I’d like to imagine this is analogous to autocomplete on a keyboard, like if I mash “A” a few times to get to the title screen and game’s like “Did you mean A A A A A Start Start Down Start A A B Right Right…”
It’s more due to AI and/or the expectation of automation being able to reduce the workforce before that actually gets set up functionally. Also that tech companies are doing it to try and kick back against people demanding their wages increase with cost of living, so game devs are piling onboard with layoffs for the same reason.
It's the same thing that happened in tech. People got used to the near-decade of essentially free money. Interest rates were low for a long time, so easy loans, and demands to endlessly/rapidly grow. Now the free money's gone and none of them know how to exercise discretion, so they "trim the fat" of their rapid growth.
It’s not only that. Companies are getting richer and richer and they could easily afford LOTS of employees. Microsoft reached the trillion-dollar market cap and a few days later fired 1900 people
Right, but they’re doing it because they believe they can make up the lost manpower through automation that won’t be integrated enough to do so for another couple years. So they’re going to overload their current employees even further than they likely already are and the product/s will continue to suffer and fall off.
This isn’t happening in a vacuum, it’s happening currently because they believe AI is far enough along to pick up the slack.
Setting aside the topic of generative AI, isn't it about time that Pokemon goes to the public domain?
It's been a long time since I read Lawrence Lessig, but I think we would undo Disney's mods to copyright laws and allow more cultural remixing after a reasonable time. Like maybe 20 years instead of a century?
Legally? No, it’s not time for it to enter public domain.
That being said, yes, Pokemon should be close. The original copyright term in the US was 17 years with an additional 17 years extension. 34 years is plenty time to get money out of a work. It’s time we stop letting corporations exploit the public domain without giving back
Copyright duration and rules are ripe for a complete overhaul, but it is worth noting that the so-called “Mickey Mouse Protection Act” really just put the US in line with the other countries in the Berne Convention, which the US had dragged its feet on signing onto for decades. Once the US agreed to respecting international rules for IP, offering a shorter copyright duration than Europe was an obvious disadvantage.
What are you talking about? Indie development studios spring up out of mistreatment at AAA studios all the time. Where do you think Supergiant, Second Dinner, and Frost Giant came from, for instance?
That’s what I was thinking too. Let’s hope that happens. When these developers get freedom to make games without corporate overlords pushing for dumb things in games, really great innovative games seem to be made. Let’s hope.
They apologized and replaced their CEO but then got rid of a quarter of the company, people that probably had nothing to do with their terrible management last year.
well if the digimon case taught them anything, they dont own the idea of monsters that you can catch, and if they are based on real world animals you cant really own them, outside of name.
I purchased Palworld today, started it up, I made a character, and walked around a bit, but I had to exit the game to go get an errand done. I get this game is aping pokemon hard, but the thing that struck me hard was how much they ripped off the “New Area Discovered” sequence Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom used. Palworld did the same behavior as I left a cave, almost the same sound/music clip, the font looked the same, the color too. Yeah, very much felt like a copy/paste, what a bizarre thing to copy.
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.
I disagree with it “solving” the problem. I’ve yet to hear an AI voice that actually works/sounds like an actual person. I’ve heard sentences or two that are somewhat passable at times, but never enough for actual dialogue. Regardless, your entire comment also does not address the issue presented at all, that voice actors did not agree with this deal.
Clearly you haven’t seen the videos of Biden, Trump and others playing Minecraft… Because man that works… And probably that wasn’t the latest technology.
I have. If you think those are perfect replicas then I have a bridge to sell you. Go listen to them again, they’re close-ish but there is always something a little off that sticks out when listening to it.
If I have to listen close-ish then they don’t stick out or they do very little so sounds good enough to me. Let again we don’t need exact replicas for gaming.
Plus probably lot of usage would be to pregenerate stuff not realtime so they can fix specific cases where it sounds weird by editing or similar.
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.
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).
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.
Speaking of Star Trek and AI voices… Majel Barrett supposedly recorded her voice so that it could be used in the future by software to make her talk again.
So fuck Google Assistant or whatever. Where’s my Enterprise Computer app for me to talk to?
The finals uses ai voices for announcers and I could not tell the difference so there’s definitely something there. I think it works in that setting because the inflections is so set.
It does, yes. And they can also choose to opt out of future uses of their voice in the AI trained model. Which essentially means that their contracts are on a per-project basis, rather than allowing the game developer to force them to contract for the current project and any future use of the model by that game dev.
The way I see it, if they want to train models on someone’s voice they should hire them specifically for that purpose. Ergo, clips that are used in production should not be used for training voice models.
That’s fine for people who are established, but unions are supposed to protect all members, especially the ones just getting started who don’t have as much bargaining power.
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