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/
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.