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.
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.
I had spitballed an idea similar to this a few months back. Build the characters, world, and situations, and give the AI that information. Pick a few specific pieces of info the AI would have to tell you at specific times, basically to act as guide rails. Then, let the AI and the player just... Interact.
That's pretty much Vaudeville. The only things you can do is click on locations and talk to people, each of whom has some bit of information you need to figure out.
It's basically an experiment to see what works and what doesn't with the idea. I appreciate that they kept the scope small (no quests, no WASD movement) and have been implementing changes as they discover the shortfalls (like the ones I've mentioned). If it ever does get released as a finished game, it'll be more like a proof of concept for other games to build off of.
I find it to be very off putting that Baldur’s Gate 3 doesn’t have voice actors for the main character.
There are so many different races that would have different voices and different accents that it wouldn’t be financially viable to do that with voice actors either.
They originally did for the beta (for origin characters at least) but the players didn't really like it so the feature was removed
Depends how much you're willing to spend
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?
The concern is that the training and potentially production voices are not properly compensated or consenting
It's not so much that a new tool is used, it's that it exists due to the artistic product of people who aren't profiting from the novel use
A job coming or going isn't the true issue
Downgrading because we want people to stay employed?
Then let's go back to ploughing our fields by hand, surely that will create many new employment opportunities!
Eh, we weren't paying for that back in the day anyway.
More importantly, the system we all accept (willingly or not) requires that people be employed to survive.
It's not a matter of wanting to be employed, as needing to be employed.
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.
claim to care about the workers as it invests in the machines to replace them.
A company that invests in UBI could make that claim!
Obviously Amazon doesn't do that now. But I could see it happening when people stop being able to buy their junk
Good to see you have formed a strong opinion without having all of the information.
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.
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.
I had spitballed an idea similar to this a few months back. Build the characters, world, and situations, and give the AI that information. Pick a few specific pieces of info the AI would have to tell you at specific times, basically to act as guide rails. Then, let the AI and the player just... Interact.
That's pretty much Vaudeville. The only things you can do is click on locations and talk to people, each of whom has some bit of information you need to figure out.
It's basically an experiment to see what works and what doesn't with the idea. I appreciate that they kept the scope small (no quests, no WASD movement) and have been implementing changes as they discover the shortfalls (like the ones I've mentioned). If it ever does get released as a finished game, it'll be more like a proof of concept for other games to build off of.
I find it to be very off putting that Baldur’s Gate 3 doesn’t have voice actors for the main character.
There are so many different races that would have different voices and different accents that it wouldn’t be financially viable to do that with voice actors either.
They originally did for the beta (for origin characters at least) but the players didn't really like it so the feature was removed
Depends how much you're willing to spend
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?
The concern is that the training and potentially production voices are not properly compensated or consenting
It's not so much that a new tool is used, it's that it exists due to the artistic product of people who aren't profiting from the novel use
A job coming or going isn't the true issue
Downgrading because we want people to stay employed?
Then let's go back to ploughing our fields by hand, surely that will create many new employment opportunities!
Eh, we weren't paying for that back in the day anyway.
More importantly, the system we all accept (willingly or not) requires that people be employed to survive.
It's not a matter of wanting to be employed, as needing to be employed.
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.
A company that invests in UBI could make that claim!
Obviously Amazon doesn't do that now. But I could see it happening when people stop being able to buy their junk
Good to see you have formed a strong opinion without having all of the information.