this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2023
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This is a battle the voice actors won't win, unfortunately. Maybe today, their voices are iconic. You can't make a new Frozen movie or any other Disney Pixar without the original voice actor (you can, but it's bad).
But in the future, the next "voice actor" for the next big Disney Pixar hit, is a pure AI from the start. Then they can control the voice forever. And that's what they want.
I can't see how the voice actors could possibly get around this, because they are suddenly expendable.
It'll happen in games first.. nobody cares if 'background NPC #15' is generated by AI, and mostly they voice a few sentences at a time.
Suddenly, voices aren't special.. Voice actors have to have something else, like movie or book fame (Audible books seem to be mostly voiced by the authors, and I can't see that going away). But only a few % really have that.. I bet there are thousands of voice actors we wouldn't even recognise the names of.
Honestly, for games, it's got even more potential. Imagine if the NPCs in games actually said your characters name, not just "dragonborn" or whatever
Imo the smart thing for VAs to do would be get in front of it. License their voices to models, and charge royalties for said models
The voice isn't the only selling point, many times, a voice actor is hired only for their fame
Which was already a blow to voice actors. It used to really be primarily about talent first and then they started realizing they could create hype by hiring famous people for the jobs. Some were great at it (Robin Williams comes to mind) but the Chris Pratts of the world have no business voicing Mario, etc.
I have a lot of respect for voice actors and their work. Many of my favorite games are what they are because of them, because their work managed to bring those characters to life. However, I'm also a little bit torn on that matter, because many of them also decided to go after people using their voice models for modding projects to improve their favorite games. I don't mind if they go against those who try to monetize on that but the majority of that type of work is completely free, from the community, for the community, without any intentions to capitalize on it.
With that in mind I feel I at least lose sympathy for at least some of them, because they kinda act in a similar way as those big companies.
I'm still not a fan of said companies potentially gaining some sort of copyright on those actors voices either though, as they'd do the same thing, not caring about potential fair use.
Yup and it's going to happen for music, illustrations, photography, 3D models, scripts, lyrics, books and probably patents and full digital personalities. Some things will be harder to fully replace but big components will get replaced.
Some things will mostly just move on the spot for a while, like coding, as it won't get much easier for the professional level, but basic elements will be possible to get fully replaced.
Hopefully wars in future can be decided by an AI battle instead of human life, like in episode 23 of Star Trek. Without the real deaths though. Well of course that part is fiction, but I wanted to add that little trivia.
Edit: I want to point out that most people have yet to understand how general AI works and I understand the downvotes. It's scary and new, but you can prepare properly and get through this with very little friction if you act now. Cheers!
Wars are already simulated like crazy. AI battles will be going on right now working out if various ukraine battles are winnable, what will happen if Iran gets too riled up, etc.
The bit we currently do wrong is then verifying the results using real people..
With a union. And by marketing themselves.
A union doesn't change the fact that voice actors are expendable. You can make a movie without hiring any voice actors. That's a fact.
And hard bargaining by the union is likely accelerating the adoption of AI. The technology is immature right now and not really good enough... but it's getting better and in part because of all the strikes it's getting better really fast.
Taking away all of the actors is a really powerful motivator for Hollywood to start making movies without actors.
At the end of the day, it's the producers who are the moneybags of the industry. All the money comes from them. If actors don't have a good relationship with producers, then actors will not get paid. That's got nothing to do with AI - producers can (and often do) choose to invest their money in something other than the arts.
No, like, SAG AFTRA reached a deal that excluded AI from being used in scripts, I wonder if that deal excluded AI from replacing voice actors.