Oh fuck, I had no idea Warhorse studios was also part of the whole Embracer mess! They better not kill the studio off! Now that we got to see a glimpse of the new Kingdom Come game I don’t know how I could handle the game being canceled.
Embracer has really been a mess. Buying everyone up in the hopes the Saudis were definitely going to be on board with funding them probably didn’t help.
Just chucking everyone in a “Thing and friends” team probably isn’t helping matters either. Surely someone from the many dozens of development teams they have could have thought of better names.
I fired up 7DTD a couple months ago, and I definitely did not feel like it was anywhere close to being done. Releasing out of EA feels like they just want to be done with it.
What a shit article. There’s a massive amount of context missing.
7DTD is a game created by The Fun Pimps. Telltale Games bought the rights to produce a console port of the game from TFP. Telltale Games then contracted with Iron Galaxy to produce the port. Telltale Games went bankrupt and it’s assets were liquidated, one of those assets was the rights to produce the console port. TFP managed to buy back the rights to the console port, but were unable to get any of the source code for the console port. It took years to get the rights sorted out, and it wasn’t cheap.
It’s a messed up situation, but console players bought a Playstation 4/XBox One game from Telltale Games, a company that went bankrupt and is defunct, and that sucks. TFP is now starting from scratch to produce a console port for the current generation of consoles and that costs money.
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
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.
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