What’s the point of paying for early access if need to pay again when it’s stable?
Early access users took a gamble of paying a low price for a likely buggy game, that might evolve over time through user’s feedback and that has a possibility of failing and never come out of early access.
Asking for the early access users to buy the game at full price is a slap on the face.
This feels borderline criminal. Yeah it’s 11 years old, but if someone told you that an early access game stays in early access a decade, that means you need to buy it again on release, would you?
And we thought identity theft was shitty before. I hope that we’ll have better tools to identify AI voices in the future. In some cases right now I have a hard time telling between an actual person and a faked voice.
The only way to limit the damage is the tedious old-fashioned way: An honest debate, thorough public education, followed by laws and regulations, which are backed up by international treaties. This takes a long time however, the tech is evolving very quickly, too quickly, self-regulation isn’t working and there are lots of bad actors, from pervy individuals to certain nation states (the likes of Russia, Iran and China have used generative AI to manipulate public opinion) which need to be contained.
I’d honestly go one step further and say that the problem cannot be fully solved period.
There are limited uses for voice cloning: commercial (voice acting), malicious (impersonation), accessibility (TTS readers), and entertainment (porn, non-commercial voice acting, etc.).
Out of all of these only commercial uses can really be regulated away as corporations tend to be risk averse. Accessibility use is mostly not an issue since it usually doesn’t matter whose voice is being used as long as it’s clear and understandable. Then there’s entertainment. This one is both the most visible and arguably the least likely to disappear. Long story short, convincing enough voice cloning is easy - there are cutting-edge projects for it on github, written by a single person and trained on a single PC, capable of being run locally on average hardware. People are going to keep using it just like they were using photoshop to swap faces and manual audio editing software to mimic voices in the past. We’re probably better off just accepting that this usage is here to stay.
And lastly, malicious usage - in courts, in scam calls, in defamation campaigns, etc. There’s strong incentive for malicious actors to develop and improve these technologies. We should absolutely try to find a way to limit its usage, but this will be eternal cat and mouse game. Our best bet is to minimize how much we trust voice recordings as a society and, for legal stuff, developing some kind of cryptographic signature that would confirm whether or not the recording was taken using a certified device - these are bound to be tampered with, especially in high profile cases, but should hopefully somewhat limit the damage.
I feel there needs to be more nuance to how this AI is used.
For commercial settings (including streaming), permission from the voice actors must be given first, or at the very bare minimum monetarily compensated at their full rates for the amount of time those voice lines are used.
However, if I want to mod Baldur’s Gate 3 for fun and add a new companion into the game without any expectation of profit, as long as my usage of the Narrator’s and other companion’s voice lines don’t stray from the established style of the game, I should be allowed to use AI to create those voice lines until I secure funding (either through donations or Patreon) to actually hire the voice actors themselves.
I disagree. It would be better to set a precedent that using people’s voices without permission is not okay. Even in your example, you’re suggesting that you would have a Patreon while publishing mods that contain voice clips made using AI. In this scenario, you’ve made money from these unauthorized voice recreations. It doesn’t matter if you’re hoping to one day hire the VAs themselves, in the interim you’re profiting off their work.
Ultimately though, I don’t think it matters if you’re making money or not. I got caught up in the tech excitement of voice AI when we first started seeing it, but as we’ve had the strike and more VAs and other actors sharing their opinions on it I’ve come to be reminded of just how important consent is.
In the OP article, Amelia Tyler isn’t saying anything about making money off her voice, she said “to actually take my voice and use it to train something without my permission, I think that should be illegal”. I think that’s a good line to draw.
From the quotes in the article, I have to agree with drawing that line. On the one hand, making a non-profit mod using AI-generated voices has no opportunity cost to the actors since they wouldn’t have been hired for that anyway. On the other hand, and this is why I am leaning against training AI voices off people at all without permission, it can cause actual harm to the actor to hear themselves saying things they would otherwise be offended by and wouldn’t ever say in reality. In other words, the AI voices can directly harm people (and already have, according to the article at least).
It’s not even that quality mods need fake voice acting. There’s a vibrant modding scene surrounding the Gothic series - and several modders managed to convince the original German voice actors to lend their voices.
nasty things people do with AI [trigger warning]> “I went on to this stream because somebody gave me a heads up and I went on and heard my own voice reading rape porn. That’s the level of stuff we’ve had to deal with since this game came out and it’s been horrible, honestly.” Amelia Tyler.
I cannot imagine going into a stream of someone playing a game you have poured your heart and soul into for years, and hear you own voice reading stuff like that
I use jerboa and it is working (I used the toolbar to generate it, but had to fix it because my mobile keyboard is a massive PITA for any corrections and I haven’t had time to find something new).
Anyway, looks like sync and boost are not lemmy-markdown-compatible
That’s legal? Can a contract be changed willy nilly in the US like that? In the EU it’s a least a month’s notice and in some EU countries even 3 months notice!
Lmao, most workers in the US don’t have a contract at all. They’re under a system called “At Will Employment” that was part of breaking the Unions. They can quit at any time, but they can also be fired at any time, for nearly anything. (It can’t be discrimination, but it could be the color of the shirt you wore that day)
So yeah the terms of your employment in the US can change at any time.
Read the article. It's the UK (which still has most EU employment law active). Now, I don't think it's illegal to do what they're doing. Effectively, I can bet I know exactly how they're framing this, and it'll be totally legal.
The calls were almost certainly initiating the redundancy process. That is, technically EVERYONE (probably below management) is being made redundant. As part of the redundancy process, an employer is expected to attempt to find internal opportunities for the employees to be culled, and this new position is what they are likely offering as said opportunity. I suspect this is working around a bit of a grey area in redundancy law. But, I don't think they're falling foul of any law. But, I'm not a legal expert.
So, at the end of the required redundancy period (it varies based on employment duration) they will either be let go (with whatever statutory redundancy pay they're owed) or re-employed under the new zero hours contract.
Personally, I think this has the potential to blow up in their face a bit. It's not allowed in the UK to employ someone on a zero-hour contract and not allow them to work elsewhere. Such a clause in a contract may be ignored. Now, this could well mean they say "Oh we need you on Wednesday" and you say "Well, actually I've already agreed a shift elsewhere on Wednesday" and there's really not much they can do about it. I also hope the people working there just move on.
The worst thing that can happen is that the parent company benefits from this. It'll just make other retail companies do the same in a race to the bottom.
Well, in the first line they reference an article from yesterday which made it very clear.
I'm not too sure why the response was so defensive. That point made up a miniscule part of my overall comment and wasn't even close to the primary subject matter.
Saw that response coming. I’m just saying maybe don’t assume everything is American before asking a question like that, and especially don’t do it for a website with “euro” in the name
That’s precisely it. Maybe I should add a blurb about that 🤔 (for later)
Anti Commercial AI thingyCC BY-NC-SA 4.0Inserted with a keystroke running this script on linux with X11 bash #!/usr/bin/env nix-shell #!nix-shell -i bash --packages xautomation xclip sleep 0.2 (echo '::: spoiler Anti Commercial AI thingy [CC BY-NC-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) Inserted with a keystroke running this script on linux with X11 bash’ cat “$0” echo ':::') | xclip -selection clipboard xte “keydown Control_L” “key V” “keyup Control_L”
This headline is almost incoherent, I wish they’d stop teaching journalists about newspaper shorthand headlines. We’re not limited to broadleaf sized headlines any more, just put some fucking words in there so it makes sense.
I have a very hard time understanding these headlines, but I normally blame it on my English (English isn’t my first language), but good to know that that’s not the case. Reading them twice or more doesn’t help. I just give up and let it go.
Staff members were told of GAME’s impending change to force staff onto zero hours contracts, first reported yesterday by Eurogamer, via mass video calls held on Microsoft Teams.
Are you paid to craft distraction posts? The headline and article are clear but your post (clearly upvoted by bots) is now the point of discussion (likely some responders are also the same bot accounts).
How much do you earn in service of corporate interests?
Who do you think is paying random Lemmy users to complain about headlines on news articles? Seriously, who do you imagine is behind such a ridiculous conspiracy? Where is the value in such activity?
Also, upvotes are public. We can see who upvoted him, and it wasn't bots.
Feel free to come up with your own thesis for the behaviour then. Why do you think a bunch of discussion has formed around a falsehood where all the parties of that discussion seem to agree and yet none have discussed the subject matter at all.
Feel free to come up with your own thesis for the behaviour then.
People upvoted him because they agree with him. Not that hard to figure out.
Why do you think a bunch of discussion has formed around a falsehood where all the parties of that discussion seem to agree and yet none have discussed the subject matter at all.
Because the headline is trash, hence the conversation at hand.
I got to ask, has reading comprehension really come down that much in the recent decades?
Could the title be expanded to be more prosaic? Sure!
But at the same time, it’s intuitively and entirely understandable.
Who? GAME staff
What? Discovered something
What exactly? That they’re moving to zero hour contracts
How? Via a mass Microsoft Teams call
Or, written together, the title up above. And that’s a completely normal sentence structure, it’s essentially how your brain should expect a sentence conveying that information to be structured, or the final part would be at the start (“Via a mass microsoft teams call…”).
Sure, but while I understand the sentence structure I still don’t know what it’s talking about without the article itself
I think the point they are making is that we use these short titles even though we don’t need to. It might be correct, but why not make better use of the medium
I just find it weird that you felt compelled to post an explanation for something that is “intuitively and entirely understandable”. It’s almost as if you knew that lots of people couldn’t understand it.
What exactly? That they’re moving to zero hour contracts
This isnt what the headline says though. “Discovered zero hour contracts” isnt how normal people speak. I have no clue if a mass teams call means they discovered some people were already on contracts, or that they were moving everyone to them, or some people, or (not knowing what a zero hour contract is) that the company has new contracts with game publishers.
You took your own understanding of the headline and even in your “its simple” added details that weren’t there originally.
As a noun or adjective it would be a derogatory term for gay men. As a verb most people would recognise it as disappeared in the UK. There plenty of other terms for the verb.
Pretty sure they’re referring to “poof” which is a derogatory term for a gay man in British vernacular. In any case, the context in which it was used clearly wasn’t intended as the derogatory term, rather to mean “suddenly”.
There is legitimate use cases for a zero hour contract. The vast majority don’t fit it.
If the zero hour contract minimum wage was £50 per hour, then it would be appropriate. This would still allow it to be useful to hire consultant, semi- retired experts and contractors and use PAYE, no additional companies, accountants etc. Very efficient and would only apply to employees with some power in the relationship with the business.
However, it’s used to exploit minimum or low wage staff. The company takes all the flexibility it offers and uses it to bully the employee into accepting the hours the business wants. They do this by treating to cut hours if the employee doesn’t agree. This makes it difficult to have multiple jobs to make up the hours.
Yep, exactly that. There are laws that say if you work more than a certain number of hours per week, you’re entitled to benefits like pension, paid holiday, etc. Zero hours contracts let companies get away with not providing those, as they’ll keep each individual staff member below the required hours, because there’s no guarantee of a minimum number of hours in their contract.
It’s absolutely atrocious, but the government spins it to make it sound like a benefit by saying you have extra time, you can lead a flexible life. What it means in reality for most people is that they need multiple jobs and still get no benefits that a full time job would provide.
We have part-time jobs as well, but those usually come with a minimum number of hours. Zero hours contracts were brought in to bypass those rules. Since zero hours contracts came in, part-time contracts practically disappeared.
my local one closed recently. Looks like they were carrying tons of preowned, and new games etc. But had a large section for board games, trading card games. At one point had warhammer.
Seems they tried to branch out and failed. iirc they said they’re no longer accepting trade ins?
Yup, killed the one reason I had to go in there apart from the Pokémon codes.
Merch is overpriced, they won’t part-ex anymore. They closed stores and moved to crappy corners of sports direct and what not. It’s dying. It’ll be an online portal where kids send links to grandparents at Christmas soon.
eurogamer.net
Aktywne