they got permission from his family. His sons were “very supportive” of the idea, according to a Bloomberg report.

I am pretty sure his sons are fans of CP2077 too. I would give permission too if I were in their shoes - getting a new character, or a different voice for the old character is annoyingly weird when you get used to it...

Im absolutely sure I need GlaDOS (Ellen McLain) to voice my LLM digital assistant including her iconic unending font of bitter sarcasm.

It's just common sense. No rational viewer would challenge this necessity.

No, McLain is not dead, but I expect she is busy.

Imagine now, the Joker 2 movie where Heath Ledger, as Joker, jokes all his jokes about living in the society.

I mean, sure, but that should be negotiated. If they’re using my likeness for free I would not be ok with that. If they’re paying me (or my family) for the use, I would give permission for that.

In general lay audiences have a very weird relationship to AI as a topic, likely in large part to decades of effectively propaganda from SciFi anthropomorphizing it as an effective 'other' to have as a threat for human protagonists.

The reality of how this all is going to play out is that low skill work like walla walla filler for audioscapes will be AI generated instead of library sourced, which is going to sound better and not really make much difference to labor markets.

Middle range performances like NPCs will be AI generated from libraries where the actual voice actors creating that voice will be paid out residuals for the duration of voice generation, and you'll likely have better performances than most side quest NPCs by the next generation of consoles.

High end performance for key characters will still be custom hires directed for the specific role, likely with additional contract terms for extended generation for things like Bethesda's radiant questlines.

The latter is going to be the thing that's going to be the biggest hurdle to figure out terms for, as what would be ideal for the player would be having a near infinite variety of branching questlines in an open world that would be fully voiced, but if each branch was considered its own X hours of generation under contract that wouldn't be feasible and would ultimately price human actors out of the market down the road in favor of fully artificial alternatives. So it will probably be something like X hours of parallel generation (i.e. infinite variety but maybe only an additional 200 hours worth in a playthrough priced at 200 hours of generation).

But as can be seen in the article, it's not as simple as waving a hand and having AI voice lines - this was work done on top of a different actor's performance to bring the voice in line with the original performer.

And given there's still going to be a few years as the tech improves with significant overlap of needing to work with actors to get performances right, this is all going to get managed in acceptable ways.

You don't see people losing their minds over improved facial animation rigs taking away mocap sessions from actors, even though that's a reality of improved tech. But it doesn't have the scary 'AI' in the name (even though the tech is generally going to lean more and more on machine learning), so it flies under the radar.

Ultimately, being able to take a static voice performance into dynamic extended content is going to be one of the best things to ever happen to video games, and given how much of that is going to rely on human performance and union buy in, I wouldn't even be surprised if the eventual leading product offering ends owned and operated by the trade unions or a number of the actors themselves.