There need to be laws to establish protections of voice work for this reason. Any commercial use of an actor's voice should require compenstation.
this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2023
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The headline makes it seem like the company used her voice but the article says it was a mod-creator aka non-commercial.
There are already laws in place concerning use of actos' likenesses, but I don't know if that would extend to their voices.
With games it's kind of unavoidable in a long run, they are interactive and dynamic, be it outright mods or just new situations arriving out of gameplay. Being able to adopt the voice or automatically or generate variations of a sentences would be a huge benefit. Not exactly a new idea, we had things like iMUSE that dynamically adjust music for 30 years and effects like reverb have been dynamically added for at least 20. Most cutscenes are also realtime rendered for exactly this reason, you can't reflect a costume change in a static FMV sequences. Now imagine you want a character to make a comment on the costume or weapon you are currently wearing, you'll quickly end up with a combinatorial explosion of the amount of stuff you'd have to record.
Expanding it all with AI voices or AI filtered voices (think RPG with character creator) is just unavoidable. You can't drive a dynamic medium with static content to it's fullest potential. And of course many smaller indie games just don't have the money for full voice over to begin with.
I also wouldn't mind AI just as filter to change a voice, since some voice actors are just way to recognizable.
As long as they pay the actors fairly for use of their voice and/or likeness, it's fine. The problem right now is the exploitation of people's personality rights.
Yeah but still there will be less work, eventually they will generate new voices not related to nobody, yeah in some cases if they want the fandom of or popularity of a famous person yeah that will still be needed as you say, but for generic NPCs? An AI generated voice that is a new person in a way will be enough, so less work for voice actors for sure.
Ideally they'd just have AI do all the voices and get rid of the voice actors altogether. Maximum profit at all cost.
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I'm all for this. I'm excited for games to have truly generative NPCs that I can talk to and have conversations with - but I want the voice actors who were used to generate those models to be compensated for it.
I think most people would even pay extra for it. Take the skyrim mod where you get a follower, like the article lays out. I think most people would gladly have a follower with AI based voice be an extra DLC, where the base game is as normal but for say, $10 bucks more you get an AI companion. I think that'd be a fair tradeoff, and the voice actor gets compensated fairly for it.
If the voice actors get paid fairly for the use of their voice, and I mean fairly, then there really isn't much of an issue.
Provided you can get the model to land at a place where it's replying like a well constructed character and not, well, an AI model (hopefully through the input and effort of a talented and well-supported writing team) I don't see a future where this isn't where this kind of tech lands. Games are always striving for some sense of realism (some correct away from reality but the driving force of the games industry is in that direction) and while I don't think absolute realism is a healthy direction for people to aim, realistically realizing characters has a lot of room for unique and incredible games to strive for. Obviously bespoke writing is still the heart and soul of a good narrative but there's some areas it can't really cover and I think that tech like this is great for covering that uncharted water
Given that, the voice actors who train these models for moment-to-moment interactions and other stuff that can't really be easily written for if a game's content creates a need for it really NEED to be properly compensated otherwise it's an incredibly unhealthy precedent for the industry. The speed at which this sort of AI develops outstripping proper precedent (legally and professionally) is much scarier to me than some sort of like, ai-overlord type future
I think the forseeable future will give us a hybrid solution where a writing team creates most of the content (dialogue for the main story and important side quests, character backstory, distinctive mannerisms) and AI fills in the rest.
One of the main problems with branching narratives is that it makes writing and recording dialogue very expensive. The upcoming Baldur's Gate 3 has something like 170 hours of cutscenes and players will see less than 10% in a single playthrough. Not to mention hundreds of thousands of dialogue lines. Developers have to find techniques to reuse as much as possible which leads to situations where the ending consists of a loosely connected list of applicable scene snippets. Now imagine that AI can fill in the gaps between those snippets to make them seem like a single continuous sequence.
AI can also fill in events that the developers could never anticipate. Imagine you killing a random blacksmith in Skyrim. With current technology, NPCs would either not react at all or give a generic "killing innocents is bad". How awesome would it be if the game would automatically generate a prompt from the basic facts: npc refuses to give discount, player kills npc, npc was blacksmith, player steals dead npc's wares, wares are needed for sidequest, ... and then use that to provide not only companion dialogue but also possible replies for the player. If this happens multiple times, maybe the companion will mention it in other situations or confront the player when they're alone. Imagine if during a long walk through the wilderness, your companions start talking about what happened during the last few days.
With a fully AI-generated character, this would all become very generic and unnatural but if every character can extrapolate from a few hundred handwritten lines to match their tone, this could actually work.
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I think the example of the NPC follower in Skyrim is a great place for it, being able to ask your follower "which way to Riften?" is kind of neat, giving them commands like "go stand by the rock and attack the wolf when they get close". For actual dialogue, take Johnny in Cyberpunk or Liara in Mass Effect, there's no way AI can stand in for voice actors.
I'm thinking shop owners, random NPCs, etc. Little bits of dialogue.
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