While everyone here is screeching about jerbs, I would like to point out that using AI voices to voice an AI is an artistic genius in itself.
this post was submitted on 15 May 2024
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The technology was created to replace voice actors. That's the actual purpose. Its very existence hurts their profession and benefits studios. You can not be a studio, use this technology, and claim to care about ethics, anymore than Amazon can claim to care about the workers as it invests in the machines to replace them.
No one is holding a gun to their head forcing them to us AI. They made a choice. There is no "ethical" way to cripple the livelihood of working class people for the benefit of your business. Just stop using the word.
It doesn't matter if you compensate or get their approval, because the fact is the existence of the technology in the industry effectively compels all voice actors to agree to let it use their voice, or they can't get work. It becomes a false choice.
If there was no financial benefit, if it truly made no difference in how much a studio pays in labor or the amount the artists make, there would be no reason for studios to want to use it.
Technology making labour obsolete is the goal we should all be wanting.
Attack capitalism not the technology.
True, but it's not quite working out that way is it?
That's kind of the point though isn't it? It's not the car's fault we can't afford the gas. We need to stop arguing about the ethics of using AI and start arguing about the ethics of the people using it unethically.
There is a person in that studio that suggested using AI, there is a person who gave the go ahead to do it. Those people need to be the problem, not the toy they decided to play with.
That's a very naive perspective though. We're not blaming the guns for gun violence, it's the people, but restricting access to guns is still the proven way to reduce gun incidents. One day when everyone is enlightened enough to not need such restrictions then we can lift them but we're very far from that point, and the same goes for tools like "AI".
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In practice, capitalism will use technology to subjugate others instead of allowing technology to free us from work.
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yea, see i just don't like how we first automated creativity instead of like, idk, manual labor????
Manual labor has been being automated since the industrial revolution.
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The technology is magnifying the flaws in capitalism
Do you have any source for those claims? There are plenty of better reasons to develop voice synthesis than replacing voice actors.
Voiced characters that use generative AI in real time instead of prerecorded lines and a dialogue tree come to mind as an obvious use. How cool would that be, to be playing an RPG and ask any character any question you want and get an actual verbal answer? No way you can do that with voice actors.
Ever seen the game Vaudeville? It's a fairly basic detective game but all the characters have their own LLM and AI voices. I bought it for the reason you described. I just had to see the technology in action and I can definitely see a future with generative text/voices in games.
It's not perfect by any means but I think it's a very cool approach to a detective game. There have been updates to it since I played that address most of the problems I had with it like characters forgetting past conversations and giving conflicting info.
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The only real ethical concern is around the training data. If all voices are compensated / actively consent to be used in an AI program, then this is just a tool. People losing jobs doesn't really matter to an individual company. Industries change and technology advances.
So the real problem is they are using these types of tools, built of the skill of other voice actors, without properly compensating them or getting their consent.
What's the point of bringing up "ethics?" The job only existed in the first place because of technology, and now people want to argue that there is a right or wrong aspect to it?
How about the poor candle makers or buggy whip manufacturers? Should we keep downgrading society just to keep a few "artists" happy?
The term Luddite comes to mind.
Luddites were not anti-technology. They saw the progress of technology IN a primitive capitalist system and understood that technology would never benefit them, and always be used to subjugate them more.
If technology only benefits 0.1% of the world, and leads to the world dying, does it benefit humanity at all?
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Old man yells at cloud
I have an idea for the practice that could help us better explore practical uses. Basically, a company may train an AI off an actor’s voice, but that actor retains full non-transferable ownership/control of any voices generated from that AI.
So, if a game is premiering a new game mode that needs 15 new lines from a character, but their actor is busy drinking Captain Morgan in their pool, the company can generate those 15 lines from AI, but MUST have a communication with the actor where they approve the lines, and agree on a price for them.
It would allow for dynamic voice moments in a small capacity, and keep actors in business. It would still need some degree of regulation to ensure no one pushes gross incentives.
Congratulations you essentially described what Stellaris devs did.
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I get that record sessions are a huge hassle and simply paying VAs per AI-generated voice line is easier for everyone, but it somehow makes Paradox look a little careless to me.
Stories like these also set a precident. This is what voice 'acting' will be like for a moment before it becomes effectively eliminated because voice libraries will become diverse enough quickly and there will be no need for a single more voice actor to be included. It seems like VAs are basically forced to sell their voice to AI companies quickly to at least make a quick buck before they never get a job again.
There's probably no stopping it, but that made this read all the more frustrating to me.
This is what (modern) voice acting has always been.
Actually read a few interviews with professional VAs or watch their streams if they do that. Two VAs actually interacting with each other and reacting is almost unheard of outside of very specific productions (and mostly are done as a stunt for some BTS footage). They read a dozen different takes of every line and go through like five different scripts worth of dialogue. And then they do "efforts" that are just general grunts and emoting that are used for the moment to moment gameplay and to pad out a scene that had heavy rewrites. It is why so many professional VAs can stream "their" games... because they genuinely have no idea what is going to happen.
Paying to train a limited use model off of a specific VA (or even a group of VAs) is the "logical" extension of that. And, arguably, it is a "good" one (with some MASSIVE caveats). Everyone lost their god damned mind over that FPS that came out last year where the announcer was (allegedly?) a model trained off of a VA. But it also meant that you could have stuff you would never have had otherwise. Nolan North isn't going to get a paycheck to sit in a booth all day commenting on random matches. But a model that can read out a team's name and string together different reactions? That is actually really cool and WAY better than the traditional sports game approach of "The Champion! just went through... A Table!"*
Like almost everything AI? The key is to focus on creators' rights and control what can and can't be used as training data. Because the genie is out of the bottle and ain't going back in. But if we can protect the rights of what goes into training data? Then people are still paid for their effort/creation.
Do I think this was done "ethically"? I don't know. But with everything Paradox has done in the past few years? I assume "not in the slightest". But the concept is sound and one that we need to standardize sooner than later.
Of course, we also need UBI so that people's lives aren't tied to their jobs but that is a bigger mess.
*: Also, if you don't think those aren't already stitched and blended together with most of the same tech then I have a bridge to sell you
I'll also add on that there are very good reasons to pay for models based on VAs. Brendan Fraser infamously permanently-ish hurt his vocal cords because of the performance that were expected of him in his prime. Same with a lot of VAs (I think David Hayter is one?) who basically need to smoke a pack a day when they are "in character" to get the right gravely voice. And while Stephanie Beatriz played it smart and made sure her "Rosa" voice was something she could maintain, a lot of actors and actresses basically can't be the character they are famous for because it is killing them.
And pulling a solution out of my ass that is surely missing important aspects of the industry?
if I just want Nolan North or Felicia Day to voice a character then I buy the use of their model from their agency and am charged based on how much dialogue they have in a given game. If I want to use them as a character going forward (so what ANet tried with Felicia before they realized she was too expensive and decided to give Zojja permanent brain damage so she wouldn't ever have dialogue again)? I can pay by line at a much cheaper rate.
But if I want Nolan North to do a voice that isn't just Drake? Then I am paying him to train a new model and it gets a lot more expensive. And I can pay more to "own" that training data with the same caveats regarding future use. The main idea being that I want to make sure my Nolan North performance doesn't end up in a competitor's game next week.
I love how upset people get about things like this
Your coffee is made by enslaved children and people shrug
Your clothes were made in a sweatshop and people shrug
Your music is owned by corporate monsters who impose absurd copyright to steal culture from those that live in it and people shrug
A theoretical voice actor misses out on a small role and you go wild calling for boycotts and making unhinged tweets at the company?
Very weird priorities.
Almost like it's totally unserious and nothing but self Important performative nonsense.
I feel like "The world sucks" is a poor argument for making it worse.
Almost like it's totally unserious and nothing but self Important performative nonsense.
This should be the new tagline for social media
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we're pretty good at exploring dystopian sci-fi and don't want to end up there ourselves
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I'm not really up-to-date on voice synthesis. Have we reached the point where we can get enough training data from just a handful of voice actors to train a model of this quality?
Or is this a case of them using those voice actors for fine-tuning a pretrained model and just being quiet about that?
Still waiting for them to fix their game and not produce even more DLCs
what is broken in stellaris
My mid game builds 😢
Skill issue
Probably
From my experience, nothing. I’m not sure what the guy is complaining about.
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