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.
5 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.
Dubbing in live action media kinda has negative reputation in the minds of many viewers, at times the voices seem. Flat and the delivery lackluster in addition to the words being said not matching the mouth movements on screen, so I’m a bit conflicted on the pros and cons of this article, on the one hand this is for sure revolutionary technology that is for sure very impressive from a technological standpoint. That fact that AI voices have come this far this fast is very astonishing to me. But on the other hand dubbing is a big part of the voice acting industry and a lot of voice actors rely on dubbing voice acting roles to maintain their career, with this ai technology a bunch of people would be out of work and that is not good at all and is something I don’t support
I feel like there are so many things wrong with this. Number one, why are we so adamant that a movie in a different language needs to be dubbed in English in order to watch it? “But audiences won’t have to groan about subtitles” – if you’re groaning about subtitles, you need to watch a different movie. Dubbing is really hard. Voice actors need to convey the same emotion and feeling as the original, while using words that aren’t direct translations.Theres a lot of room for error and subtleties to be missed. That is why I think not only that dubbing is not necessary in general, but also that AI dubs will not fill the same hole. This is also taking away the jobs of so many voice actors. The AI (at least at this point) is probably not better than a voice actor. The only reason to use AI instead of hiring real people is because it’s cheaper and, once the system is developed and perfected, quicker. Cinema is about quantity of quality, and it’s incredibly disappointing.
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