Honestly surprised that no one other than me has mentioned this in any posts over the past few months, but to give a TL;DR about the original purpose of the strike: SAG-AFTRA (Screen Actors Guild–American Federation of Television and Radio Artists) is the primary union for voice actors, actors, journalists, DJs, singers, etc in the United States, and on July 26, 2024, began striking against several game developers and recording studios, including Activision, Epic Games, Disney Interactive, and most important to this post specifically, Formosa Interactive, due to the lack of ability to come to an agreement with various studios about the usage of their members' voices in LLMs to create machine generated voices for their content. In contrast to these studios among others, a deal was made with Replica Studios for usage of AI, including a time limit on using said LLM without either destroying the data or sending another payment to the actor the LLM was trained on.
In contrast to the US, South Korea, China and Japan actively have laws in their federal code against using AI voices for profit without the consent of the people/persons the LLMs will be trained on, so none of this is an issue. Because of the way that Hollywood developed and the current makeup of our government, I believe that such a law getting passed in the US is essentially impossible, but a law like that wouldn't solve every problem, as the strike has moved passed that, but let me explain why the strike has begun to bite Western VAs in the ass.
Under the Taft-Hartley Act (or the Labor Management Relations Act, 1947), non-union members are allowed to work on unionized jobs (this specifically means a show/movie/commercial/whatever that has signed an agreement with SAG-AFTRA to only hire union members) and with SAG-AFTRA, have to write a Taft-Hartley 'report' and are only allowed to do this three times during their lifetimes (which isn't in the act, but imposed by SAG-AFTRA), before either no longer being able to join 'union projects' (which is what I will refer to this as for the rest of the post), or having to join SAG-AFTRA. SAG-AFTRA's one-time joining fee is $3,000, with annual dues of $236.60 as well as taking 1.575% of 'covered earnings', up to one million dollars, with the ability to take out a loan or put said joining fee on a payment plan if a prospective member can't join the full fee at the time of joining.
Formosa Interactive is the studio that Hoyoverse originally contracted to lead the recording of the English dub of their games. For those who are unaware, Hoyoverse, formerly known as MiHoYo, is the developer of Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail, Honkai Impact 3rd and Zenless Zone Zero, and is on a generational run, when it comes to getting even casuals who don't play many other video games to play their games, similar to Pokémon GO, but even more sustained than that. The only current 'controversies' are people malding about the lack of melanated characters and the ratio of limited five-star females to males for the past year which even then isn't that big of a deal.
Because of the strike, Hoyoverse switched to a different studio, which they already agreed an AI protection deal for, Sound Cadence Studios, owned by the English voice actor of Genshin Impact's Furina, Amber Lee Conners.
The current hubbub that blew up over the last few days, and why this post is getting made, is that the original voice actor of Kinich, John Patneaude has been replaced by Jacob Takanashi, who based out of Japan, and after that, many of Genshin Impact's voice actors have been active on Twitter over the past day or so, which I will link below with various Reddit posts and tweets, since it's been very wild.
The Western community as a whole has actually sided with Hoyoverse, mostly because of the reactions of several different voice actors, but on that same note, it also came up why Western voice actors for anime are who they are, and a lot of it has to do with the way that voice acting for animated content was treated on the inception of it in the various regions. In Japan, China and South Korea, voice actors are just as respected and famous as real life actors, to bring this to a Western example, Tara Strong would be just as famous and well known as Angelina Jolie, when in actuality, that is not the case at all, because animation was shamed as something only for kids, so no one took animated shows and movies seriously until very recently, which meant that training for voice acting wasn't as formalized in the West as it could have been, and some rare crossovers with a traditional actor, such as Mark Hamill being the voice of Avatar: The Last Airbender's Ozai, or Regular Show's Skips were nowhere near as common here as they are over there.
To add to this, in Japan specifically, specific voice actors are so adored that they have become part of the marketing and how Hoyoverse sells specific characters to the player base. Hu Tao's Japanese VA is Rie Takahashi, who voices Megumin in Konosuba, Emilia in Re:Zero, Mash Kyrielight in Fate/Grand Order and Ai Hoshino in Oshi no Ko, just as one example.
To end, I'll go over other things I've heard about foreign unions since looking deeper into this whole situation. In Europe, unions are not able to force people to join them, which is what the limit on using Taft-Hartley does, benefits such as AI protections would benefit all people in specific job, not just members of the union and dues are much cheaper. In addition, one thing I forgot to mention up above is that it is very difficult for a non-American to join SAG-AFTRA, so if Hoyoverse were to sign the 'interim agreement' that the union is asking for, it would essentially ice out all foreign voice actors as well as limit the pool to union voice actors.
I personally believe that SAG-AFTRA has much overplayed their hand and has essentially fucked up public opinion of them, because if this was just about AI protections, this would have already been finalized by now and there wouldn't be a large section of the casts of Hoyoverse's games that have silent voices when using the English dub.
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https://old.reddit.com/r/Genshin_Impact/comments/1jl23uo/khoi_dao_albedo_en_va_on_non_union_worker/
https://x.com/khoidaooo/status/1904969482675884332
https://old.reddit.com/r/Genshin_Impact/comments/1jkx91y/china_actually_already_has_some_protection/
https://x.com/NathanNokesvo/status/1905109307126874437
https://old.reddit.com/r/Genshin_Impact/comments/1jkrc15/other_hoyo_vas_have_started_chiming_in/
https://old.reddit.com/r/Genshin_Impact/comments/1jkkqq4/why_the_hell_are_vas_targeting_the_new_guy/
https://old.reddit.com/r/Genshin_Impact/comments/1jl067k/shara_kirby_candace_va_opinion_on_hoyo_and/
https://old.reddit.com/r/Genshin_Impact/comments/1jl2psc/good_riddance/
https://old.reddit.com/r/Genshin_Impact/comments/1jkvyrc/im_tired/
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We shall see what happens next.
Edit: Here's another summary on Reddit that goes into a few more specifics on the agreement itself instead of just the backlash https://old.reddit.com/r/Genshin_Impact/comments/1jl6h4f/i_dug_through_the_sagaftra_interim_act_genshin_va/
"Thanks, FAG."
-Alec Baldwin, unrepentant murderer.
SAG needs businesses far more than businesses need SAG.
If I want a voice actor, I can get one instantly. If I want a body actor, I can get one instantly. Just put out a casting call online.
LOL, fair enough.Edit: I actually forgot why I said that, but yeah, the dynamics are kinda weird, as the primary (and honestly only) power a union has against a business is the ability to withhold labor via strikes and lockouts
I can almost guarantee you that they all gave consent for their performance to used in what ever manner the studio saw fit. They just didn't know they had because, "sure you have the full rights to this performance," meant something different in their minds when they signed their contracts years ago.
Mark Hamill is a voice actor whose one notable live action role was over 40 years ago.
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back wasn't that long ago!
Mark was perfectly cast as Cock-Knocker. His performance was a tour de force.
Admittedly I just dropped the first name I could think of that did both, which was him
I think no one posted about this because no one gives a shit about western VAs getting fucked by the very policies they advocated for and shamed everyone into accepting. No one should hire any SAG related employee for any reason, not the least of which being they are fucking shit at their jobs. The HSR and ZZZ EN dubs are atrocious.
Edit: just to clarify, fuck English shitlib VNs. AI copy their voices and let them cry about it.
Most of these VA are in because of nepotism. One gets hire and they bring their circle of VA friends with them.
This is why you keep hearing the same voice actors over and over again, especially in dubs of anime and Japanese games. It gets to the point where it starts to become jarring and take you out of the experience. I think Matt Mercer has a pretty impressive vocal range, but good grief I've listened to him talk for hundreds of hours now and I could pick out his timbre anywhere, no matter how skilled he is at hiding it.
Everytime I heard about a VA union strike, it was because they were trying to extort a company beyond what they could pay for a fan favorite character or they were just straight up being replaced by someone who sounded too different for it not to sound wierd.
Point being, they were actively making my experience worse and making me hate them rather than convincing me that the problem was the companies hiring them. And as such when the AI problem arose, they found very few sympathetic voices.
I've tried to appreciate listening to stuff in English as long as I could. Hell, I've been one of the most forgiving when it comes to acting quality.
Fuck these people. Fuck the Film Actors Guild. Let them starve on the streets of California.
SAG-AFTRA, like a lot of unions in the West, is essentially just an entertainment mafia: "Join, or else".
They strong-arm their way into projects and have done nothing but ruin the entertainment industry.
English anime/video game dub VAs deserve every single bad thing that happens to them, and probably a lot worse. The same goes for any localizer you can name besides Ted Woolsey.
Kayli probably needs a talking to that actors are also striking from their roles in NIKKE (and were immediately given "temporary voices"), where she continues to voice the main fucking girl. Nobody likes hypocrites.
It seems to be built into the psychology of those disposed to become 'artists' to favor denying reality in favor of wishful thinking. The AI debate is currently gaining steam in the anime dub community, and as par for the course, their only answer is to stomp their feet and shout 'NO!'. They have no understanding that AI voice acting is coming, and it's coming fast. We're less than a decade away from when you can simply feed a script into an AI voice generator and have it act out parts in any language you want, at least the major ones like English at first. All the talk about "well it won't have the same emotion or feeling or 'cultural understanding' as a real VA" is going to be made irrelevant. It will be trained on tens of thousands of performances and samples of VAs and will pretty quickly become at least mostly acceptable to most viewers. Especially for animes that don't get selected to be dubbed or are too old to have been dubbed in their time.
Users will be able to take any fansub script they want and feed it into the program and have a perfectly understandable dubbed audio track spit out, and the rise in quality from introduction to mainstream will follow the same path AI generated images took. It was only a year or two from the weird Picasso-esque first images to ones that were sort of realistic with terrible hands, to now almost indistinguishable from real images. AI voice acting will follow the same path, and human VAs are going to be out of a job. I've suggested many times to dub fans that if the VAs were smart, they'd get ahead of the curve and begin licensing their voices to AI companies to get models made so they get royalties when they're used. But of course I've been shouted down every time with the usual 'No! AI bad! You just want VAs to starve chud" nonsense.
And all the talk about making it illegal to train AI on previous live VA performances will be made irrelevant too. China will just do it anyways. The lying cunt Monica Rial for instance, still has a lot of fans of her voice. And she's got probably 10,000 hours worth of past VA performances that anyone can feed into an AI learning algorithm. If it's illegal in the US, some Chinese company will just ignore those laws and do it anyways. Then it gets released into the wild, a very suspiciously identical sounding uncredited AI voice get dubbed onto other anime, and there will be not a damn thing she can do about it, and she won't get a dime for it. It's gonna happen, and they can bitch and moan all they want, but they're not going to stop the march of technology. Especially when once it gets off the ground, doing it with AI will be way cheaper. Instead of dubbing 15% of seasonal anime, anyone will be able to dub 100% of anime with identical VA performances for pennies on the dollar. Don't like the way some blue haired fag changed a line to be pro feminism? Just feed it a different fansub. Don't like that a certain VA got cast in a role you feel wasn't the best fit? Just swap it out with another voice model. It's gonna happen, and these idiots think throwing a tantrum is going to stop it.
You missed where I mentioned that China's government passed a law making it illegal to do so without permission of the people they're training the LLM off of and have to pay annual royalties to that person or else the data needs to be destroyed. Hoyoverse is already just hiring non-US based voice actors and sidestepping the issue, now that SAG-AFTRA is completely overestimating how much leverage they actually have. South Korea and Japan have the same law on their books as well.
Whether or not the consumer does whatever they do, is up to them, but the studios in charge of recording have to follow said laws. I just don't think that is going to happen nearly as much as you say they will, hence the current strike. What I do agree with you on is that machine generated content will continue to grow more advanced.
Assuming Chinese IP laws are going to stop literally anything is an exercise in delusion though. They have 'laws' that say you can't build apartment buildings out of pot metal and sawdust too. Doesn't stop the bribes from letting them do it though.
That law is only on the books in China to ensure the right palms are greased before the VA data theft is performed. There is zero intent to actually prevent it, and every Chicom knows this.
the laws are also there to give reasons to persecute someone for displeasing any of the government officials
Fuck all of this, and fuck gachashit. If gachashit mobile "games" were erased from reality and took the corporats that promoted it, the devs that did their bidding, and all the retarded whales that make that business model possble with them - very little of value would be lost.
The fags losing again is funny, but chinese gachashit is terminal cancer.