SAG-AFTRA Approves AI Voice Actors, Enrages the VA Community::SAG-AFTRA has approved AI voice actors and partnered with Replica Studios, enraging the voice acting community on a global scale.
Oh great AAA games are going to get even worse… I hope indie devs have better sense to not use AI voices at least.
Well, indie studios aren’t known for huge budgets - they generally don’t include voice acting at all. Between no voice acting and AI voice acting, which is better?
It’s a thorny issue. In the position of an indie dev/studio i get using cheap (or free) art, be it voice, textures, whatever. In a way a properly licensed ai trained voice is no different from using assets from an asset store.
On the other hand, the current crop of ai are less than fair about where they source the data, so good luck getting a morally neutral voice right now, leaving aside the legal aspect.
A big issue beyond that is how it’ll completely wreck the industry. If Alice licensed her voice for cheap, and I can get it to say whatever I need with minimal hassle why wouldn’t I use that over paying more for a voice actor, where I have to wait on them to actually record and rerecord her lines? I’d be paying more for slower results and more work.
Then you realize this is true not just for me but for most groups needing voice lines. This means that even if an individual voice seems ethically sound, considering the wider context and impact on other voice actors it becomes far less simple.
It is.
Personally, I’m not against it. Acting means by default imitating something. Pretending you are something you are not. If AI can do it as well or better than actors, I’m okay with that.
Maybe we’re at a stage where the voice actors of tomorrow will be simply those who can configure the AI to output the voice most fitting the role, rather than those who can reproduce it with their own vocal chords. They’re different skillets - I see no reason why one should be more important and worth saving than the other.
This is progress. The only bad thing about progress is that it won’t benefit the many, but the few that can capitalize on it. This, I do regret. But on the other hand - I’m sure all the horse ranchers were very much against cars when they first appeared, and not for environmental reasons, but for more selfish ones. And while it might’ve been sad for so many of them to have to start working in a different field, it’s also undeniable that cars have made a huge economic impact on the world and that living conditions as a whole have improved since their invention.
Idk. It’s a whole thing. I really hope these people can find a way to ride the wave. Because right now it looks like they’ll just be crushed by it instead, and I for one can’t justify impeding progress for the love of the few people stuck in the past.
None. Bad voice acting is worse than none for sure. Like for example Morrowind had a pretty good story and writing but Oblivion’s voice acting has been a joke for over a decade now.
Compared to anything nowadays, yes - Oblivion was awful. But let me tell you, I played that game as a kid and it wouldn’t have been even half as interesting with no VA. When you’re a stealth archer and someone gets close to you and you think you’re safely hidden, but then you hear “you’re not supposed to be here”, it scared the hell out of 15-yo me and made me run away sooo fast. I tried morrowind just after that and couldn’t stomach playing it - no VA? At all? It was awful.
Maybe we sometimes forget, games are also for kids. Kids don’t need the best acting. And while adult me can’t take oblivion VA seriously - it is still one of the best games I’ve ever played as a child, while Morrowind never even made it into the list because I was spoiled by playing Oblivion first, with its VA, bad as it is.
Morrowind had voice acting for lines like detecting you and greetings when you got close, plus a few lines in story, most notably Dagoth Ur and Vivec.
For the majority of the story there was none while oblivion had like 11 people voice the entire thing and poorly. The voice acting of Oblivion was also accompanied by the way worse writing. I grew up on Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2 and later Morrowind and those were only partially voice acted and I definitely liked that as a kid as well, at least more than I did Oblivion.
If voice actors are represented by the same union as all the film and TV actors then they never had a chance. United Airlines had a similar situation in the 90’s where flight dispatchers were represented by the same union as the mechanics - but were outnumbered probably 10 to 1. So dispatch pay and working conditions were an afterthought to the union and even if every dispatcher voted no, if a contract was good to the mechanics it would still pass.
So much for labor unions establishing worker’s rights.
What should SAG-AFTRA have done differently do you mean?
Represented everyone. When animators were adequately represented yet the CGI techs weren’t, Disney just stopped making drawn animated films and resorted to CGI, which is all we get now.
Essentially, however unions fail to provide for the working class gets exploited by the owning class.
And it’s fair if labor unions can’t fix everything, but then let us admit that our capitalist system is broken beyond what labor can do to fix it. Let’s stop pushing unions as a solution, except as a short-term one that is going to leave some people cold and hungry.
I can’t speak for how unions work in the US but over here in Sweden they work because of member engagement. Of course, the opposite is true too: they doesn’t work when there is no engagement shown by the members.
If unionmembers don’t show up on the meetings, especially the annual one, where the board election take place each year, the board doesn’t know what the members want. Furthermore, if members do hint show up on election day they are getting the board they deserve. (The same goes for government and elections)
My experience is that most of the people complaining about the union not representing them, being corrupt and/or being toothless, are people who never visited an annual meeting. They never participated in the election of representatives and they most often think of the union like it’s their personal legal team.
Unions are positive and bring good things, not only to workers/members but also to the “area of business”, when the members are active in the discussions and understand the issues. Unions are bad, almost cancerous, when members just pay the monthly fee and aren’t really engaged…
I don’t know if the persons complaining are super engaged in the union work but tweets like “you don’t represent me but happily take my money” smell a little bit of “you’re the worst legal team I’ve ever had”.
When it comes to the issue here I wonder what the alternative would be? SAG-AFTRA saying no to AI voice overs? Going out on strike?
In what way would that not end up in the companies just use more AI VO AI is an investment and a recurring cost you can calculate. Human labor is not. There is all sorts of unknowns connected to human labor and AI never make threats about going out on strike (yet!?)
So, a little more in detail, what do you think will be the result of what they did here? What should they have done differently and what result would they have gotten then?
Fuckingcapitalists
Sounds like a union leadership shakeup is gonna happen at SAG-AFTRA in the very near future
More than likely the video game performers form a new guild/union because they’ve been getting skullfucked since the SAG-AFTRA merger repeatedly. More and more VG performances are going non-union because they gaming companies can sit out the labor actions SAG-AFTRA brings and the talent is there.
