According to SAG AFTRA, the deal will “enable Replica to engage SAG-AFTRA members under a fair, ethical agreement to safely create and license a digital replica of their voice. Licensed voices can be used in video game development and other interactive media projects from pre-production to final release.”
The deal reportedly includes minimum terms and the requirement for performers’ consent to use their voice for AI.
However, several prominent video game voice actors were quick to respond on X, specifically to a portion of the statement which claims the deal was approved by “affected members of the union’s voiceover performer community.”
Apex Legends voice actor Erika Ishii wrote: “Approved by… WHO exactly?? Was any one of the ‘affected members’ who signed off on this a working voice actor?”
I feel like this is really a consequence of what many called the “bad deal” the SAG/AFTRA merger was years ago. When the union can effectively exclude you from the bargaining process and arbitrate you to it, what’s the point? They’re behaving like a cartel, and not like a union. This is not praxis, brothers and sisters!
This is one sector where I am actually happy for AI to be available. I want to play a game where the NPC’s can say my character name.
That being said, I also want the voice actors to be compensated fairly. Maybe the guilds can set up a deal where using someone’s voice for training data is included.
They don’t need AI to say your character’s name, text to speech works for that.
Yeah, but matching TTS to a character’s voice is where you would need it.
You don’t need AI to do that, that kind of system can be made independent of AI. It’s just not worth doing for this one use case vs using it for a whole voice.
Honestly, the problem is that “AI” is a dumb term that is way over used in these situations. Outside of Science Fiction, AI has generally been used to describe what “the next big thing” computers can do.
Using a term like “Large Language Model” to refer to ChatGPT explains what it actually does. Or Deep-Learning Text to image models for the image generation.
I remember playing around with TTS on a Apple ][ plus as a kid, there is nothing new about that, but using statistical models to have them imitate a voice is new, but just lumping them all in with Artificial Intelligence, is just dumb.
I really hope this doesnt take off. I tried out Star Trek: Infinite and the tutorial uses an AI voice. It just sounded bizarre and jarring, completely took me out of the experience.
This deal solves the problem you’re encountering, because it allows game companies to use real voices to generate dialogue. It will sound a hell of a lot better than the 100% AI generated voices you dislike.
And it will protect voice actors’ jobs because the deal effectively requires new contracts for each use out of scope of the previous contract (i.e., the “opt out” language), and it encourages game companies to continue to rely on voice actors rather than switch to 100% AI generated.
Without this deal, game devs will just go 100% AI (and the tech will improve dramatically), and within a year or two, game voice actors will have no jobs to contract.
This is especially important in light of the trend toward dynamically generated dialogue in RPGs, etc. Without allowing an AI to train on real voice actors, dynamically generated dialogue will have to be 100% AI generated (no human voice involvement).
Voice acting in all fields is already a diminishing market because of AI generated voices. One of my coworkers had to get a job where I work because his VA jobs basically dried up. This agreement stanches the bleeding by permitting the use of AI trained on VAs (but only allowing use on a per-contract basis). Without that permission, AI would just be trained on open source / freely available voice samples, and there would be no contracts, and VAs would just … not exist anymore.
within a year or two AI actors will have no jobs
extreeeeeme doubt. The moment an AI has to inflect emotion it really fucks it up. You’ll spend 5 hours and $200 of compute costs getting it to say “Great, thanks” sarcastically, when an actor could do it in a single take as part of doing the entire script.
Honestly I just don’t think a lot of people will care. They’ll just get used to the lower quality. AI only has to be ‘good enough to still sell’. Do you really think that gamers are the consumers that are going to be ones to fight back against it? The same consumers that have rolled over to basically every other exploitative practice ever conceived of?
I think people will be bothered if the voice acting in their games sounds like it could have been done by Stephen Hawking (or with less exaggeration, like an actor doing their first reading of a script).
You aren’t up to date if you think modern AI voices sound like Stephen hawking.
at the levels we’re talking - maybe an indie studio could deliberately, stylistically, pull it off. But a AAA studio? To whom their VO budget is less than what they pay an executive. It just leaves them open to competitors making a game with good voice acting, and their own game getting panned in the press.
Interesting, thanks for the clarification. Have to admit, that does sound better, at least in terms of quality
I agree. The key factor is getting this settled before some smart people get this working seemlessly. It’s stupid to hear that there wasn’t any unionised info decisions for a union though. I guess you ask the union to speak for you but it’s the unions job to speak back.
I sympathize with the voice actors but at the same time I think this is a losing battle. I expect AI voices to be widespread and employment opportunities for voice actors to diminish (although I think high-budget games will still use human voice actors for a while). Maybe being open to AI is actually the best case scenario for getting at least some of the money involved.
