2w ago

Over 30 Apex Legends voice actors refuse to sign an agreement that would see them 'give up our expertise to train the generative AI that will replace us tomorrow'

www.pcgamer.com Over 30 Apex Legends voice actors refuse to sign an agreement that would see them 'give up our expertise to train the generative AI that will replace us tomorrow'

"We are asked to shoot ourselves in the foot."

Over 30 Apex Legends voice actors refuse to sign an agreement that would see them 'give up our expertise to train the generative AI that will replace us tomorrow'

60 comments

What blows my mind is that when it comes to costs I feel like voice actors are probably less than 5% of the budget on a video game. Unless they hire a famous actor I can't imagine this being that worthwhile. It's just penny pinching.
- It’s just penny pinching.
- Imagine the pace you can just dump out new voice lines for items, maps, general quibble etc that you'd never get the budget to bring a bunch of VAs into studio to do for updates
- Honestly it's probably an agility thing. You remove the entire. Getting another human to do the work thing
  
  If you believe it hasn't occurred to them that they won't have to pay wages any more, I have a bridge to sell you.
- The one use case I can see being valuable is dynamically reading a custom name. In Skyrim for example, all NPCs refer to you by your title as Dragonborn. But some smart person made a mod that uses AI trained on the NPC voice lines to embed your character's name into dialog!
  As long as voice actors are appropriately compensated/protected, say with royalties for every game that uses their likeness or an ironclad contract making sure the company can't stiff then out of future work, I feel like that could be a great thing.
- I get they want to keep their talents and jobs. But it's just not viable for the future and it has nothing to do with cost.
  The future is RPG games where the NPC's can generate their responses in real time and not in text way, but fully voiced. There is no pre-loading responses. The future is curated content responding to the player.
  So to achieve that, its either a fully generated voice like a vocaloid or you train an AI on someone's voice.
  If the voice actors aren't interested in it being their voice, they'll find someone or go vocaloid.
  It's not about saving money. It's about pre-recorded voice lines being dead on arrival.
  Think audio books, but choose your own adventure audio books, where all the names/places/things can be curated to the listener. Voice Actor isn't going to be apart of that.
  
  That's likely true, but we can write a fair contract that allows for that.
  A pay rate for the time spent recording, slightly lower than the normal rate
  A pay rate per minute of generated vocal content using user telemetry. For users that opt out of sharing, pay out based on averages applied against their total playtime.
  
  That could be the future, but not anytime soon. I haven't seen anything AI gen that has enough continuity to make "on the fly" story telling something I'd be interested in.
  
  Customers dictate what they want to play, not the developers. You might like the idea of content generated on the spot (which has existed for a long time BTW) but there will be others who dont like that. Baldurs Gate III done with AI would have been half as popular. There are RPGs with AI right now via mods, I believe there is one in mount and blade, if you want to try one out.
  
  Obviously you get downvoted, but just as obviously this is the future. Nonsense static responses are useless, having actual responses that match what happens would take immersion to a whole new level.

So let’s hear it. Hand an AI Leviathan Wakes, the first book of The Expanse, and see how it does. My money is on it being garbage, but let’s hear it.
Jefferson Mays is tough to beat as a human.
Worse, hand an AI a Terry Pratchett book, see how that goes.
- I only ~~read~~ heard him read the last 3 books+ novellas after watching the show, and he REALLY did the accents well
  *Except Bobbie, not enough southern hemisphere OZ/NZ twang
  
  Audiobook narrators don’t “read”. They act. They vocally act the entire book. The ones who don’t generally get returned, unread, to either your audiobook platform choice or the library.
  Voice actors in games also don’t just read. They act. They vocally act their entire role.
  Jennifer Hale vs AI, who would win? Would any human other than Kate Mulgrew as Flemeth have made the character as compelling?
- Hand the AI Twilight books. It'll either delete itself or make them better?
  
  Holy 2008 Batman

Calling it now, EA is going to do it anyway if they haven't already, and tell them all to go pound sand.
- Hopefully it’ll finally usher in their downfall. Can’t imagine the slop they’ll kick out with AI generated voices, models, scripts, and other assets.
  I’m gonna be disappointed when it somehow makes them the most profitable game company of all time instead.
  
  Considering EA is known for making sports games clones of each other that only change the year in the title and people still buy it, I wouldn't be shocked if nothing comes out of this.
- With judiciary cos playing lapdogs for oligarchs... Why wouldn't EA fuck the pedon

Good for them

When Star Wars (1976) came out, it cost 12 million to make and had almost no advertising. The "advertising" was word-of-mouth.
Modern games and movies wouldn't need to set aside 100 million dollar advertising budgets (on TOP of the cost of their product) if they would simply stop writing shit.
- They had word of mouth AND the difficulty of getting a film made and distributed. That meant very few movies existed. It's easier to stand out in a small crowd.
  Now anybody with a phone can film and distribute. Marketing is more important for getting your idea in front of people than anything else these days.
- You can't really compare budgeting and advertising with 50 years ago.
  Regardless of inflation, it's hard to stand out in the flood of new stuff and information being thrown at us from every direction. You didn't have any of that back then.
- Star Wars was released in 1977, and what does "simply stop writing shit" mean?
- Then they wouldn't have to make up the advertising costs with subtransactions (micro transactions doesn't seem like the right word anymore when they cost over $5 a pop).

The great thing about ai is you don’t need to get a voice actor to do it
Just some random person that knows it won’t be a career and could use $5
- And it'd sound like they're literally phoning it in. At that point, no, the artists and writers would just do it themselves. Like old times.
  What this tech makes possible is hiring Nolan North to do everyone. Men, women, children, cats, dogs, stuffed toy dinosaurs, everyone. It's mocap for your vocal cords. You don't have to look like David Hayter to move like Snake, and you don't have to sound like Michael Shapiro to talk like the G-Man. What people will hear and see is the performance.
- You don't even need that. You can generate a voice entirely through AI (or even non-AI tools that have existed for a long time before generative AI was a thing).

I think it is wrong, but this is inevitable.
The next time they hire actors they will just require them to train the AI as well. Voice actors will in a huge part die out. There will be some, but far less. Even A-list celebrities will in the future have to give the companies their likeness and their voice. So that companies can provide dubbing for other languages, make toys etc.
Not the A-list celebrities we have now necessarily, but the coming generations. I can't see a situation in which everyone have a united front and won't take the money
Edit: I realized this is a bit defeatist. A solution would be unions, I should have mentioned that

AI will replace them. All they're doing is buying themselves more time. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but it will happen.

sounds like EA

Using AI to recreate a real person's voice is the dumbest possible use. It's like drawing a cartoon that can only resemble a real living actor. Just... make something up. How does this character sound, in your head? Generate that, and then use style transfer, so anyone can do that voice.
Because the text-to-speech version is only the voice... not the character. You still want real human actors performing the character. The AI part is just a costume for their throat.

Voice actors fighting AI exploitation is the resistance we need in this dystopian tech landscape.
🐱🐱🐱🐱🐱

Since being replaced by AI is inevitable, it would make more sense for us to be figuring out how to make that world work instead of swinging swords at the ocean.
- It doesn't have to be inevitable. You, a gamer, can openly and loudly refuse to buy games that are made with the use of generative AI
  
  Recently, a thread cropped up about indie devs putting "No GenAI used" stamps in their pages, and the amount of people questioning the value of the initiative or outright criticizing it is absurd.
  People saying disingenuous things like "It's just another tool, I didn't hear anyone complaining about the brush on photoshop", and "games already used AI, are you also against procedural generation?" or the ridiculous "I need AI to make things. Why are you all against me learning and growing as a person?"
  There is a vocal, often severely technically-uninformed crowd that strongly likes GenAI, doesn't care about and refuses to understand the harm it causes, and needs everyone to be like them so they can stop receiving backlash for contributing to creator exploitation.
  
  People in the early 20th century could have openly and loudly refused to ride in cars, but they didn't, and people today won't refuse to accept AI in enough numbers to stop AI. It doesn't HAVE to be inevitable, but it is anyway.
- And why does it fall on the consumers and workers to figure out how to not exploit people, instead of the companies currently doing it?
  
  Because companies won't. For people who actually want to make things happen, the question is how to do it and not how wrong it is that somebody else isn't doing it.

60 comments