Cloning voices is dumb. Voice-to-voice transformers should let studios invent what any character sounds like, and then focus on the performance instead.
You still wind up with Steve Blum, Gianni Matragano, Nolan North, and whoever’s in Bethesda that week doing eight voices per game per month. But they’ll actually sound like eight different characters. Even if some of them are coming back to fill in for one another’s characters.
Honestly, let them use AI for voice over. That way we can all see how emotionless and uninspired games will become. It’s gonna be hard to relate to video game characters when they are stripped of their humanity even more than they already are being fictional to begin with. Sure it’s cheap and they can churn shit out at a quicker pace, but when they try to make a game like The Last of Us with AI voice over let me know how much people will give a shit about the characters. Add AI writing into it and you’ve got yourself something so soulless you’ll look back on Nazeem asking you about The Cloud District with fondness.
Yeah I agreed how soulless games would sound. But while we had so suffer trough these awful games all the performer would have no job for a couple of years and the industry might just die right there and then
My point is that regardless of what kind of agreement they will come to, these companies are going to find a way around it if they can. They’ll just stop hiring them altogether. I really feel for these people and I wish they didn’t have to deal with this. But I also know that the people in charge don’t really care.
So give them more reasons to use AI. A strike against someone taking your job seems like a hard battle.
Let them try to make games with only AI and see how they sell. This strike is to force producers to go “all or nothing” with AI, and choosing “all” is a terrible idea
AI being heavily implemented in voice acting is gonna suck so bad. Maybe in a few years it will be there but we’re too early for full scale voice talent being replaced. Wish these people all the best with the strike.
Replacing people with AI creates a situation where the incentive for people to make original works is greatly diminished, so the ability of the AI to continue to improve is stunted by a lack of new training data. It’s what we’re already seeing with text-based language models and what we’re starting to see with diffusion-based image models.
AI in art is inherently limited unless used only as a fine tuner on human made works. The fact that a work of art was made by humans is what makes it special in the first place.
Hard agree. There’s still a threat of the generalised nature of AI meaning it won’t just be a tool for people to use, but a complete replacement of large swathes of knowledge based work that can be automated.
Replacing people with AI creates a situation where the incentive for people to make original works is greatly diminished,
Why would that be? It should be tye opposite, making VO cheaper means studios can take risks and get experimental. Basically what cheap engines have done for indie development.
But that scenario does have a flipside, possibly even a silver lining if it was macximized. Makes games a hell of a lot easier for indie devs to close the gap on aspects of production that right now. Decreasing a significant portion of cost/budget that will be to indie devs advantage.
Which if luck holds, would really hurt the triple A dogshit studios and create a lot more competition that they have consolidated with the big mergers and acquisitions that have happened in recent years.
Im all for empowering the little guys.
(For clarity i dont want devs to replace any humans with AI)
Couldn’t be worse than Resident Evil 0.
I think a second, larger issue is that they decided to strike right when the industry is laying people off at large scale. That’s not very good timing to try a pressure play.
I disagree, that’s an ideal time to exert labor leverage and make it more obvious to executive turds that workers have solidarity with each other.