How very cyberpunk, except for the fact that permission was given.
this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2023
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Permission from the family, not the person who died. Is it okay for ai actors if the actors are dead and the family wants to get paid?
CDPR originally thought they may replace him in the expansion and then go back and actually re-record his lines in the original for consistency’s sake but…no one really liked that idea, as it did not seem fair to his memory and his great performance.
I really don't like the idea of doing it for entirely new performances but it doesn't seem about the money in this case.
Well, that's where we are going.
The reaction this is getting is simply going to fuel execs who now see that people are okay with it. And if they are okay with dead actors, they will be okay with live actors in a few years after they are used to that.
The correct answer to all of this was the same answer we have had for as long as humans have performed, everyone acknowledges that the character won't continue and the media pays respect in some way for the performance the actor actually gave.
This resurrects the actor without the permission of the actor just of their family who may or may not have understood what was happening. Which is likely going to be the norm from here on out.
I don't want an AI ressurectiin of Lance Riddick in the next Horizon game either. Do you want that?
The reaction this is getting is simply going to fuel execs who now see that people are okay with it. And if they are okay with dead actors, they will be okay with live actors in a few years after they are used to that.
This is nothing new. Let's not forget Wagons East or that Pink Panther movie from the 70s.
To be fair it is notoriously difficult to get permission from someone who has died.
If we can’t have necromancy in real life, then this will be the best we can get to bringing the dead back to life.
Do you have a problem with the family of a deceased writer who inherited the rights to their work given the writer's will deciding on the publishing agreements for that writer's work?
Should we have to resort to necromancy in order to even touch any new agreements regarding the work of the deceased?
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The actor agreed to voice the character in the base game. As far as I'm aware there is no evidence of a soured relationship with the developers, no reason to deduce he would have refused to continue voicing the character were he still alive.
It would be unethical to use a dead actor's voice in a way they would have a good reason to object to if they could, but this doesn't seem to be the case here.
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Similar situations come all the time for deceased musicians and writers. that get work released after they die. You can also see the family being proud of the legacy. It's always a mix of greed and pride, some cases go more to one side that other.
This article lacks some context. Miłogost Reczek was the voice actor for the Polish language of the game. If you played the English version of the game you would have heard the very much alive Michael Gregory as Victor Vektor.
Many commenters here are discussing the writer's and actors strikes that are in the news. Those are American unions, they have no bearing on the work of Polish voice actors who do localization work.
He also voiced Vesemir from Witcher. He was also very popular voice actor in animated movies localizations. Genuinely he was one of the few voice actors I knew by name, and the news that he died really struck me.
Technically, wouldn't he be the standard voice actor in a CDPR game and the English actor be the localisation?
I assumed the English version is the primary version. The game is set in the US, it's based on an American tabletop game. The plurality of the game's players will be playing the English version. Also the Bloomberg article features quotes from "CD Projekt localization director Mikołaj Szwed."
I don't know specifics of CDPRs development, but it's a reasonable assumption to make that English is the primary language, despite the studio's location.
Also the game has Kianu Reeves, his character is pretty clearly based on the actor. You wouldn't spend hollywood money to hire a hollywood film actor just to have them there to do dubbing work to replace a polish actor's performance.
Aren't all languages localizations in a game? Unless the characters' movements and voice would be motion captured and recorded together...
In the early days, localization was often done by the publisher, independent of the original developer. Which is the reason why you only get English language on some older games on Steam, despite localization existing. The rights to those localization aren't with the developer or publisher that is handling the Steam version. Small disc sizes also meant that you would only get one language on the disc, not a choice between multiple.
With bigger discs and online downloads a lot of that went away and games ship with multiple languages, which also means the developers are handling it themselves. But there will still be a main language that the game is actually written and developed in, while everything else is an afterthought, this can result in lip movements not matching, textures containing English or text on UI buttons having trouble fitting foreign text. Few localisations receive as much attention as the main language.
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CDPR uses game dev studios all over the place for supplemental work, so their business language has to be English.
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I was just thinking earlier today, games could probably use AI to seamlessly work the player's name into dialog. They would still hire voice actors, but insert whatever name the player chooses into the lines where it is mentioned. I feel like this isn't too far away.
World of Warcraft would benefit from this. Local processing power is quite up to the task these days, and it’s jarring to see your name on the screen but the audio says “champion” or something similar.
Maybe in 11.0…
Star field does this and it caught me complete off guard became I had used my real name.
Fallout 4 did as well, but it worked with a list of names that Codsworth could say. I'm assuming Starfield does something similar? Or is it a ton of NPCs that use the name?
Idk I didn't pick a name, I just entered my name for my character. Then I was playing and Vasco just said my name. I literally stopped in my tracks and was like "what did you just say?"
Yeah, he called me Assface.
To be fair, Vasco is a robot with a robotic / computer generated sounding voice. It's still cool, but it wouldn't take modern AI / neural network based processing to do that, any old text to speech engine could reproduce Vasco's voice.
He's voiced by Jake Green https://m.imdb.com/name/nm2482007/?ref_=tt_cl_t_4
I just saw another link farther down saying that its not actually auto generated at all. Jake Green just had to record 1011 different names.......
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I like the idea a lot. I can think of two problems that need to be solved for this:
- How do you pronounce the player’s name correctly?
- How do you prohibit abuse?
- Have them type it a second time phonetically, and let them test it
- If single-player? Don't. If multiplayer? Yeah... that'd be a nightmare lmao
Multiplayer doesn't make a difference, at least not noticeably, as all those shenanigans can already be done by text. You'll get reported and named "player345133" whether you misspell e.g. a forbidden slur or use a misspelling to get the slur's pronunciation.
But it's harder to detect spoken slang when people make it talk in mixed accents and more, you would have to run a talk to text engine too many different times with different filters and parameters against many different languages' lists of slang words with multiple recognizable pronunciations.
And then somebody names themselves ChatGPT and the French will laugh because that sounds like "cat farted" in their language
I recently had this in a game. Just couldn't say which one sadly.. I was really suprised it said my (character's) name. Damn...which game was it?
Starfield does this to some degree: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/starfield-names-list
It does it if you have an anglo-sounding name, which is the problem with brute forcing this.
Generative AI would be a fun solution, but it currently seems like it'd trigger a lot of controversy, sadly.
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I look forward to the expansion from this, even. Real dialogue between the players and the game. Writers and designers set parameters for each character, backstory, motives, personality, current goals, etc. And then instead of a simple 4-5 choices of pre-canned dialog, with pre-canned responses, the player can type (or even say) whatever they want, and the game can return a customized response appropriate for the character.
With advances in AI, Reczek’s performance could be recreated, but CDPR made sure they got permission from his family. His sons were “very supportive” of the idea, according to a Bloomberg report.
I am pretty sure his sons are fans of CP2077 too. I would give permission too if I were in their shoes - getting a new character, or a different voice for the old character is annoyingly weird when you get used to it...
Im absolutely sure I need GlaDOS (Ellen McLain) to voice my LLM digital assistant including her iconic unending font of bitter sarcasm.
It's just common sense. No rational viewer would challenge this necessity.
No, McLain is not dead, but I expect she is busy.
Should McLain get paid for it? Should McLain get a say in how her voice is used? That is the real issue with this stuff. The answers are not clear cut.
Yes and yes imo. A person's voice is part of their likeness, and people should get to decide how their likeness is used and get paid for such usage.
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Imagine now, the Joker 2 movie where Heath Ledger, as Joker, jokes all his jokes about living in the society.
I mean, sure, but that should be negotiated. If they’re using my likeness for free I would not be ok with that. If they’re paying me (or my family) for the use, I would give permission for that.
Right...and they did. Isn't that one of the main poinst of the article...?
Yes. This time, although it was permission from the family, not the actor. Should that be allowed?
He’s dead, I don’t think he protested too much
Depends on whether a voice is considered a copyrightable asset. If it is it would have transfered to the family when he died so they could give permission. If not CDPR legally wouldn't be required to get consent anyway. New regulation is probably going to be written to clarify issues like this.
Depends on whether a voice is considered a copyrightable asset.
It isn't, a voice is not an expression and hardly tangible, you can copyright a voice as much as you can copyright a violin, or a style of play: You can't. But as we're talking about a person and not an object it is use of someone's likeness, which is part of personality rights.
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In general lay audiences have a very weird relationship to AI as a topic, likely in large part to decades of effectively propaganda from SciFi anthropomorphizing it as an effective 'other' to have as a threat for human protagonists.
The reality of how this all is going to play out is that low skill work like walla walla filler for audioscapes will be AI generated instead of library sourced, which is going to sound better and not really make much difference to labor markets.
Middle range performances like NPCs will be AI generated from libraries where the actual voice actors creating that voice will be paid out residuals for the duration of voice generation, and you'll likely have better performances than most side quest NPCs by the next generation of consoles.
High end performance for key characters will still be custom hires directed for the specific role, likely with additional contract terms for extended generation for things like Bethesda's radiant questlines.
The latter is going to be the thing that's going to be the biggest hurdle to figure out terms for, as what would be ideal for the player would be having a near infinite variety of branching questlines in an open world that would be fully voiced, but if each branch was considered its own X hours of generation under contract that wouldn't be feasible and would ultimately price human actors out of the market down the road in favor of fully artificial alternatives. So it will probably be something like X hours of parallel generation (i.e. infinite variety but maybe only an additional 200 hours worth in a playthrough priced at 200 hours of generation).
But as can be seen in the article, it's not as simple as waving a hand and having AI voice lines - this was work done on top of a different actor's performance to bring the voice in line with the original performer.
And given there's still going to be a few years as the tech improves with significant overlap of needing to work with actors to get performances right, this is all going to get managed in acceptable ways.
You don't see people losing their minds over improved facial animation rigs taking away mocap sessions from actors, even though that's a reality of improved tech. But it doesn't have the scary 'AI' in the name (even though the tech is generally going to lean more and more on machine learning), so it flies under the radar.
Ultimately, being able to take a static voice performance into dynamic extended content is going to be one of the best things to ever happen to video games, and given how much of that is going to rely on human performance and union buy in, I wouldn't even be surprised if the eventual leading product offering ends owned and operated by the trade unions or a number of the actors themselves.
the actual voice actors creating that voice will be paid out residuals for the duration of voice generation
In a perfect world, sure. In reality, we've seen that paying residuals is something companies won't do if they can possibly help it. It's one of the very issues being fought over in the strike negotiations right now.
And given there's still going to be a few years as the tech improves with significant overlap of needing to work with actors to get performances right, this is all going to get managed in acceptable ways.
I admire your optimism, but I can't share it. We're so poorly prepared to deal with job losses associated with AI and automation in general, and I don't see any movement on that front. If you're relying on unions to get it done, know that they already have an uphill battle getting things they should've had years ago, let alone future protections against a rapidly changing market.
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