AI Will Destroy Voice Actors and the Gamers Will Cheer
(www.youtube.com)
Comments (37)
sorted by:
Interesting video on how shitty unionized voice actors are and how generally pretentious and detached from reality the art sphere is when it comes to AI art.
Imagine taking the most soulless corporate output and labeling it as "art." Or even thinking that what "AI" produces will someday be seen as "art."
The major problem with computer generated voices is they will be extremely difficult, if not totally impossible, to copyright.
Media companies, which games absolutely are, do not run like regular businesses. Most of the prognostication in this sub is completely misplaced.
I'll drink to that one.
I'm tired of hearing the same handful of voices in games anyway (especially the female ones).
AI can't be any worse than the current smug Twitter-tier Liberal who ends every sentence with a snarky self-aggrandising question.
Every single female anime/anime adjacent voice actress sounds the exact same and it's really jarring. I don't know if there are literally like three people getting every single role or if casting directors are all looking for one very specific female voice, but it's been a problem for well over a decade.
Male voice actors aren't a ton better, but at least you can pick a voice out of the cloud of sameyness generally once per show or game. With women there have only been a handful of those in the past 20 years, and half of them are retired now.
It's funny coming from a VA's channel. I'm certainly looking forward to the day AI kills acting in general, as a notable profession, especially the "Hollywood stars." I wonder who our new celebrities will be.
Everyone will make their own celebrities. lool
It will be decentralized, so you will have small and medium level celebrities within their own respective spaces.
It will be like a niche era before things become too big and become too commercial and then to woke.
I'm more worried it'll kill the impressionist's careers.
No it won't. SAG-AFTRA will.
I almost swear SAG-AFART is doing it on purpose. They seem to be doing everything to hasten the demise of the voice acting profession.
Nice one. I usually just go with Film Actors Guild if I feel like I have to mock them.
I absolutely would, and they have no one to blame but themselves.
They bring constant drama and trouble to productions, and the ones who don't are always connected at the hip to the ones that do. Its funny that Hollywood actors, normally a source of all sorts of problems, are usually the safer bet to have VA in your product than the actual "professionals" in terms of keeping things simple and quality.
We can just go back to reading dialogue in games, with only the occasional voice line in video. Like FMV used to be in the older games.
Silent protagonists were a golden age we didn't realize we were living through.
Funny thing is that short of really great voice acting, super important cut scenes, or comedic stuff, I often just read the subtitles and skip the VA. In this age of insanely long scripts, the amount of precious time wasted on listening to VAs just isn't worth it to me.
To think the only studio that seems to hire Trump supporters (and actors with some perspective about the job) is Sentai Filmworks, a non-union anime dub studio in Houston.
For you old-school otaku, they used to be ADV.
Always wondered what happened to them.
If for no other reason than NPC's not repeating the same dozen or so recorded voicelines AI would be a tremendous boon. It's probably going to be at least a decade until full AI integration where you can have a full botted conversation with literally every NPC you come across, in the mean time being able to write lots more dialog and have an AI read it would do wonders for immersion. I'm tired of the four choice dialog wheels, (yes, no, sarcastic, tell me more) I want to be able to role-play in a goddamn role-playing game.
These days it's more like: yes, yes, sarcastic yes, also yes but with more words
BG 4?
And the mod to remove it gets banned
Fuck integration. Live services are worse than Always Online copy protection.
Write a decent script, record voice lines. Don't cancel my game when the support runs out for a stupid gimmick.
With the speed that optimizations are happening on the software side combined with specialized hardware, I'll be more optimistic and give it 5 years tops before some AAA game has full AI conversations for every NPC. Indie games will be experimenting with the tech before that. The model will be running on your high-end local machine too, not from a remote API.
The voice actors are almost as bad as games journalists and localizers and I'll be happy to see all of them jobless.
Workers lost jobs to automation 20+ years ago and this is honestly no different. It fucking sucks, but history tells the future.
How does it suck?
Seriously, the wealth generated and the quality of products that come out of modern factories is leaps and bounds above that of small workshops without production lines.
Yes, people have had to retrain. Yes the economy has shifted because Computer Industries (like Google) make as much money as the US Steel industry for the same revenues, with vastly less people BUT the US can do both.
Do you wish that everyone was wearing expensive, fragile mechanical watches for a month's pay each, and riding around in Model T fords so we can have higher employment figures? That is the trade off. I don't miss watchmakers.
Quality is debatable. Even high end stuff breaks so quickly these days. Granted, that could be purposeful because buy it for life means no more revenue, but overall build quality has seemingly dropped over time.
That is only because normies can't make judgements of value across complex criteria. They just buy whatever is cheapest. So manufacturers optimize for the lowest possible manufacturing cost to give the lowest possible. Price.
I'll give you an example:
Which car is best?
Okay. Which car is cheapest?
If you compare cars today vs cars of the 1960, then it is no contest. A decent, economical four cylinder car today will drive the pants off anything manufactured in the UK or the USA in that era.
A humble Toyota Corolla will, with fastidious oil changes and mostly highway driving (that is a high proportion of KMs per start / stop cycle; say a long commute) will get a million kilometers without anything more than scheduled maintenance.
Want a mechanical, waterproof watch with a sapphire glass? Or a pocket calculator? Or a light aircraft? Every single one of these is a better product at a lower price than ages past.
Yes there is corporate fuckery. Yes, the red tape is out of control. That is a regulation issue.
Yes, design priorities have changed to focus on cheap, disposable goods, because that is what normies demand. Feel free to tell the customer that they are wrong in regards to taste.
And if you want expensive, high quality goods, then buy them! They exist.
Much like with any other art form, I actually don't think that voice actors are going to go away.
The issue is that low-tier voice actor work (particularly quick translations, or unimportant characters, or games that didn't originally have voice actors) will utilize AI voice-overs. The actors themselves will still continue.
Honestly, given the rest of the comments on the thread, I think you all have been completely duped by the AI bubble, as well as Leftist historical narratives on labor and automation.
AI is not going to end the field, or even their jobs. It's going to make voicework more efficient, and it's going to cull the useless, and benefit the productive.
When it comes to voice, current AI models are almost indistinguishable from real people. The main thing is that they're actually too good. They sound too perfect, which few people actually naturally sound like. I'd imagine that it won't be long before a gaming company could feed in a script, have it output the whole thing using various different voices and then just have some people check the output for accuracy and quality.
They aren't indistinguishable. As you noticed, they basically have their own accent because their speech is so stiff, they can't intonate properly on the right words to convey the right emphasis and connotation, and if you listen closely you can even hear the combination of tones over-lapping each other incorrectly.
That being the case, I would expect that you would want script lines to be used for many bits of filler or useless dialogue, but you still want voice actors to act, as good ones have a mastery of linguistics, emotion, and noise.
I've seen games that were heavily AI, and actually voice acting is the worst feature of them.
That's where the industry will be for a while yeah.
This could be the case in places where the law regulates it as such. For example Debra Wilson can license her voice and sell that to even more productions than she has time to do VO for. I still think that will only last another generation though, until the current actors die out and the tech is perfected. Then AI voices will take over completely. The uncanny voice issues you're talking about are an engineering problem, not hard physics problems, and not qualities monopolized by the human soul.
I don't agree, it's like saying digital art will end the use of paints. No, not really.
These aren't technical problems. They are meta-physical problems. They are problems of human expressions, holding unspoken context, and the containing information about human relationships (with other people or things), that are not well documentable or quantifiable by a program running a simulacrum of a person's voice.
AI is being treated like it is something fundamentally unknowable as a technological advance, but it isn't. In every single instance where automation has been introduced it was an increase in human productivity and efficiency for economic purposes. It did not end fundamental human expressionism. Acoustic instruments were not eliminated by electric ones. CGI did not remove the existence of practical effects. Movies and Radio did not end the existence of Plays or Opera.
Unlike economic trade-craft. Human expression has no "efficiency requirement". The ice industry uses far fewer people than it once did, even to the point where most of all ice in the US is generated by machine. But anything involving human expression is never operating off of an efficiency requirement. Art, in particular, has no efficiency requirement at all. It's purpose is metaphysical, not material. There is no real productivity improvement focus. Techniques can be streamlined, but archaic methods of expression are not eliminated simply because you can "produce more expression more efficiently", that's a total misunderstanding of the concept.
Voice Actors will still be used, and I absolutely agree with your point that VA's are probably going to do some kind of personal AI library that will actually be legally enshrined as their own personal property (that a studio could then purchase and train AI off of in order to replicate their voice for a price... that will be very interesting to see the law examine this concept). However, it is still acting. And as such, it will never go away. AI will just do what every other automation does: eliminate the least useful parts of the activity.
Oh I dont think there won't by ANY voice actors, just that they will be the exception. A selling point for certain market segments in fact. "Oh wow this production features a super famous HUMAN voice actor." VA, like the visual arts, will become more like a high-value craft trade making bespoke creations. It won't be the industry standard, for better or worse.
We'll have to agree to disagree on the metaphysical aspect. Perhaps I just don't hold (voice) actors in high enough esteem. I admit they have a talent that I don't, but they might as well be advanced parrots. It's not an issue of denying the artistic, "human" element - maybe you hear what I don't. It's just that most gamers like me only need something that's "good enough". The masses don't understand and don't care about high art in their shooty games.
On all that I agree. I just think this isn't a good example of that, not as strong as the visual arts. Voice acting is a more advanced form of screwing widgets together that factory robots can do. Yeah you still have people managing the factory, and people filling in the gaps, so I certainly don't ascribe to the socialists' panic that AI will steal everyone's jobs. You'll still have some people in the industry doing things only humans can do.
If when new games came out, they had a "AAA" version with all the story and cutscenes and voice acting, and a cheaper gameplay only version - which do you think would sell more?
Correct