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.
I love companies swinging between “we have to increase your subscription costs to allow us to offer more great features” and “our customers are excited about our new features so we need to leverage advertising to continue providing them”. Just repeat until everything is loaded with ads AND costs twice as much!
honestly, the thing that gets me here is–who even focuses on Netflix Gaming in the first place? i never hear about stuff dropping in their ecosystem, and so it really feels like an afterthought service to begin with that they’ve bolted onto their main business
Ok no joke, I discovered Dead Cells, one of my favourite rougelike games currently, through Netflix. I was browsing through Netflix mobile, saw that they had a gaming section, and that was one of the first suggested games.
I now own 3 copies of Dead Cells+DLCs (one for every platform I game on). However, I don’t have a Netflix subscription anymore, lol.
They throw a half assed product at the wall without notifying anyone, nothing sticks, so now they’re throwing in ads to recover costs.
I really feel like the C suites of these companies are run by complete morons, without hyperbole. These people are not good at what they’re doing. They just floated to the top during a period where money was free and being bold was more important than being right.
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.
I feel like the solution is pretty simple: if you want to AI copy someone's voice and put it in your project, you have to hire them and pay them as normal, and they have to give consent to let the AI use their likeness.
And this has to be on a per-game basis, to. Studios licensing a voice in perpetuity will eventually come back to the same issues.
For AI to truly be a net benefit to our society, it should be used as a tool by the artists to augment the output from the artists. It shouldn’t be a way of replacing them.
If a voice actors job goes from recording each and every line to recording samples for AI and helping to tweak the output, that’s fine. But the compensation stays the same.
That’s how it improves our world. Makes the human’s job easier without replacing them or affecting their compensation.
The way it’s currently on track to be used is how it improves the lives of the wealthiest at the expense of everyone else. No amount of futurist techno-jerking should distract from that. These are not tools for us to benefit from in any significant sense.
I’ve been trying to find the actual text of the deal to see if it fucks over the actors or not, but I can’t find the actual deal, just articles referencing 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 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!
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.
So tech outpaces legislation, as it is wont to do since legislation is notoriously slow, and so because of that our reaction should be to throw our hands up and not even try? Perhaps you don’t sympathize as much as you think you do.
I don’t think this is a case of tech outpacing legislation because I expect that ultimately legislation will be rather favorable to tech. There’s too much money to be made using AI for the government to extend copyright protection to training data.
(Plus, I sympathize with voice actors in the sense that I’m sad that a lot of them will lose their jobs, and that’s independent of what I think about AI development and copyright law.)
Horse drawn carriage drivers, industrial seamstress, miners. Being supplanted by technology is a tale as old as time. The only difference is the perceived uniqueness of creative jobs holders that look down on the then blue collar work, now suffer the same sort of fate as them. Eventually the only work to be done is gonna be performed by AI. With the economy being trended towards AI buying other AI products. Ironically, the only work humans be doing at will be back to heavy labour jobs, with the ones at the top being AI.
They’re not giving up though, what they’re doing is getting ahead of it. Assuming their deal is favorable for their members, they’re making it so that anyone who wants SAG-AFTRA synth voices has to go through their contracted company which they have collective bargaining power or strike an equal or better deal. Along with blacklisting companies from SAG-AFTRA work that use non-union synth voices.
This is way better than leaving actors on their own to bargain with companies, which would have definitely happened. Rather than have companies wear individuals down and drive pay down, they get to dictate the terms, together.
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Aktywne