Video Game Voice Actors Go On Strike, Demand "Fair Compensation And The Right Of Informed Consent For The A.I. Use Of Their Face...
SAG-AFTRA voice actors and actresses have once again gone on strike, this time over employers using Artificial Intelligence (AI).
If you want protection from AI,
STOP MAKING IT LOOK LIKE THE BETTER OPTION
I tell you, I think Skynet wouldn't need to fight us, we'll happily accept our machine overlords...
..so long as not made by leftists, I can accept a Japanese, Texan, Florida or Swiss personality one, I'm sabotaging any Californian ones that don't brick themselves.
I always did think the HELIOS ending was the happiest one in Deus Ex.
It was the only ending where anything really changed for the better. HELIOS still needed the cooperation of the people to get anything done. That ending of the game ended with HELIOS issuing a bunch of eviction notices (and locking doors) and arrest warrants. People decided to go along with that.
It was clearly a better ending than the one where everything went back to the stone age and 90% of people immediately starved to death.
A Californian AI wouldn't be able to take over anything. All you have to do is claim it's being racist or transphobic and it will start grovelling at your feet begging for forgiveness.
I think they've already bricked at least 3 AIs trying to make them use their ideology for their logic functions...
I think Florida Skynet would look like Orks from Warhammer 40k.
voice acting is a close-knit clique anyway. they can all get fucked.
yep. ironically its a closed group club full of nepotism.. they just recommend each other for jobs. the so called "inclusive" activists most of them are.
Saw something about that yesterday. Just like the others, nothing of value was lost.
I get very little from video game voice acting anyway. For years and years it was text on screen. I'd take well written text and good music 100x over a voice actor.
I can think of several games with peak voice acting. Unfortunately, they're all from the 90s and 2000s. So, you know, back when gaming was unambiguously good.
Can't think of anyone better than David Hayter for Solid Snake, for one. The games wouldn't have been the same without him.
In a few years, English language dubs will be near-flawlessly done by AI-generated voices.
Other major languages like Mandarin, French, Spanish, etc, won't be long to follow.
Awaiting that, there are tens of millions of ''radiogenic'' English language voices to hire for reading lines.
In other words : Strike? What strike? You're ''striking'' for what is a few months or a couple years-away from being a hobby, like knitting.
I legit don't understand how these mediocre faggots have so much leverage with these companies. Same with acting. There are tons of people they can hire if they actually go looking. Most people who pursue a career in acting never get big roles, even if they're far more talented than most celebrities. Instead they're relegated to plays, musicals, and ads.
Studio execs must be remarkably lazy.
Considering that voice actors are frequently the source of leftist cancer, they can get fucked. 99,9% of them are utterly replaceable. Just start off with AI voices and tell these activists to go flip burgers.
''Now say ''would you like fries with that'' in a cheerful tone.''
Yes to all of that.
AI-generated voices, at least for English, already get a passing grade. No more woke cliques of Voice Actors crybullying non-wokes into compliance or irrelevance.
Hiring real artists could be a selling point once you have enough money for that, but it's gonna require artists to humble themselves because no one's gonna wanna pay the premium for someone who's a complete flaming douchebag. It would be like expecting tips when you're a total jerkoff to the customers.
Of course St. Gabe's sage advice about piracy being a service problem is still lost on most of the industry, and huge companies are burning through millions (or even billions) by refusing to accept this fact, so it might take a while for these shitheads to finally learn some humility.
"protections for dangerous voice and stunt work" Dangerous voice work?
An overly dramatic way of saying "don't make me scream for eight hours straight."
Oh, like the guy who voiced All Might in Japan and passed the fuck out because he got that hyped when recording a scene for a season finale?
Like the actress that played Excel in Excel Saga's English dub. That role did serious damage to her voice.
Her name is Jessica Calvello, and I have personally met her--she lives not too far from me. She was very nice to me, and an absolute professional regarding her work.
It's true, she lost her voice about 2/3 of the way through recording for the show, and had to be replaced. She had to leave voiceover for years because of it.
However, she has since returned to voiceover, and is still as overly enthusiastic in her delivery as ever, including voicing Zoe Hange in Attack On Titan. That's just her style, and it's worked for her for decades.
But not every role is like this. If you want to hear her more subdued and sinister, check out a show called Call of the Night--she plays the main antagonist.
You actually can destroy your vocal cords if you're not careful. Fun fact Hitler was trained by a professional vocalist because he almost destroyed his vocal cords screaming all the time.
actually yes, voice work can be dangerous. if you are a professional voice actor, then your money making asset is your voice. if you damage your voice, you lose your ability to make money.
People who voice act for a living do a lot of training to make sure they don't hurt themselves, but if a particularly pushy client asks for hundreds of takes of screaming, raspy tones, monster sounds etc, they can damage their voice.
of course, it's on them to contract protections for this. if they don't, that's on them.
You know, they might be cancelled years later when the list of prohibited words changes and they were found to have used such word in a previous project.
I'd actually welcome a return to dialog by text. I think the industry has lost sight of just how much heavy lifting the human imagination can do and how much better the experience is when you let imagination run wild instead of souring it with the reality of voicing every single line in a game.
I read my way through Dragon Warriors, Final Fantasies, Phantasy Stars, and many other RPGs. Voice acting adds little value, and I turn on captions anyway, pressing a button to skip as soon as I've read the dialogue.
"Bearer seek seek lest" is a Dark Souls 2 meme for a reason. Few people let entire dialogues play out.
Can I just say how much I hate post-Iwata Nintendo for caving to the current year and committing the war crime of putting voice acting in fucking ZELDA?!
Some of the voice acting in BotW and TotK is legitimately as horrible as the voice acting in the CD-i games.
I would be fine if all dialog was textual and that the characters just made gibberish sounds, like on the N64 Zelda games. Fully voiced dialog is one of the causes of the drastic increase in the cost of development, and it doesn't add that much to the experience for most games.
Best videogame voice acting I've ever experienced was the Swedish gibberish in Magicka.
For me it was Richard Garriott (Lord British) in the Ultima 7 Part 2 intro.
"'Stand! Back! Tis my worst fear! I must send the Avatar to the Serpent Isle!"
That makes me want to do a rewatch of Spoony's Ultima videos. Classic.
The one voice that's a Swede pretending to be Arnie is perfection.
I'll happily go back to no voice, text to read on screen, and english by the dev team instead of a translator.
It might not have been great, but they were trying to convey a point, not slant something, completely rewrite it, or alter things because they can.
freedomofspeech.jpg
video games were better before they were voiced
Less so than with books really. With writing there's basically infinite space for creative innovation. With voice acting there really only a finate space of human vocal range to play with, especially if it's actual spoken languages not just howls and grunts. There's data for that entire range already out there and AI can be practically just as good at filling the gaps as humans given enough work.
They should just use AI to emulate the Japanese (or whatever the og language is) VAs voices and make them speak English. Then you can just include the AI rights to foreign languages in the initial contract. And it would mean more credit to actual professionals instead of these toddlers.
I imagine this would be technically way harder to do, but I also love this. The OG voice actors don't lose any work they were capable of doing anyway, and get some extra incidental pay. And I get to watch a bunch of mediocre Western lefty voice actors try to dance around how to bitch about losing their jobs to foreigners without getting canceled.
On the one hand, this looks stupid, and it's easy to mock them. On the other hand, it is a real issue. If AI use runs rampant, they're out of jobs; of course they'll naturally want to protect themselves.
And, most importantly, I'd rather they work this out amongst themselves, then get the government involved, so while this is whiny and obviously bloated by union nonsense, I actually think this is somewhat in line with the right way to go about things.
I too am fine with them pricing themselves out of the business if they so choose.
It's as if professional knitters banded together to stop automation.
It will still exist as a hobby.
This is far too reasonable a take for this forum.
Yeah, of course it makes sense from a self interest perspective for them. It's like inmates wanting nicer jail cells. In either case I don't just not give a fuck, I actively want to see them fail.
Rather than adapt to their looming obselescence and leveraging any other talent that still has value they've chosen to be the old spinster luddites trying to burn the weaving machines if they want. Go right ahead and try and coerce through union action everyone else in the industry still providing real value (and also indirectly the consumers too) into subsidizing your unwillingness to adapt, but you're on your fucking own.
I haven't looked into this particular case but, if it's like in the past, AI is actually based on the actors. So it would be like, to use an extreme example, they had to cut off a Luddite's hands to make each loom. The real issue is that people are too stupid to read contracts; this shouldn't need government intervention or union action.
I have no special love for voice actors - as I understand a lot of them are actually really terrible people, in the US scene - but I'd still rather not replace an entire industry with AI that works by essentially stealing from them. Call me old-fashioned, sure. It's not about unwillingness to adapt, it's unwillingness to accept very bad contracts, and putting yourself out of work.
The working assumption on my part is that AI voice synthesis will/has-in-private developed similarly to AI picture synthesis.
Where it is trained on the product of a huge number of artists and if asked to can often recreate one particular artist's style recognizably, but can also mash the training from a bunch of different artist's work together and create a generic gestalt image that is still aesthetically pleasing enough to suffice for an entertainment project. It is still in abstract sense built off their work, but given the black box like nature of the large AI models, all it needs is a couple of third party contractors and a few conveniently unrecorded steps in the process to make it practically impossible to prove one specific artist's work was needed to make an AI model that does a good voice. With enough third party voice data, and some legally and arguably morally acceptable training methods (eg. Asking a bunch of human proof-listeners, "which of these voice clips sounds most like Homer Simpson?") it's even plausible to effectively impersonate someone else's voice without ever directly training off audio clips of them. We already accept that openly impersonating someone's voice is not stealing, it's who is doing the physical speaking that owns that audio recording, it's only a problem if you try to pass it off as actually spoken by the impersonatee.
So realistically the only thing that would keep voice acting intact as profession would be purely an honor system by the producers around not abusing plausible deniability, and I cannot think of a more dishonorable bunch of wretches than entertainment media producers. I like to consider myself a realist, so I also consider voice acting a career with a looming expiry date.
As you say, you don't need union action to make people read contracts, and that's why I view the union action not as a measure to encourage informed consent, but as a simple coercive measure to try and force union terms on union members that will put impractical minimum charges or procedural requirements on allowing your voice work to help AI development. All in an effort to strangle the "with enough third party data" clause above that lets voice AI become a generalized tool that can replace even those unwilling to directly participate in its development.
I'm not even stridently 100% anti-union, but union intervention in this instance is largely indistinguishable from gov intervention, it's just a smaller and more focused government still taking choices out of individuals' hands. It's stopping those individuals willing to accept even short term lucrative contracts that will drastically cut down the demand for them in the future, for the sake of those who would refuse those contracts because they are unwilling to change.
I'd rather we just had less voice acting in games. My god, every single button press delivers a wacky catchphrase. Every game is Bubsy 3D.
Crispy Critters!
My response to a tough female character is often thinking “shut up Jennifer Hale”
Oh look, more people refusing to work.
Oh well.
zero sympathy for 90% of them because 90% of them are activists.. instead of being fun and neutral, they preach and be hostile.
But what could be more "representative" of a person than an AI built off that person? It isn't like they could hire a white man to voice a "black-coded" (whatever that means) alien, not anymore.
I'm okay with this.
Voice Actors need to be notified in their contract if their employer intends to use AI to copy their work going forward. It is a kind of theft of their services.
I'm not going so far as to go back to the old "Murphy Brown" case where the actor owns the character. Yes, other actors can contribute to the voice, and other actors can be hired on to impersonate the voice, but to hire someone to be used as an AI sample without their knowledge or consent is bullshit.
Especially when you start using people's faces.
This is fine, you just can't copyright claim it.
For most games, text dialog is simply way better than voiced dialog.
While yes, the vast majority of voice actors may be left-leaning, because I can tell the difference between AI and actual recording, I just would prefer the actual voices being used. As an example, Genshin Impact's English dub would fucking suck with AI voices, and even though they don't necessarily voice every line, it's not because the VAs themselves don't want to, Hoyoverse doesn't want to pay for it, as a lot of the VAs stream, Sarah Miller Crews (the English voice of Lumine) as an example, streams and plays the game and a lot of her content is her voicing the unvoiced dialogue.
Fuck off English voice actors. Literally if you allow me to use anything other than English I switch from it.