gizmodo.com: Following in the footsteps of the SAG-AFTRA and Writers Guild strikes of 2023, video game voice actors are on strike after a year of negotiations with big-time video game publishers like Activision and Epic Games. As with those strikes, the central sticking point for video game voice actors is protection against the ever-pervasive use of generative AI technologies.
2 comments:
I had no idea that voice actors in the video game industry were currently on strike. AI continues to be something that I think most artists are afraid of will take away their jobs and cause them to find a different way to make a living. I think it’s interesting that in this article Hale talks about how everyone in the room, making and designing the game understands the rights and responsibilities associated with using AI and AI generated voices. But it's the higher ups, the CEOs and the corporate-level people like the publishers who continue to push the designers to make that update with AI and look past the ramifications of not giving the rights to the correct voice actor for the work they continue to use and manipulate. I think as a whole, most artistic communities are going to need to reshape the way they work in order to incorporate AI so that it doesn’t take away from the work, but instead adds to it in a positive way without taking anyone’s job or freedoms away.
I’ve been following the voice actor fights against AI for a while now, since I was mindlessly scrolling through social media and I saw an ad for an AI chat bot app. The Talkie ad caught my attention because the voice used in the advertisement was distinctly recognizable to me: it was Michael Kovach, a voice actor who I really like and who works on a number of different voice over projects. The replica of his voice was near perfect except for a few small pitching changes that didn’t make sense in the context of the ad. I was actually horrified. If I hadn’t previously known what the ad was for and known that Kovach would never work for a company like that, I truly would have believed he had recorded the audio and not known that his likeness was being stolen from a project he worked on for this AI app. I am fully on the side of the actors in this case. Their voices are their form of artistic expression, and they shouldn’t have to live in fear that that art will be cheaply replicated and mass produced at no benefit to them. I sincerely hope that the strike goes well and results in major change and legal reform for voice actors who currently have no way to fight these threats to their livelihood.
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