What blows my mind is that when it comes to costs I feel like voice actors are probably less than 5% of the budget on a video game. Unless they hire a famous actor I can’t imagine this being that worthwhile. It’s just penny pinching.
It’s just penny pinching.
Imagine the pace you can just dump out new voice lines for items, maps, general quibble etc that you’d never get the budget to bring a bunch of VAs into studio to do for updates
Honestly it’s probably an agility thing. You remove the entire. Getting another human to do the work thing
If you believe it hasn’t occurred to them that they won’t have to pay wages any more, I have a bridge to sell you.
Oh I agree with you. I just don’t think they are doing this just because of that.
I get they want to keep their talents and jobs. But it’s just not viable for the future and it has nothing to do with cost.
The future is RPG games where the NPC’s can generate their responses in real time and not in text way, but fully voiced. There is no pre-loading responses. The future is curated content responding to the player.
So to achieve that, its either a fully generated voice like a vocaloid or you train an AI on someone’s voice.
If the voice actors aren’t interested in it being their voice, they’ll find someone or go vocaloid.
It’s not about saving money. It’s about pre-recorded voice lines being dead on arrival.
Think audio books, but choose your own adventure audio books, where all the names/places/things can be curated to the listener. Voice Actor isn’t going to be apart of that.
That’s likely true, but we can write a fair contract that allows for that.
- A pay rate for the time spent recording, slightly lower than the normal rate
- A pay rate per minute of generated vocal content using user telemetry. For users that opt out of sharing, pay out based on averages applied against their total playtime.
The problemo see with this construct is that it only benefits current actors. There won’t be space for a new generation of actors.
I don’t know about playtime based payment, but maybe % of sales for paid games and paywall generative content in free2play games (with a significant % of purchases for “voice unlocks” going to VAs)
That could be the future, but not anytime soon. I haven’t seen anything AI gen that has enough continuity to make “on the fly” story telling something I’d be interested in.
but not anytime soon.
I challenge you on that.
We’ll see a Skyrim like game using LLM for NPC’s within 3 years, definitely 5.
It’ll be marketed as Skyrim with all LLM text and end up as Oblivion with prefab text chunks.
Even disregarding the fact that current LLMs can’t stop hallucinating and going off track (which seems to be an inherent property of the approach), they need crazy accounts of memory. If you don’t want the game to use a tiny model with a bad quantization, you can probably expect to spend at least 20 gigs of VRAM and a fair chunk of the GPU’s power on just the LLM.
What we might see is a game that uses a small neural net to match freeform player input to a dialogue tree. But that’s nothing like full LLM-driven dialogue.
I think some will exist in that time frame, but I don’t think they’ll be any good, or well received.
IN the near-future of gaming, but not BEING the near-future of gaming.
missed the train, hype up the next thing is QUANTUM Computers! don’t you want some QUANTUM Chips with QUANTUM TOPS and a QUANTUM leap in QUANTUM performance in your QUANTUM Non deterministic Games???
QUANTUM LOOT BOXES… WITH NFT REWARDS GENERATED BY AI. ON THE BLOCK CHAIN! IN THE CLOUD. POWERD BY BIG DATA. HD RESOLUTION. GIGAHERTZ. MEGABYTES OF RAM.
The one use case I can see being valuable is dynamically reading a custom name. In Skyrim for example, all NPCs refer to you by your title as Dragonborn. But some smart person made a mod that uses AI trained on the NPC voice lines to embed your character’s name into dialog!
As long as voice actors are appropriately compensated/protected, say with royalties for every game that uses their likeness or an ironclad contract making sure the company can’t stiff then out of future work, I feel like that could be a great thing.
So let’s hear it. Hand an AI Leviathan Wakes, the first book of The Expanse, and see how it does. My money is on it being garbage, but let’s hear it.
Jefferson Mays is tough to beat as a human.
Worse, hand an AI a Terry Pratchett book, see how that goes.
I only
readheard him read the last 3 books+ novellas after watching the show, and he REALLY did the accents well*Except Bobbie, not enough southern hemisphere OZ/NZ twang
Audiobook narrators don’t “read”. They act. They vocally act the entire book. The ones who don’t generally get returned, unread, to either your audiobook platform choice or the library.
Voice actors in games also don’t just read. They act. They vocally act their entire role.
Jennifer Hale vs AI, who would win? Would any human other than Kate Mulgrew as Flemeth have made the character as compelling?
Technology will of course change, but I did complete an (unreleased) experiment where I made an animation with AI, using AI to provide voices. This was a few months ago.
All of the models used to generate vocal lines out of nothing are very basic and robotic. But I had a lot of success recording the lines (and songs) myself and then using an AI tool to convert it into someone else’s voice. I blended two or three voices per character and for voices where the character was a different gender or age from me, it sounded like a real actor of that demographic giving the same performance I gave.
So, context matters here. Is the tech ready to replace actors completely? Not at all. But could you have an actor record all the lines in different styles and then use licensed voice models to have it sound like a given voice actor? Absolutely. Actors should think very hard before agreeing to any licensing agreements using their voices. Because it might just result in a lot of the acting removed from their job role. And potentially worse quality dialogue in the end depending on who they hire to record lines in bulk. Not to mention that it’s only a matter of time before the fully AI models advance far enough to do the job completely.
Hence, why I never released my animation. People wouldn’t be able to tell whose voices I used. But I would know. And I don’t want to be on the wrong side of history.
Hand the AI Twilight books. It’ll either delete itself or make them better?
Holy 2008 Batman
Calling it now, EA is going to do it anyway if they haven’t already, and tell them all to go pound sand.
Hopefully it’ll finally usher in their downfall. Can’t imagine the slop they’ll kick out with AI generated voices, models, scripts, and other assets.
I’m gonna be disappointed when it somehow makes them the most profitable game company of all time instead.
Considering EA is known for making sports games clones of each other that only change the year in the title and people still buy it, I wouldn’t be shocked if nothing comes out of this.
Good for them
When Star Wars (1976) came out, it cost 12 million to make and had almost no advertising. The “advertising” was word-of-mouth.
Modern games and movies wouldn’t need to set aside 100 million dollar advertising budgets (on TOP of the cost of their product) if they would simply stop writing shit.
They had word of mouth AND the difficulty of getting a film made and distributed. That meant very few movies existed. It’s easier to stand out in a small crowd.
Now anybody with a phone can film and distribute. Marketing is more important for getting your idea in front of people than anything else these days.
You can’t really compare budgeting and advertising with 50 years ago.
Regardless of inflation, it’s hard to stand out in the flood of new stuff and information being thrown at us from every direction. You didn’t have any of that back then.
I think it is wrong, but this is inevitable.
The next time they hire actors they will just require them to train the AI as well. Voice actors will in a huge part die out. There will be some, but far less. Even A-list celebrities will in the future have to give the companies their likeness and their voice. So that companies can provide dubbing for other languages, make toys etc.
Not the A-list celebrities we have now necessarily, but the coming generations. I can’t see a situation in which everyone have a united front and won’t take the money
Edit: I realized this is a bit defeatist. A solution would be unions, I should have mentioned that
The great thing about ai is you don’t need to get a voice actor to do it
Just some random person that knows it won’t be a career and could use $5
sounds like EA
Voice actors fighting AI exploitation is the resistance we need in this dystopian tech landscape.
🐱🐱🐱🐱🐱
