variety.com: A foreign language sci-fi movie is headed to U.S. movie theaters this spring, but audiences won’t have to groan about subtitles. For the first time, an international feature film will look and sound as if it was made in English thanks to artificial intelligence.
3 comments:
This is so so interesting. I feel lille aspects of using artificial intelligence to create an english dub or dub in other languages is really cool and awesome and really can be a gamechanger. I think its amazing that this company figured out a way to change the actors' mouth movements to fit English or other language’s mouth movements. But I feel really conflicted because the article states that the company’s artificial intelligence worked off of the Swedish actor’s voices and translated them into english. The voices on the english dub are fully made by artificial intelligence. THIS IS SO SCARY!! I feel morally conflicted because this is now bound to happen to so much more media and will take away jobs from voice actors. I do think it's important for dubbed versions of media to be as accurate as possible to the original artist and creator’s vision, but it's actually a little bit more interesting when voice actors make conscious choices with changing dialogue to fit/adhere to the cultural context of the language they are speaking in.
How is this AI compliant with SAG-AFTRA and its agreement with the use of AI? Movies and studios in Hollywood are fraught with scandal after scandal. With one of the biggest being that movies no longer turn a profit no matter how much the movie grosses in the box office, online, or whatever platform. “Creative” loopholes with tax shelters and havens with multiple corresponding companies loaning money finding ways to always have costs bigger than their gross revenue. While this is great for the company, the actors and bigger names in Hollywood lose on deals where they start making a percentage of the profit… Even though a movie could be in the leaderboards for their revenue, their costs are magically always more than the money they bring in so they don't have to pay out. How does this factor into the agreement? Will this just be used to broaden the markets while failing to pay out actors?
They keep talking about this, but all I still see is a way to get around paying actors for a dub, or translators and/or caption creators for their work. Furthermore, I highly, highly doubt that any work produced by this program alone would have the understanding of cultural and cross-language nuance that a human translator would bring to the table. Think about trying to talk to someone using Google Translate. It is technically possible, yes, but a lot of the double meanings, phrases, or cultural history behind words or less-than-official meanings would be lost. If this is any good, I wonder if we’ll see someone credited as some sort of an AI fact checker whose job it is to double check the AI’s work and re-interpret what the AI misinterpreted, which would essentially be a translator’s job that probably paid less. I acknowledge that I am coming at this from a place of bias as an avid AI hater, but I still think it’s just a technological fad and that is nowhere near ready to be used for what it’s being used for.
Post a Comment