this post was submitted on 15 May 2024
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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.
Technology making labour obsolete is the goal we should all be wanting.
Attack capitalism not the technology.
True, but it's not quite working out that way is it?
That's kind of the point though isn't it? It's not the car's fault we can't afford the gas. We need to stop arguing about the ethics of using AI and start arguing about the ethics of the people using it unethically.
There is a person in that studio that suggested using AI, there is a person who gave the go ahead to do it. Those people need to be the problem, not the toy they decided to play with.
That's a very naive perspective though. We're not blaming the guns for gun violence, it's the people, but restricting access to guns is still the proven way to reduce gun incidents. One day when everyone is enlightened enough to not need such restrictions then we can lift them but we're very far from that point, and the same goes for tools like "AI".
you’re gonna have a bad time restricting software
Very easy time if it's about commercial use (well, at least outside of china). Companies need to have licenses for the software they use, they have to obey copyright laws and trademarks, have contracts and permissions for anything they use in their day to day work. It's the same reason why no serious company wants to even touch any competitor's leaked source code when it appears online.
Just because AI tech bros live in a bubble of their own, thinking they can just take and repurpose anything they need, doesn't mean it should be like that - for the most case it isn't and in this case, the law just hasn't caught up with the tech yet.
actual example please not like your other friend Luddite on the other comment
It'd be dead easy, actually. Don't even have to actually ban it: For image generating models, every artist whose work is included in the training data becomes entitled to 5 cents per image in the training data every time a model generates an image, so an artist with 20 works in the model is entitled to a dollar per generated image. Companies offering image generating neural networks would near instantly incur such huge liabilities that it simply wouldn't be worth it anymore. Same thing could apply to text and voice generating models, just per word instead of per image.
disregarding the fact that the model learns and extrapolates from the training data, not copying,
have fun figuring out which model made the image in the first place!
That said, this choice wasn't actually a problem right?
I mean this game doesn't use voice actors normally. If they used ai voice actors for this update only to represent the ai characters... isn't that just appropriate?
Previously all characters in this game were represented only by text, so literally nobody is being replaced here.
Another way to think about it would be via representation. We get worked up when an ethnic character on screen is played by a different ethnicity, an actor in blackface for example. And in that vein using ai for organic characters could be seen as offensive, but using ai for ai characters would not. In contrast could we see using human voices for ai characters to be insensitive? That may sound far fetched, but this is sci-fi, the ai characters in the game are fully sentient and in their fictional universe would have rights, the whole point is to make the player think about what that means.
Well I guess I have my takeaway, I may consider boycotting any game that uses human actors for ai characters. Just get an ai actor... seriously.
Honestly, I'd argue that that's exactly what AI should be for. Either being used by that one guy to give voices to his passion project because he can't afford to hire voice actors, or to add a touch of the uncanny to an AI character.
In practice, capitalism will use technology to subjugate others instead of allowing technology to free us from work.
Yes, as long as people keep focusing on fighting the technology instead of fighting capitalism, this is true.
So we can fight the technology and definitely lose, only to see our efforts subverted to further entrench capitalism and subjugate us harder (hint: regulation on this kind of thing disproportionately affects individuals while corporations carve out exceptions for themselves because 'it helps the economy')...
Or we can embrace the technology and try to use it to fight capitalism, at which point there's at least a chance we might win, since the technology really does have the potential to overcome capitalism if and only if we can spread it far enough and fast enough that it can't be controlled or contained to serve only the rich and powerful.
yea, see i just don't like how we first automated creativity instead of like, idk, manual labor????
Manual labor has been being automated since the industrial revolution.
Okay but I still have to fold my own laundry.
And do you wash your clothes in a bucket, wring them out in a mangler before beating your rugs with a stick to get the dust out of them?
And I don't make my own paints either when doing art. I still agree with the basic original point:
It is disappointing that we're currently automating creativity far faster than manual labour. I'm angry that my art is getting automated away faster than my folding of laundry.
It's not; you're just looking at the beginning of automating creativity when labor automation has been going on for over a hundred years. The introduction of new tech is always more disruptive than refining established tech. Besides which, VA is particularly sensitive to disruption because every VA does essentially the same job- one AI can be programmed to speak in thousands (millions?) of different voices, whereas one manual labor job doesn't necessarily require the same actions as another.
Also it's funny you complain about laundry, given how much doing laundry has been automated.
The original point being:
emphasis mine, but this is just incorrect. Technology has been reducing the need for manual labour (or rather increasing the amount of useful work done with manual labour) since the wheel and the plow.
And people still have to lift heavy shit, crawl around in dangerous spaces and generally harm their health to make a living.
The technology is magnifying the flaws in capitalism
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.