I think this article has some mixed signals, as it's merging several different things, for some reason. Some voice actors are angry about ML-generated audio samples that can imitate people's voice...
I think this article has some mixed signals, as it's merging several different things, for some reason. Some voice actors are angry about ML-generated audio samples that can imitate people's voice (ala elevenlabs), some mods (specifically, two) NSFW skyrim mods are using ML-generated voices. The title implies that those are one and the same.
Well, regardless, I do think it's pretty doomed for the voice actors. In the US, there's already a precedent that voices cannot be copyrighted, so there's even more of a uphill battle if you want to tackle it from that angle. There'll still be voice actors, but mainly for prestige roles. The litany of minor roles will probably be taken over by generated voicelines, which are already quite good, and will only get better.
Unfortunately, I'm certain that this is going to be the exact case going forward. I'm reminded of The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, and the very short role Patrick Stewart played. God only knows how...
There'll still be voice actors, but mainly for prestige roles. The litany of minor roles will probably be taken over by generated voicelines, which are already quite good, and will only get better.
Unfortunately, I'm certain that this is going to be the exact case going forward. I'm reminded of The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, and the very short role Patrick Stewart played. God only knows how much money he was paid for such a short role, meanwhile you have a handful of people voicing the roles for hundreds of characters over the entire course of the game. Was it incredibly detrimental to the quality of the voice acting to have a few high profile actors voicing individual characters with the rest being voiced by four or five contracted actors? Absolutely, but who cares, we got Picard in the opening cutscene!
So I think you hit the nail on the head. We'll see advertisements saying something like "Featuring the real and authentic voice of Billy West!" before too long.
Bethesdas complete lack of interest in hiring voice actors is the biggest immersion killer for me in their games. Skyrim is incredible with the exception of there being about 7 voices across a...
Bethesdas complete lack of interest in hiring voice actors is the biggest immersion killer for me in their games. Skyrim is incredible with the exception of there being about 7 voices across a game of hundreds of npc. The voice actors didn't even try to make any 2 characters sound different. Just the same identical tone and energy for 400 npc. Sometimes multiple in the same room speak as clearly the same person. It's so frustrating that a company with all that money just can't be bothered to consider voice acting.
That's fascinating, and I wonder if it's a particular type of person that would/wouldn't notice that. I had no idea. I have played hundreds of hours and never even thought about the similarities....
That's fascinating, and I wonder if it's a particular type of person that would/wouldn't notice that. I had no idea. I have played hundreds of hours and never even thought about the similarities. Like clearly the guards are all the same, but I had never realized others sounded similar at all.
Honestly it might just come down to playtime. I'm coming up on 3k hours on special edition and have no idea what I played on Xbox before getting it on steam. Skyrim modding took over my life for a...
Honestly it might just come down to playtime. I'm coming up on 3k hours on special edition and have no idea what I played on Xbox before getting it on steam. Skyrim modding took over my life for a while so I've probably heard every line in skyrim 100+ times. Though my wife who only plays off and on has also mentioned it's funny that every nord man is the exact same person and there's only 2 old people voices. So I don't think it's just my upsetting number of hours in it.
Nah, it's pretty egregious (even though Skyrim actually has over 70 VAs). At least Laura Bailey only does Serana's voice, where Colleen Delaney's "female even-toned" is used for Lydia and a ton of...
Nah, it's pretty egregious (even though Skyrim actually has over 70 VAs).
At least Laura Bailey only does Serana's voice, where Colleen Delaney's "female even-toned" is used for Lydia and a ton of generic NPCs so that Lydia and a random bandit will be saying "I'll kill you if I have to" to each other in identical voices mid-fight 🙄
I recognise voice actors across games and different roles. I would absolutely realise there's only a handful of VAs for an entire game. It's somewhat jarring and also one of the reasons Skyrim...
I recognise voice actors across games and different roles. I would absolutely realise there's only a handful of VAs for an entire game.
It's somewhat jarring and also one of the reasons Skyrim doesn't necessarily score well in my book.
I would hope that the law catches up as time goes on. As far as I am concerned, your voice, appearance and mannerisms are all details that can be considered personal identifiers and like any other...
In the US, there's already a precedent that voices cannot be copyrighted
I would hope that the law catches up as time goes on. As far as I am concerned, your voice, appearance and mannerisms are all details that can be considered personal identifiers and like any other personal information, should be protected.
Deep fakes and AI imagery is only going to get more sophisticated and realistic as time goes on. Don't want a repeat of the lack of customer protections with digital products because the law couldn't keep up with the times.
It's generally the oppose, legally. Because things like voices and appearance are considered inherent properties of a person, and thus are not created, they cannot be copyrighted. If two people...
It's generally the oppose, legally. Because things like voices and appearance are considered inherent properties of a person, and thus are not created, they cannot be copyrighted. If two people have the same voice, they cannot mutually copyright claim each other when they appear in recorded audio.
Same thing. You can copyright a specific clip of Porky Pig's voice actor, but you cannot copyright all audio clips that Porky Pig's voice actor could produce.
Same thing. You can copyright a specific clip of Porky Pig's voice actor, but you cannot copyright all audio clips that Porky Pig's voice actor could produce.
I'm kinda fine with it because computer generated things are uncopyrightable it will make companies hesitant to use such material widely. I do agree that voice, appearance, and mannerisms should...
I'm kinda fine with it because computer generated things are uncopyrightable it will make companies hesitant to use such material widely.
I do agree that voice, appearance, and mannerisms should be protected though.
Not only is it hard to copyright a voice (you'd have to prove it was copying the character/person in a way that would go beyond just voice, I think), but even then it's generally not illegal to...
Not only is it hard to copyright a voice (you'd have to prove it was copying the character/person in a way that would go beyond just voice, I think), but even then it's generally not illegal to copy works for your own personal use.
So, you might have issues making a business out of selling famous people's voices & personalities, with some minor law changes, but you COULD make a business out of selling something that can make any voice the user wants and users could then use it to make the voices they want, famous or not.
To make the latter illegal would be difficult to do without being very draconian.
Yeah. There's some cool stuff from this when it comes to making things (movies/shows/games), and I expect that to get much better. Being able to just record a voice doing certain sounds, then...
Yeah. There's some cool stuff from this when it comes to making things (movies/shows/games), and I expect that to get much better. Being able to just record a voice doing certain sounds, then write the lines in such a way to not just convey phonetics but tones (happy, sad, sarcastic, etc) is something I see happening for this kind of program in the not too distant future. I wouldn't be surprised if this hits singers as well.
In my opinion it is by far the most threatened industry from recent tech advancements. Images still have lots of "well you could use ML, but...." caveats still (and I expect they will for some time), but the "good enough" line for voice has been blown past. Now it's just creating the tools to support it.
While there's obviously a whole industry or two about to get nuked hard, I do see the silver lining in that it lowers barriers to entry even more. We've long been past the point of no longer needing full blown studios for major and well done productions (most of my personal picks are all comedy things like abridged series or TTSD, but there's a bunch more), and this does make it even easier to do such things. Especially when line reading is such a major pain in the ass to schedule and get right.
I think business models are going to need to change in the long run, and the short run is going to be rough, but this is really interesting technology.
I think not-for-profit AI voice mods are fine, but draw a hard ideological line at pornographic uses. The reason I hold the former stance is you realistically won't get the VA to voice lines for a...
I think not-for-profit AI voice mods are fine, but draw a hard ideological line at pornographic uses.
The reason I hold the former stance is you realistically won't get the VA to voice lines for a mod, and assuming it isn't an otherwise distateful mod, doesn't harm the artist. I'm aware this is an unpopular opinion in the modding scene, but I sort of see this as an inevitable outcome, and not too far past texture/model reuse and manipulation that occurs in many mods. The artists don't lose their livelihoods over their work being adjusted for mods, either.
While I'm not generally opposed to AI voice mods to preserve characters in new, not-for-profit content, throwing sex into the mix leads to the potential mischaracterization of the VAs by misrepresenting their work in a fairly extreme way. The voice is an intimate part of themselves, especially characters that are less "acted" and sound closer to the VA's normal voice. It's not like erotic fanart where it is a rendering of a bunch of pixels, but an appropriation of a human's voice.
Drawing the line at sexual content feels very arbitrary to me. A VA might be fine with being associated with sexual content more than say being attached to a cause or political movement that is...
Drawing the line at sexual content feels very arbitrary to me. A VA might be fine with being associated with sexual content more than say being attached to a cause or political movement that is contrary to their beliefs. They should be the ones that consent to what is ok for their voice to be used for.
I wonder if Mr Rogers would have been more upset if his voice was used in sexual content or violent content. Certainly, insulting children would have been considered worse than either of those.
I wonder if Mr Rogers would have been more upset if his voice was used in sexual content or violent content. Certainly, insulting children would have been considered worse than either of those.
I think most major platforms will try to remove this kind of sexual stuff just to make everyone happy, Nexus is usually pretty well moderated and takes down lots of objectionable things, like one...
I think most major platforms will try to remove this kind of sexual stuff just to make everyone happy, Nexus is usually pretty well moderated and takes down lots of objectionable things, like one time they removed a mod that replaced all pride flags with American flags.
However, legally restricting this will be more difficult. These mods might even be able to claim fair use even if the original voice content is copyrighted, and even that is kind of beside the point. If someone hosts a website in a foreign country that doesn't recognize the copyright, now American companies will have no recourse. Even if they can get the federal government to block the website, VPNs exist and are generally simpler to install than a mod.
So laws may be able to prevent companies from selling games that use AI voices, or at least AI voices that were made from people who didn't want to be recorded for the purpose of making an AI voice, but restricting modders would be nearly impossible, at best they can just make it slightly more difficult
I would also say that the practicality of making regulations over something like voice similarity are pretty dicey. If you could copyright your voice, you would be copyrighting an entire class of...
I would also say that the practicality of making regulations over something like voice similarity are pretty dicey. If you could copyright your voice, you would be copyrighting an entire class of audio waveforms. Not a specific audio clip, but a "type" of audio. How would that work? How would the boundaries be set? What if someone just happens to have a voice like yours? Can they no longer speak without violating your copyright?
You have many possible pitches. Can you own all of them?
What about other situations? Can you now copyright the type of sounds an instrument can make? Can you copyright the look of a particular stroke from a particular brush?
Deep neural networks have given us an instrument that can produce voices, as a midi keyboard can make piano noises. It is, what it is.
Not to mention impressions, or the simple fact that some people sound similar. I think it will be very difficult to try and legislate something like that.
If you could copyright your voice, you would be copyrighting an entire class of audio waveforms.
Not to mention impressions, or the simple fact that some people sound similar. I think it will be very difficult to try and legislate something like that.
That's ultimately a very different scenario. The case there was that it was defaming him, by impersonating him and having the impersonator espouse opinions he doesn't share. It wasn't the mere act...
That's ultimately a very different scenario. The case there was that it was defaming him, by impersonating him and having the impersonator espouse opinions he doesn't share. It wasn't the mere act of mimicry, as it would in a copyright case, but a defamation case.
On the other hand, these mods, for the most part, aren't trying to trick you into thinking it's Laura Bailey, they just like Laura Bailey's voice. At least the ones that aren't trying to trick into thinking it's really the voice actor, you can just leave their names out for one, there's not much you can do about it.
In general I think defamation law is where you would have to go to legally handle this anyway. Something about how its implying the voice actor endorses the content of the mod or somrthing? I'm...
In general I think defamation law is where you would have to go to legally handle this anyway. Something about how its implying the voice actor endorses the content of the mod or somrthing? I'm not sure how successful it would be, since it would depend so much on the individual circumstances of each case, but it's not as much of a no-go as copyright.
But of course the much MUCH more sensible solution is for this to be removed by the mod platforms, perhaps at request of the game studios, without bringing in any legal issues at all. Nexus Mods could totally establish a policy against this and remove offending mods regardless of their legal status.
It's not an approach that'll get you anywhere. For defamation, you have to prove that the defendant 1) knew the claim was false 2) had malicious intent. Both of which are infamously hard to prove....
It's not an approach that'll get you anywhere. For defamation, you have to prove that the defendant 1) knew the claim was false 2) had malicious intent. Both of which are infamously hard to prove. If the mod just had a line that said "these were AI generated", it already blows away malicious intent.
I believe the standard you call "malicious intent" is actually "actual malice", which means something slightly different. But I agree it would not be a particularly easy case to argue. I can just...
I believe the standard you call "malicious intent" is actually "actual malice", which means something slightly different. But I agree it would not be a particularly easy case to argue. I can just see it potentially working in the case of a mod with REALLY objectionable content IF it actually caused damage to the voice actor's reputation. Whereas I don't think there's even an edge case where copyright would work for this.
AI voice "theft" is gonna become a huge issue moving forward. There's also now voice changers that can be trained using someone's voice as a model and you can literally speak in real time using...
AI voice "theft" is gonna become a huge issue moving forward.
There's also now voice changers that can be trained using someone's voice as a model and you can literally speak in real time using their voice. This is a big issue if your entire career revolves around you voicing a character, it waters down your worth.
I'm curious to see how copyright law evolves to address AI in these scenarios.
I'm curious what the ultimate outcome of this would be. With AI being fed everything human so we can have it respond back to us with whatever we want, what would the ultimate outcome be if AI...
I'm curious what the ultimate outcome of this would be. With AI being fed everything human so we can have it respond back to us with whatever we want, what would the ultimate outcome be if AI generated content then becomes the basis for AI learning because humans have relied on it for so long, we are no longer the subject it's trying to emulate? Like, would it be the "everything bagel"? Would it end up collapsing in on itself and sucking everything in?
If a model trying to predict something becomes detached from that thing and starts predicting itself or others of its kind, they'll all collectively drift away. Instead of having their own quirks,...
If a model trying to predict something becomes detached from that thing and starts predicting itself or others of its kind, they'll all collectively drift away. Instead of having their own quirks, AI art generators would increasingly have their own homogenized style that they can't get away from because it's in all of their collectively-generated training data. The same goes for text. As the majority of generated training data is created through sanitized, professional-sounding assistant models, all generated text will become stuck on those rails.
This is the crux of it. Arguments rooted in the danger of AI being used to deceive people and spread misinformation are just about the only arguments that hold water. But any argument that centers...
AI just 'learns' like we do. By copying.
This is the crux of it. Arguments rooted in the danger of AI being used to deceive people and spread misinformation are just about the only arguments that hold water. But any argument that centers around copying or job replacing is completely ridiculous.
I know a few working illustrators and they all learned by copying and continue to do their work by referencing other work. Literally everyone learns by first copying what someone else has done, and then applying our own style to it.
If we're unsure how to proceed, we either ask someone who knows more about a process what they would do, or we use a search engine (oh no, more algorithms and not the card catalog at the library made and maintained by actual humans) to find a reference. And nobody asks permission to use these references in their work. But somehow it's bad when computers do it?
What I find equally frustrating is how arbitrary and entitled the arguments against AI are. All these people who are knee-jerking about AI overtaking the art industry...why aren't they also complaining about switchboard operators being replaced by automated systems, librarians replaced by search engines, postal workers replaced by email/message boards (the irony of complaining about AI on a message board is just beyond rich). And do these same people do any shopping online? Do they ever use self-checkout?
Like suddenly, art is under threat so now it's a big deal. The (perhaps unintentional) subtext of these arguments is that artists are more important than other laborers. Nobody rages about all the other ways machines have taken over manual labor because those people weren't important enough and those jobs weren't important enough. All the work that we see machines doing were once done by people. But I don't see 100 articles a week pearl-clutching about those jobs. But now it's artists so let's rage.
I don't see it as entitlement. I suspect some of those other jobs that you mentioned - the switchboard operators, the register operators - also protested and made their cases. Many of us probably...
I don't see it as entitlement. I suspect some of those other jobs that you mentioned - the switchboard operators, the register operators - also protested and made their cases. Many of us probably glossed over those events because they didn't enter our newsfeed as something that was impactful to us. This one is interesting to us because we're gamers and this is gaming news.
AI learns by copying. To an extent, it can cut code, paint and illustrate, teach, etc. Most creative and knowledge-working jobs will be impacted to an extent. Today we're talking about voice actors; tomorrow, maybe entry level developer roles will be under threat.
I think there's a very good reason why the current batch of generative AI models and apps are considered a threat: in historical cases where a disruptive technology has rendered a skill obsolete,...
I think there's a very good reason why the current batch of generative AI models and apps are considered a threat: in historical cases where a disruptive technology has rendered a skill obsolete, the know-how behind that skill has fallen out of consciousness within a generation or so.
At issue is that this time, the skill in question is general human creativity. It's a skillset that is core to what it is to be human. Sure, there will be a handful of people that will still do it as a hobby, but they'll be outcompeted in the marketplace.
My fear is not of generative AI itself, but of the long-term creative atrophy it will engender.
I have yet to see an AI creation that was genuinely creative, at least not in an artistic way. Every piece that AI boosters post from Midjourney as an example of "real art" that I have seen have...
I have yet to see an AI creation that was genuinely creative, at least not in an artistic way. Every piece that AI boosters post from Midjourney as an example of "real art" that I have seen have been, while technically impressive, void of artistic content. There is no AI that can create a piece like Ai Weiwei's "Straight" or a piece like this one.
The AI will not "outcompete" artists, because artists were never really competing in a market in the same way. Sure, art is subject to market forces. But unless you're one of those terminally cynical online folks who think that all modern art is a money laundering racket, I think it's pretty easy to tell whether a piece is expressive of something real or if it's AI bullshit. Much of the value of visual art comes from its history, materials, labor, and process. The replacement of artists with mechanical reproduction was a crisis we have already been through before with the advent of photography, and artists came out squarely on top.
What AI does threaten to replace are industrial uses of artistic skill. So things like copywriting, illustration, and concept art. There is no threat to general human creativity. The threat is to the livelihoods of dedicated artists who, without employment in copywriting and illustration, will not be able to pursue genuine non-commercial artistic endeavors in those mediums.
I feel the same way in that all of the AI generated art I've seen online contains no creative merit. A lot of what I've seen looks hyperrealistic, which is impressive, but feels soulless to me. I...
I feel the same way in that all of the AI generated art I've seen online contains no creative merit. A lot of what I've seen looks hyperrealistic, which is impressive, but feels soulless to me. I often wonder if at some point, the demand for "authentic handmade" art (for lack of better terminology) will become more in demand.
This is an excellent argument. I believe you're right that AI will likely replace dedicated adcopy writers to some degree, but not completely. For a very brief time (about 1 yr) I was a copywriter...
So things like copywriting, illustration, and concept art.
This is an excellent argument. I believe you're right that AI will likely replace dedicated adcopy writers to some degree, but not completely. For a very brief time (about 1 yr) I was a copywriter and adcopy writer. My perspective is that freelancers will probably have a hard time finding consistent work, so they'll need to branch out or pivot (but most freelance writers are already skilled in a couple adjacent writing disciplines anyway).
I believe larger companies will probably retain a smaller cadre of in-house copywriters/editors to tweak the AI output according to whatever target corporate sets. Or just outsource it to an adcopy writing agency (what many do already).
Personally, for writers anyway, I see an evolution more along the lines of "AI prompter and editor." There is a skill in talking to these things and massaging the output, and people with skills in writing/editing and AI language will flourish. I also believe the transition will be relatively natural. As older hats who don't want to touch AI retire, the subordinates and newer employees will have had enough exposure to branch out into this new, adjacent writing field, or they'll come in already educated in something like LLM linguistics (a master's already offered at several universities), so they'll already understand how to use AI as a tool and just adopt it naturally into their role.
This has always been the argument, though. I remember when Photoshop first released and everyone claimed that now physical medium artists would become obsolete and that "real" artists would no...
This has always been the argument, though. I remember when Photoshop first released and everyone claimed that now physical medium artists would become obsolete and that "real" artists would no longer have a job and that art would be replaced by fake hacks that used Photoshop. But that didn't happen. There are still physical medium artists and digital artists now. Creativity didn't atrophy and everyone was fine. It was just another technopanic, even though everyone argued that, no no, it was different this time.
One of my classes in college was about the evolution of paper-making (I studied creative writing) and we read more than one eloquently worded old-timey argument about how the printing press would destroy literacy and writers, and ruin the art of writing because now anybody could print a book, and now instead of one really rich guy buying one of only ten copies of a book, there would now be thousands of copies of that same book. But here we are now, people are still writing things by hand and printing things via press, and the printing press has allowed us to reach new creative heights.
But as it turned out, the monks were just fine, writers, calligraphy art, and letter artists survived professionally and not just as hobbyists, nobody was pushed out of the marketplace, and it opened the door to even more wonderful art for people to experience.
The point I'm making with that artivlcle is that technopanic has been a thing for hundreds, probably thousands of years. And each time, people say "No, it's different this time." It's not different. We're not special people living in special times. It's the same thing since time immemorial. It's just another technopanic in a long line of panics that people get caught up in.
I don't know how you can believe that creativity is so vital to being human, while simultaneously believing that it's so weak and underwhelming that it will atrophy just because something that isn't human can also be creative. Our creativity will survive just fine, and will likely be complemented by generative tools that allow us to reach new and unexpected creative heights.
What skills have fallen out of human consciousness? I'm genuinely curious to know what skills we as the current generations don't know from two generations ago.
What skills have fallen out of human consciousness? I'm genuinely curious to know what skills we as the current generations don't know from two generations ago.
The ones that I know for sure are lost have to do with producing particular colours in fibres with natural dyes... but that's only because I know a spinner/weaver that is a hardcore nerd for such...
The ones that I know for sure are lost have to do with producing particular colours in fibres with natural dyes... but that's only because I know a spinner/weaver that is a hardcore nerd for such stuff.
I think there is a difference between switchboard operators having their rote manual labor replaced and artists having most of their entire profession replaced.
I think there is a difference between switchboard operators having their rote manual labor replaced and artists having most of their entire profession replaced.
Meh, I would be very angry if I as a voice actor would get my voice duplicated and reused somewhere. But there are always multiple perspectives to it, which need to be all considered. In gaming,...
Meh, I would be very angry if I as a voice actor would get my voice duplicated and reused somewhere.
But there are always multiple perspectives to it, which need to be all considered.
In gaming, if I would have a company as big as EA is, I would most likely not bother with voice AI voice generation. Those voice actors do a bit more than just talk. The human aspect would be very important for me.
As a modder, lets say, for HalfLife. How cool would it be to create new stories with the original voice of Alyx or Dr Kleiner. Especially for indie games in general I see a lot of emancipating possibilities there. Its hard to create a game, no matter how great you are as a developer when you are as creative as a brick or lack the time and usually the money to find alternatives.
I think the topic is overblown as it is with any new tech. Cars will replace horses, nerds will replace my daughters face in photos with this photoshop thingy, no one goes into stores anymore, ai will take over humanity.
I also dont really agree with the whole copyright issue. AI just 'learns' like we do. By copying. Most stuff on this planet is just a copy of a copy of a copy anyway. With more time and input you wouldnt even notice which pixel is eventually from what.
I would normally agree with you on the copyright issue, but in this case where you're reproducing a person's exact voice, I don't think that counts. From mods where you needed to match the.... No,...
I would normally agree with you on the copyright issue, but in this case where you're reproducing a person's exact voice, I don't think that counts.
From mods where you needed to match the.... No, not even then. You can replace that character's voice as a whole with whatever new voice you want to using the AI. Don't still people's voices.
Just in general. Don't steal people's voices. It's kind of a basic moral obvious thing, isn't it? Use the AI to create new voices, and use those.
This argument seems like it fits more for the issue of AI replacing voice actor jobs than it does the issue of recreating real people's voices with AI (for pornographic purposes).
This argument seems like it fits more for the issue of AI replacing voice actor jobs than it does the issue of recreating real people's voices with AI (for pornographic purposes).
I think this article has some mixed signals, as it's merging several different things, for some reason. Some voice actors are angry about ML-generated audio samples that can imitate people's voice (ala elevenlabs), some mods (specifically, two) NSFW skyrim mods are using ML-generated voices. The title implies that those are one and the same.
Well, regardless, I do think it's pretty doomed for the voice actors. In the US, there's already a precedent that voices cannot be copyrighted, so there's even more of a uphill battle if you want to tackle it from that angle. There'll still be voice actors, but mainly for prestige roles. The litany of minor roles will probably be taken over by generated voicelines, which are already quite good, and will only get better.
Unfortunately, I'm certain that this is going to be the exact case going forward. I'm reminded of The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, and the very short role Patrick Stewart played. God only knows how much money he was paid for such a short role, meanwhile you have a handful of people voicing the roles for hundreds of characters over the entire course of the game. Was it incredibly detrimental to the quality of the voice acting to have a few high profile actors voicing individual characters with the rest being voiced by four or five contracted actors? Absolutely, but who cares, we got Picard in the opening cutscene!
So I think you hit the nail on the head. We'll see advertisements saying something like "Featuring the real and authentic voice of Billy West!" before too long.
Bethesdas complete lack of interest in hiring voice actors is the biggest immersion killer for me in their games. Skyrim is incredible with the exception of there being about 7 voices across a game of hundreds of npc. The voice actors didn't even try to make any 2 characters sound different. Just the same identical tone and energy for 400 npc. Sometimes multiple in the same room speak as clearly the same person. It's so frustrating that a company with all that money just can't be bothered to consider voice acting.
That's fascinating, and I wonder if it's a particular type of person that would/wouldn't notice that. I had no idea. I have played hundreds of hours and never even thought about the similarities. Like clearly the guards are all the same, but I had never realized others sounded similar at all.
Honestly it might just come down to playtime. I'm coming up on 3k hours on special edition and have no idea what I played on Xbox before getting it on steam. Skyrim modding took over my life for a while so I've probably heard every line in skyrim 100+ times. Though my wife who only plays off and on has also mentioned it's funny that every nord man is the exact same person and there's only 2 old people voices. So I don't think it's just my upsetting number of hours in it.
Nah, it's pretty egregious (even though Skyrim actually has over 70 VAs).
At least Laura Bailey only does Serana's voice, where Colleen Delaney's "female even-toned" is used for Lydia and a ton of generic NPCs so that Lydia and a random bandit will be saying "I'll kill you if I have to" to each other in identical voices mid-fight 🙄
I recognise voice actors across games and different roles. I would absolutely realise there's only a handful of VAs for an entire game.
It's somewhat jarring and also one of the reasons Skyrim doesn't necessarily score well in my book.
I would hope that the law catches up as time goes on. As far as I am concerned, your voice, appearance and mannerisms are all details that can be considered personal identifiers and like any other personal information, should be protected.
Deep fakes and AI imagery is only going to get more sophisticated and realistic as time goes on. Don't want a repeat of the lack of customer protections with digital products because the law couldn't keep up with the times.
It's generally the oppose, legally. Because things like voices and appearance are considered inherent properties of a person, and thus are not created, they cannot be copyrighted. If two people have the same voice, they cannot mutually copyright claim each other when they appear in recorded audio.
What about a character’s voice, like Porky Pig?
Same thing. You can copyright a specific clip of Porky Pig's voice actor, but you cannot copyright all audio clips that Porky Pig's voice actor could produce.
I suppose it makes sense that it's not copyrightable, but there should greater legal protections for your likeness.
I'm kinda fine with it because computer generated things are uncopyrightable it will make companies hesitant to use such material widely.
I do agree that voice, appearance, and mannerisms should be protected though.
Not only is it hard to copyright a voice (you'd have to prove it was copying the character/person in a way that would go beyond just voice, I think), but even then it's generally not illegal to copy works for your own personal use.
So, you might have issues making a business out of selling famous people's voices & personalities, with some minor law changes, but you COULD make a business out of selling something that can make any voice the user wants and users could then use it to make the voices they want, famous or not.
To make the latter illegal would be difficult to do without being very draconian.
Yeah. There's some cool stuff from this when it comes to making things (movies/shows/games), and I expect that to get much better. Being able to just record a voice doing certain sounds, then write the lines in such a way to not just convey phonetics but tones (happy, sad, sarcastic, etc) is something I see happening for this kind of program in the not too distant future. I wouldn't be surprised if this hits singers as well.
In my opinion it is by far the most threatened industry from recent tech advancements. Images still have lots of "well you could use ML, but...." caveats still (and I expect they will for some time), but the "good enough" line for voice has been blown past. Now it's just creating the tools to support it.
While there's obviously a whole industry or two about to get nuked hard, I do see the silver lining in that it lowers barriers to entry even more. We've long been past the point of no longer needing full blown studios for major and well done productions (most of my personal picks are all comedy things like abridged series or TTSD, but there's a bunch more), and this does make it even easier to do such things. Especially when line reading is such a major pain in the ass to schedule and get right.
I think business models are going to need to change in the long run, and the short run is going to be rough, but this is really interesting technology.
The industry: fuck it, just cast Troy Baker as everybody.
I think not-for-profit AI voice mods are fine, but draw a hard ideological line at pornographic uses.
The reason I hold the former stance is you realistically won't get the VA to voice lines for a mod, and assuming it isn't an otherwise distateful mod, doesn't harm the artist. I'm aware this is an unpopular opinion in the modding scene, but I sort of see this as an inevitable outcome, and not too far past texture/model reuse and manipulation that occurs in many mods. The artists don't lose their livelihoods over their work being adjusted for mods, either.
While I'm not generally opposed to AI voice mods to preserve characters in new, not-for-profit content, throwing sex into the mix leads to the potential mischaracterization of the VAs by misrepresenting their work in a fairly extreme way. The voice is an intimate part of themselves, especially characters that are less "acted" and sound closer to the VA's normal voice. It's not like erotic fanart where it is a rendering of a bunch of pixels, but an appropriation of a human's voice.
Drawing the line at sexual content feels very arbitrary to me. A VA might be fine with being associated with sexual content more than say being attached to a cause or political movement that is contrary to their beliefs. They should be the ones that consent to what is ok for their voice to be used for.
I wonder if Mr Rogers would have been more upset if his voice was used in sexual content or violent content. Certainly, insulting children would have been considered worse than either of those.
I think most major platforms will try to remove this kind of sexual stuff just to make everyone happy, Nexus is usually pretty well moderated and takes down lots of objectionable things, like one time they removed a mod that replaced all pride flags with American flags.
However, legally restricting this will be more difficult. These mods might even be able to claim fair use even if the original voice content is copyrighted, and even that is kind of beside the point. If someone hosts a website in a foreign country that doesn't recognize the copyright, now American companies will have no recourse. Even if they can get the federal government to block the website, VPNs exist and are generally simpler to install than a mod.
So laws may be able to prevent companies from selling games that use AI voices, or at least AI voices that were made from people who didn't want to be recorded for the purpose of making an AI voice, but restricting modders would be nearly impossible, at best they can just make it slightly more difficult
I sympathize with the voice actors here but I’m afraid the cat is out of the bag. I doubt this will ever go away.
I would also say that the practicality of making regulations over something like voice similarity are pretty dicey. If you could copyright your voice, you would be copyrighting an entire class of audio waveforms. Not a specific audio clip, but a "type" of audio. How would that work? How would the boundaries be set? What if someone just happens to have a voice like yours? Can they no longer speak without violating your copyright?
You have many possible pitches. Can you own all of them?
What about other situations? Can you now copyright the type of sounds an instrument can make? Can you copyright the look of a particular stroke from a particular brush?
Deep neural networks have given us an instrument that can produce voices, as a midi keyboard can make piano noises. It is, what it is.
Not to mention impressions, or the simple fact that some people sound similar. I think it will be very difficult to try and legislate something like that.
Celebrities have sued and won when a soundalike voice has been used in commercials. Tom Waits, for example.
That's ultimately a very different scenario. The case there was that it was defaming him, by impersonating him and having the impersonator espouse opinions he doesn't share. It wasn't the mere act of mimicry, as it would in a copyright case, but a defamation case.
On the other hand, these mods, for the most part, aren't trying to trick you into thinking it's Laura Bailey, they just like Laura Bailey's voice. At least the ones that aren't trying to trick into thinking it's really the voice actor, you can just leave their names out for one, there's not much you can do about it.
In general I think defamation law is where you would have to go to legally handle this anyway. Something about how its implying the voice actor endorses the content of the mod or somrthing? I'm not sure how successful it would be, since it would depend so much on the individual circumstances of each case, but it's not as much of a no-go as copyright.
But of course the much MUCH more sensible solution is for this to be removed by the mod platforms, perhaps at request of the game studios, without bringing in any legal issues at all. Nexus Mods could totally establish a policy against this and remove offending mods regardless of their legal status.
It's not an approach that'll get you anywhere. For defamation, you have to prove that the defendant 1) knew the claim was false 2) had malicious intent. Both of which are infamously hard to prove. If the mod just had a line that said "these were AI generated", it already blows away malicious intent.
I believe the standard you call "malicious intent" is actually "actual malice", which means something slightly different. But I agree it would not be a particularly easy case to argue. I can just see it potentially working in the case of a mod with REALLY objectionable content IF it actually caused damage to the voice actor's reputation. Whereas I don't think there's even an edge case where copyright would work for this.
AI voice "theft" is gonna become a huge issue moving forward.
There's also now voice changers that can be trained using someone's voice as a model and you can literally speak in real time using their voice. This is a big issue if your entire career revolves around you voicing a character, it waters down your worth.
I'm curious to see how copyright law evolves to address AI in these scenarios.
I hope everything AI generated continues to be uncopyrightable.
I'm curious what the ultimate outcome of this would be. With AI being fed everything human so we can have it respond back to us with whatever we want, what would the ultimate outcome be if AI generated content then becomes the basis for AI learning because humans have relied on it for so long, we are no longer the subject it's trying to emulate? Like, would it be the "everything bagel"? Would it end up collapsing in on itself and sucking everything in?
If a model trying to predict something becomes detached from that thing and starts predicting itself or others of its kind, they'll all collectively drift away. Instead of having their own quirks, AI art generators would increasingly have their own homogenized style that they can't get away from because it's in all of their collectively-generated training data. The same goes for text. As the majority of generated training data is created through sanitized, professional-sounding assistant models, all generated text will become stuck on those rails.
This is the crux of it. Arguments rooted in the danger of AI being used to deceive people and spread misinformation are just about the only arguments that hold water. But any argument that centers around copying or job replacing is completely ridiculous.
I know a few working illustrators and they all learned by copying and continue to do their work by referencing other work. Literally everyone learns by first copying what someone else has done, and then applying our own style to it.
If we're unsure how to proceed, we either ask someone who knows more about a process what they would do, or we use a search engine (oh no, more algorithms and not the card catalog at the library made and maintained by actual humans) to find a reference. And nobody asks permission to use these references in their work. But somehow it's bad when computers do it?
What I find equally frustrating is how arbitrary and entitled the arguments against AI are. All these people who are knee-jerking about AI overtaking the art industry...why aren't they also complaining about switchboard operators being replaced by automated systems, librarians replaced by search engines, postal workers replaced by email/message boards (the irony of complaining about AI on a message board is just beyond rich). And do these same people do any shopping online? Do they ever use self-checkout?
Like suddenly, art is under threat so now it's a big deal. The (perhaps unintentional) subtext of these arguments is that artists are more important than other laborers. Nobody rages about all the other ways machines have taken over manual labor because those people weren't important enough and those jobs weren't important enough. All the work that we see machines doing were once done by people. But I don't see 100 articles a week pearl-clutching about those jobs. But now it's artists so let's rage.
The entitlement is so frustrating to watch.
I don't see it as entitlement. I suspect some of those other jobs that you mentioned - the switchboard operators, the register operators - also protested and made their cases. Many of us probably glossed over those events because they didn't enter our newsfeed as something that was impactful to us. This one is interesting to us because we're gamers and this is gaming news.
AI learns by copying. To an extent, it can cut code, paint and illustrate, teach, etc. Most creative and knowledge-working jobs will be impacted to an extent. Today we're talking about voice actors; tomorrow, maybe entry level developer roles will be under threat.
I think there's a very good reason why the current batch of generative AI models and apps are considered a threat: in historical cases where a disruptive technology has rendered a skill obsolete, the know-how behind that skill has fallen out of consciousness within a generation or so.
At issue is that this time, the skill in question is general human creativity. It's a skillset that is core to what it is to be human. Sure, there will be a handful of people that will still do it as a hobby, but they'll be outcompeted in the marketplace.
My fear is not of generative AI itself, but of the long-term creative atrophy it will engender.
I have yet to see an AI creation that was genuinely creative, at least not in an artistic way. Every piece that AI boosters post from Midjourney as an example of "real art" that I have seen have been, while technically impressive, void of artistic content. There is no AI that can create a piece like Ai Weiwei's "Straight" or a piece like this one.
The AI will not "outcompete" artists, because artists were never really competing in a market in the same way. Sure, art is subject to market forces. But unless you're one of those terminally cynical online folks who think that all modern art is a money laundering racket, I think it's pretty easy to tell whether a piece is expressive of something real or if it's AI bullshit. Much of the value of visual art comes from its history, materials, labor, and process. The replacement of artists with mechanical reproduction was a crisis we have already been through before with the advent of photography, and artists came out squarely on top.
What AI does threaten to replace are industrial uses of artistic skill. So things like copywriting, illustration, and concept art. There is no threat to general human creativity. The threat is to the livelihoods of dedicated artists who, without employment in copywriting and illustration, will not be able to pursue genuine non-commercial artistic endeavors in those mediums.
I feel the same way in that all of the AI generated art I've seen online contains no creative merit. A lot of what I've seen looks hyperrealistic, which is impressive, but feels soulless to me. I often wonder if at some point, the demand for "authentic handmade" art (for lack of better terminology) will become more in demand.
This is an excellent argument. I believe you're right that AI will likely replace dedicated adcopy writers to some degree, but not completely. For a very brief time (about 1 yr) I was a copywriter and adcopy writer. My perspective is that freelancers will probably have a hard time finding consistent work, so they'll need to branch out or pivot (but most freelance writers are already skilled in a couple adjacent writing disciplines anyway).
I believe larger companies will probably retain a smaller cadre of in-house copywriters/editors to tweak the AI output according to whatever target corporate sets. Or just outsource it to an adcopy writing agency (what many do already).
Personally, for writers anyway, I see an evolution more along the lines of "AI prompter and editor." There is a skill in talking to these things and massaging the output, and people with skills in writing/editing and AI language will flourish. I also believe the transition will be relatively natural. As older hats who don't want to touch AI retire, the subordinates and newer employees will have had enough exposure to branch out into this new, adjacent writing field, or they'll come in already educated in something like LLM linguistics (a master's already offered at several universities), so they'll already understand how to use AI as a tool and just adopt it naturally into their role.
This has always been the argument, though. I remember when Photoshop first released and everyone claimed that now physical medium artists would become obsolete and that "real" artists would no longer have a job and that art would be replaced by fake hacks that used Photoshop. But that didn't happen. There are still physical medium artists and digital artists now. Creativity didn't atrophy and everyone was fine. It was just another technopanic, even though everyone argued that, no no, it was different this time.
One of my classes in college was about the evolution of paper-making (I studied creative writing) and we read more than one eloquently worded old-timey argument about how the printing press would destroy literacy and writers, and ruin the art of writing because now anybody could print a book, and now instead of one really rich guy buying one of only ten copies of a book, there would now be thousands of copies of that same book. But here we are now, people are still writing things by hand and printing things via press, and the printing press has allowed us to reach new creative heights.
Here's a single article, among many, from twelve years ago trying to quell a technopanic: https://www.techdirt.com/2011/02/25/fifteenth-century-technopanic-about-horrors-printing-press/
But as it turned out, the monks were just fine, writers, calligraphy art, and letter artists survived professionally and not just as hobbyists, nobody was pushed out of the marketplace, and it opened the door to even more wonderful art for people to experience.
The point I'm making with that artivlcle is that technopanic has been a thing for hundreds, probably thousands of years. And each time, people say "No, it's different this time." It's not different. We're not special people living in special times. It's the same thing since time immemorial. It's just another technopanic in a long line of panics that people get caught up in.
I don't know how you can believe that creativity is so vital to being human, while simultaneously believing that it's so weak and underwhelming that it will atrophy just because something that isn't human can also be creative. Our creativity will survive just fine, and will likely be complemented by generative tools that allow us to reach new and unexpected creative heights.
What skills have fallen out of human consciousness? I'm genuinely curious to know what skills we as the current generations don't know from two generations ago.
The ones that I know for sure are lost have to do with producing particular colours in fibres with natural dyes... but that's only because I know a spinner/weaver that is a hardcore nerd for such stuff.
I think there is a difference between switchboard operators having their rote manual labor replaced and artists having most of their entire profession replaced.
Meh, I would be very angry if I as a voice actor would get my voice duplicated and reused somewhere.
But there are always multiple perspectives to it, which need to be all considered.
In gaming, if I would have a company as big as EA is, I would most likely not bother with voice AI voice generation. Those voice actors do a bit more than just talk. The human aspect would be very important for me.
As a modder, lets say, for HalfLife. How cool would it be to create new stories with the original voice of Alyx or Dr Kleiner. Especially for indie games in general I see a lot of emancipating possibilities there. Its hard to create a game, no matter how great you are as a developer when you are as creative as a brick or lack the time and usually the money to find alternatives.
I think the topic is overblown as it is with any new tech. Cars will replace horses, nerds will replace my daughters face in photos with this photoshop thingy, no one goes into stores anymore, ai will take over humanity.
I also dont really agree with the whole copyright issue. AI just 'learns' like we do. By copying. Most stuff on this planet is just a copy of a copy of a copy anyway. With more time and input you wouldnt even notice which pixel is eventually from what.
I would normally agree with you on the copyright issue, but in this case where you're reproducing a person's exact voice, I don't think that counts.
From mods where you needed to match the.... No, not even then. You can replace that character's voice as a whole with whatever new voice you want to using the AI. Don't still people's voices.
Just in general. Don't steal people's voices. It's kind of a basic moral obvious thing, isn't it? Use the AI to create new voices, and use those.
This argument seems like it fits more for the issue of AI replacing voice actor jobs than it does the issue of recreating real people's voices with AI (for pornographic purposes).