Video game voice actors are fearing that the ability for generative AI to replicate their voices may cost them work and, more fundamentally, control of their own voice.
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.
The headline makes it seem like the company used her voice but the article says it was a mod-creator aka non-commercial.
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I think courts in the US are slowly coming to the consensus that AI-generated content is not eligible for copyright. My opinion is that this solves the problem rather perfectly; companies now have an incentive to use humans, because if they use AI to make content then anyone is free to rip off that content, and I think that’s the way it should be.
AI should benefit humanity, and its products should be open and available for everyone, rather than being something for corporations to exploit for their own sole benefit.
So how much human involvement is required for something to become eligible for Copyright? If I’m an artist and I draw a character all by myself, but use AI to fill in the background, would that be eligible? If I’m a software developer and I occasionally let copilot autocomplete a line because it suggested the correct thing, does that mean the entire programm is now impossible to Copyright? Where is the line?
AI-generated content is not eligible for copyright.
That’s just not true, no matter how often clueless artists repeat that. What’s not copyrightable is completely AI generated simple stuff, like type “car” into StableDiffusion and copyright that image of a car. That’s not eligible for copyright and rightfully so, since that would turn AI generation into a minefield if people could copyright sections of it in bulk. But nobody does that anyway.
People want full books and games and stuff, not singular images of a car. For the time being at least, any full game or book will still be full of human input, it’s not something the AI will spit out without effort. You still need numerous different AI systems, custom training and a whole lot of manual back and forth before you get something to your liking. And the result of all that effort will still be copyrightable.
There might come a day in the not so distance future when AI can do it all by itself and make the whole game or movie from start to finish with no human input. But at that point you aren’t just replacing the actor, you are making Disney obsolete, as you no longer need static content, you can just generate it dynamic on the fly like you are on the Star Trek Holodeck. But at that point the fate of the voice actor will be the least of your problems, as you just made a whole lot of other human jobs obsolete too.
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.
A company will want to pay voice actors a one off fee to train their voices, cut them loose, and then licence it out in perpetuity. Probably with greater legal protections than the underlying actor.
Yeah, it’ll be like buying instrument sample packs for keyboards. Electronics musicians have been doing this for ages. Now you’ll be able to buy the “12 gruff voices” pack and tell it to read your script. It’ll be great for NPCs, but probably not good enough for main characters in AAA titles.
If anything, someone needs to create a more effective marketplace for actors to licence out their voices rather than just handing their livelihoods over in a single payout deal.
