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Video game actors speak out after union announces AI voice deal
(www.videogameschronicle.com)
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this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2024
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I really hope this doesnt take off. I tried out Star Trek: Infinite and the tutorial uses an AI voice. It just sounded bizarre and jarring, completely took me out of the experience.
Cant wait to have the voices removed after 3 years due to copyright issues
This deal solves the problem you're encountering, because it allows game companies to use real voices to generate dialogue. It will sound a hell of a lot better than the 100% AI generated voices you dislike.
And it will protect voice actors' jobs because the deal effectively requires new contracts for each use out of scope of the previous contract (i.e., the "opt out" language), and it encourages game companies to continue to rely on voice actors rather than switch to 100% AI generated.
Without this deal, game devs will just go 100% AI (and the tech will improve dramatically), and within a year or two, game voice actors will have no jobs to contract.
This is especially important in light of the trend toward dynamically generated dialogue in RPGs, etc. Without allowing an AI to train on real voice actors, dynamically generated dialogue will have to be 100% AI generated (no human voice involvement).
Voice acting in all fields is already a diminishing market because of AI generated voices. One of my coworkers had to get a job where I work because his VA jobs basically dried up. This agreement stanches the bleeding by permitting the use of AI trained on VAs (but only allowing use on a per-contract basis). Without that permission, AI would just be trained on open source / freely available voice samples, and there would be no contracts, and VAs would just .... not exist anymore.
I disagree with it "solving" the problem. I've yet to hear an AI voice that actually works/sounds like an actual person. I've heard sentences or two that are somewhat passable at times, but never enough for actual dialogue. Regardless, your entire comment also does not address the issue presented at all, that voice actors did not agree with this deal.
Clearly you haven't seen the videos of Biden, Trump and others playing Minecraft.... Because man that works... And probably that wasn't the latest technology.
I have. If you think those are perfect replicas then I have a bridge to sell you. Go listen to them again, they're close-ish but there is always something a little off that sticks out when listening to it.
If I have to listen close-ish then they don't stick out or they do very little so sounds good enough to me. Let again we don't need exact replicas for gaming.
Plus probably lot of usage would be to pregenerate stuff not realtime so they can fix specific cases where it sounds weird by editing or similar.
extreeeeeme doubt. The moment an AI has to inflect emotion it really fucks it up. You'll spend 5 hours and $200 of compute costs getting it to say "Great, thanks" sarcastically, when an actor could do it in a single take as part of doing the entire script.
Honestly I just don't think a lot of people will care. They'll just get used to the lower quality. AI only has to be 'good enough to still sell'. Do you really think that gamers are the consumers that are going to be ones to fight back against it? The same consumers that have rolled over to basically every other exploitative practice ever conceived of?
at the levels we're talking - maybe an indie studio could deliberately, stylistically, pull it off. But a AAA studio? To whom their VO budget is less than what they pay an executive. It just leaves them open to competitors making a game with good voice acting, and their own game getting panned in the press.
I think people will be bothered if the voice acting in their games sounds like it could have been done by Stephen Hawking (or with less exaggeration, like an actor doing their first reading of a script).
You aren't up to date if you think modern AI voices sound like Stephen hawking.
And this deal was vetted and approved by which working voice actors?
Do you not understand how unions work?
I agree. The key factor is getting this settled before some smart people get this working seemlessly. It's stupid to hear that there wasn't any unionised info decisions for a union though. I guess you ask the union to speak for you but it's the unions job to speak back.
Interesting, thanks for the clarification. Have to admit, that does sound better, at least in terms of quality
Speaking of Star Trek and AI voices... Majel Barrett supposedly recorded her voice so that it could be used in the future by software to make her talk again.
So fuck Google Assistant or whatever. Where's my Enterprise Computer app for me to talk to?
Can't even configure assistants to call them "Computer"
I believe you can with Alexa, but I don't plan to find out.
The finals uses ai voices for announcers and I could not tell the difference so there's definitely something there. I think it works in that setting because the inflections is so set.
But as a emotional character maybe not so much