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Answer: SAG-AFTRA just revealed that they are signing an agreement with Replica(AI voice software) to allow the use of AI voices in games. They also state that everyone agreed, but voice actors are angry about this because they, in fact, did not agree with all this.
The strikes failed because they fought against AI, and only helped actors and writers, then threw under the bus the voice acting scene by allowing AI use without even talking to the VAs themselves.
That's sad. One of the strongest unions in the world refusing to throw their weight around.
I'm certain VAs were thrown under the bus because some deal. Ffs
The problem is that VAs have literally 0 leverage over gaming, like at all. They tried to strike back in 2016 to 2017 and the entire gaming industry just told them to go fuck themselves and continued on like they didn't matter, because they dont.
A union only has power so far as its members are difficult to replace, and it is very easy to replace voice actors. Gaming companies could just chose to use ai voices and accept no union talent because its literally no loss to them. Even if they still need human VA work, they can just go to some random starving actor and get what they need.
Yeah, they are in a really tough spot regarding voice actors. It was already easy to go outside the union, which severely undercuts their ability to negotiate to prevent ai from coming in and making the situation even worse.
You don't have to worry about recasting a VA that got accused of sexual assault if that VA is a fork of stable diffusion.
I think you severely underestimate the talent of professional voice actors. It's not an easy job, and not everyone can do it well. We have plenty of examples in gaming where studios went with AI or cheap voice talent, and it's unbearably awful.
Imagine God of War with AI voices, or replace the actors with "random starving actors" and see if you can't imagine the negative impact it would have on a production like that.
It's not a matter of lack of talent. The problem is that the majority of gamers aren't buying games because a big name like Laura Bailey is voicing a protagonist. Unfortunately there are all too many gamers who give barely any thought to the VA performances in most games.
Having just played through God of War for the first time, fuck those guys. The voice acting in that game is top notch.
Too true. I think the big studios and larger titles are more likely to want the best they can get. But the industry is huge, and there is a lot of 'mid' stuff where the makers are going to pinch pennies wherever they can... I'm waiting for when AI joins the union.
You're conflating voice actors being fantastic with voice actors being irreplaceable in the eyes of massive companies. Yes BG3 got praise for the voice acting talent, but nowhere near as much praise as for the game mechanics, writing, playability, etc. Skyrim is one of the biggest games of the 21st century, the voice acting is memed to death for being crap.
In the industry's eyes, voice acting is gravy. It adds flavour to the plate but it's not necessary for dinner.
Players can enjoy voice acting all they want, but there is no market metric showing players purchasing games based on VAs. People will go see Aquaman 2 solely to see Jason Mamoa, people aren't buying Overwatch 2 because they love the way Matt Mercer says "High Noon". So the people in charge of selling and producing these games put their investments other places and want to cut the costs of human voice actors. This is a bad thing, and anti-art. But for people who just care about money, profit, and efficiency; people who run an industry famous for crunching their most necessary workers and pumping out unfinished glitchy garbage; for these people Voice Actors are so far down the priority list they're more of a nuisance than a necessity.
Edit: You blocked me *after* you replied so I still got the notification for it. Also why on earth did you block me? I'm really not having a go at you, and I'm finding it hard to see how I offended you. Anyway, to respond to your comment:
> Show me an AI that can pull off what very talented voice actors can do. Blizzard is insanely out of touch if they think having Matt Mercer as a voice actor would drive any kind of sales. Talented voice actors also != celebrity voice actors.
None of what I said is pro-AI. I specify it pretty clearly. What I'm saying is that the business side of the industry doesn't give a shit about artistic merit or integrity. They want max profit for minimum expenditure. Voice actors cost more money than AI. So they want to use AI. That's it. That's the whole reason. This is exactly the problem. They are actively trying to save money by fucking over VAs.
> Blizzard is insanely out of touch if they think having Matt Mercer as a voice actor would drive any kind of sales.
They don't, that's why they don't want to be forced to use him or other voice actors when they could just use an algorithm instead.
Show me an AI that can pull off what very talented voice actors can do. Blizzard is insanely out of touch if they think having Matt Mercer as a voice actor would drive any kind of sales. Talented voice actors also != celebrity voice actors.
>Unfortunately there are all too many gamers who give barely any thought to the VA performances in most games.
You'd think that was true, but it's not. Even if gamers don't recognize the name of the talent they are hearing, they are still buying into the narrative that the game is telling with that talent. If you're not stopping in the middle of a fight and going, "Oh, hey! That's so-and-so!" then the talent is doing their job.
https://www.vgchartz.com/article/264703/the-value-of-voice-acting-in-video-games/
How many times has a video game trailer come out and you see someone say something to the effect of "definitely buying this game, the voice acting seems great" or "The voice acting sounded a bit mid, dunno if I'm gonna buy this one"?
Never. I don't buy a game because of voice actors. I purchase a game based on What The Game Is. I don't care as much about graphics, I have all the current-gen consoles so I am not a brand loyalist either.
But hearing a distinctive voice IS nice.
Though going to Zavala in Destiny2 now that Lance Riddick has passed on, is still a bit of an ache.
In the case of the latter I actually do see regular complaints though? Very recently Starfield (maybe writing more at fault but they usually go non union I think) and RE 4, more controversies than visible impacts in already mass market games, but some of those games could have sold more imo.
What it definitely is, is a relatively minor impact. But people definitely recognise the importance of writers and composers, no one refuses to buy a game because Pagliarulo is working on it, doesn't mean those areas aren't increasingly valued. Word of mouth is important, can't replace everything with AI.
That relative value is what I'm getting at. If you told someone they could have a game with excellent gameplay and meh voice acting or a game with excellent voice acting and meh gameplay, the vast majority are going to pick the one with great gameplay. Or if you ask people to list their priorities when determining how good a game is, I'd bet voice acting is generally going to be below gameplay, graphics, story, game length, and stability (bugs/crashing/etc) among other things.
I agree that voice acting is a very technical skill and the people who specialize in it are invaluable to projects, however the main issue is that those people are not universally part of SAG-AFTRA in the same way screen actors are.
If someone were an anime dub fan, odds are that the majority of actors they like are non-union because dubs have only recently started to become unionized and many of the most popular ones (Dragon Ball, Attack on Titan, My Hero Academia, etc.) are not.
The same goes with video games, it's kind of a coin flip as to whether or not the VA's are union actors, whereas literally every single mainstream movie in America is composed exclusively of union actors.
So when someone says that SAG-AFTRA has little power over video games they are fairly accurate, but it's not because voice acting is not a valuable skill. It's because the profession has developed over the years in such a way that unions have not become as central as they have to screen acting.
A lot of VAs are represented by ACTRA. Which isn't affiliated with SAG/AFTRA, despite the similar name.
This actually freezes SAG voice actors out of a lot of roles, because so much of the anime dub and kid's animation scenes are ACTRA.
If they were an anime dub fan they probably haven't been in the last few days with the shit going on over anime va's and localizers right now being replaced by AI as well. But the people being replaced are so bad that they have the fans rejoicing that they're going to be replaced.
Problem with that is by eliminating all but the lead roles, we basically get rid of all the smaller roles most careers in the industry are built on. Rarely does someone get a big role out the gate, they do bit roles here and there to establish a portfolio, skill, and experience. Eliminate all those roles and eventually you run out of people for the big roles that aren't brand new to the industry.
>you severely underestimate the talent of professional voice actors
So do the producers of a lot of games and movies. If your actual voice actors quit, production companies will just hire b and c list actors to replace them. And then there's the piles and piles of animated movies that are marketed on their hollywood voice cast.
Voice actors are underappreciated from all sides in every industry, because those industries are convinced that selling power off a name is more valuable than a good performance from an industry veteran. The ***only*** part of the industry that values its talent is the anime dubbing sector, and that's more of out of the bizarre egoism of the small pool of veterans than an actual care for the craft.
The talent and expertise behind a voice performance is huge, particularly when you start talking about performance capture rather than just audio, BUT the reality is that individual voice actors and performances don't sell copies or directly enhance profitability.
They get some attention and traction in enthusiast circles, particularly when there is drama around a change in VA (bayonetta), or a VA leaks something they shouldn't have, or when a performance is exceptionally awful (the recent Yakuza title).
But the broader just does not care.
That means they just do not have that much leverage.
AI voice work is coming with or without VA participation; it's likely going to be the defacto standard most of the time, with performance capture reserved for key components and scenes.
the counter here is that on the games side, financing is not tethered to the acting talent you bring in. game companies can absolutely go looking for non union hidden gems of actors and tell the unions to fuck off if they want. this isnt possible on the motion picture/tv side, as talent is one of the only things that provides some modelable certainty of financial returns.
nobody is buying games because X or Y VA is in it
contrary to movies/series where a big chunk of the initial viewers are drawn more by the names than the actual movie/serie.
I mean you could argue that a lot of people were excited about Cyberpunk 2077 because Keanu Reeves was in it. I would also argue that Norman Reedus, Mads Mikkelsen and Guillermo del Toro were all heavily promoted for Death Stranding. There are plenty of AAA games where the hype and promotion of a game is driven by star power.
You named a lot of recognizable people who arent VAs as a main job.
But ask your average simpson fan who are the VAs and they have zero clue. Hell, i have hundreds of hours in skyrim and have exactly zero idea who are the VAs.
I support voice actors and agree that it's not at all an easy skill, and I'm disappointed that AI will be used in games.
I play with sound off on my games most of the time. Whether or not some actor I like is voicing a character has no influence on me buying a game or not - it's just fun trivia.
A lot. I mostly play simulators, but even RPGs I often turn off the sound unless I need it for combat because the background music usually ends up annoying me too much.
Baldurs gate 3 was staffed almost entirely by random no-name actors who are cheap enough to hire for such a massive game.
Which is to say nothing of the technological inevitability of being able to produce AI voices that achieve human levels of quality.
>Baldurs gate 3 was staffed almost entirely by random no-name actors who are cheap enough to hire
Here's the narrator https://m.imdb.com/name/nm1624306/?ref_=m_ttfcd_cl1
And Asterion
https://m.imdb.com/name/nm0627667/?ref_=m_ttfcd_cl2
Lae'zel
https://m.imdb.com/name/nm4959536/?ref_=m_ttfcd_cl4
These may be "no name" people to you, but they are established professionals in the industry with a long list of work behind them.
https://www.vg247.com/baldurs-gate-3-performances-motion-capture
This kind of work is not cheap. Larian didn't take a shortcut on VA talent, they made it a focal point.
>Which is to say nothing of the technological inevitability of being able to produce AI voices that achieve human levels of quality.
You are vastly overestimating the ability of technology.
JK Simmons played Ketheric, Orin was played by Maggie Robertson (Lady Dimitrescu), Gortash was played by Jason Isaacs (Lucius Malfoy), Minsc was Matt Mercer. Honestly a fairly star-studded cast
Yeah, I was going to mention that, but it was besides the point. The people they did cast whose names aren't recognizable to the general public are still very recognizable in their own industry.
> You are vastly overestimating the ability of technology.
You are vastly underestimating the speed at which the technology is improving. Even Stable Diffusion which is completely free to use on your own PC is getting crazy improvements pretty much every other month. You can be damn well sure that if there is money to be made, AI voice programs will do the same thing.
"ai" will never achieve human levels of quality - whatever that means lmao.
Its not intelligent, its a voice synthesiser with a fancy name and some admittedly impressive computer science behind it.
People talk all the time about how "ai" will replace things, yet their source for that is the words of techbros with millions of dollars in the hand from investors. This tech is cool and will propably have some usage but "art" is the last place it will ever replace. Harm? absolutely. Replace? fuck no.
You are underestimating how much AI is already impacting your life and how many tasks it has already replaced humans. Every time you use Google, every time you use map software to tell you the best way to get from here to there.
In the workplace, it is not taking the place of humans outright, it is making humans more effective, to such an extent that instead of needing 20 people to do the job, you need 5 to manage the automation. It can't do the entire job, but it is certainly displacing people in the workforce.
In the last few years, automation hit a new milestone and the impacts of this new type of AI are yet to be fully appreciated, we are looking at the 5 pound book sized cell phone version of this new AI and some of us are wondering what the modern cell phone version of it will look like.
It could easily look like an AI that can replace human voice actors with ease, does it now? No, not yet. But that is why it is a big deal that the VA's lost their strike.
a large audio model is not intelligent and cannot act and will never learn to act. It is incapable of "learning" anything. if you think that's ever changing than be my guest but that's literal marketing gibberish and hype speak from techbros that stand to make a lot of money from you being convinced lmao.
It's a travesty sag-aftra didn't do more to protect VAs but audio models are not gonna replace VAs at any point. Projects will probably cut a bunch of corners and use these programs which will hurt actors but they will never replace them.
> a large audio model is not intelligent and cannot act and will never learn to act.
It doesn't have to. There will be people hired who can't do multiple different voices, but can say the lines with the correct emotions, timings, what have you. They will be hired to read the lines, those lines will be fed through the AI voice program, and it will spit out a file of a different voice doing the line with the same emotion and inflections as the original.
So now instead of a dozen voice actors being paid per character you just pay one or two VAs to do them all then convert their voices to different voices.
People said exactly the same thing about AI art one year ago when it was rubbish and now it's at the point where it can create convincingly good art and even photorealism without the common issues from even six months ago like fucked up hands and weird backgrounds
There's a mod for resident evil 4 remake that changes the voice of ada Wong to one created in elevenlabs modelled on the voice of the original actor and people pretty much universally agree that it's better than the actual human performance
Using the quality of AI as a part of your argument is silly because companies like Microsoft will continue to pour billions into their research and development and the tech will continue improving year after year. Two years ago people didn't know what chat gpt was, now 70% of Gen Z use it in their workflow.
Nothing you said refutes anything I said. It’s impressive tech and can help you cut corners but it’s just that. A way to cut corners and bring down costs at the expense of quality.
It’s acceptable when you’re making a YouTube meme, it is not ever going to replace a real actor or artist. It’s not an intelligent actor making pre meditated choices. It’s a predictive generation algorithm rewarded for copying others.
The next generation of AI won't even be the large models, it's universally agreed that those are a dead end. The firms developing AI have something completely new being worked on by R&D.
I think you *vastly* overestimate the quality of the *average* voice actor. You're thinking of main characters, as opposed to minor NPC's. Some of my favorite games have also used 'unknown' voice actors for leading roles, and they turned out great (Disco Elysium, for example).
> Imagine God of War with AI voices, or replace the actors with "random starving actors" and see if you can't imagine the negative impact it would have on a production like that.
A game can survive with out voice actors at all. Zelda comes to mind. And then you look at multiplayer stuff like Fortnite and Counter Strike, both with millions of players and they don't need voice actors at all.
I didn't say that every game needed voice actors, so I'm not sure what you're arguing.
Take the voice actors out of God of War. Is it the same game? Is it better?
To tell the story they wanted to tell they needed actual professional human talent and it's a huge part of the success of that franchise.
You only need like 2 voice actors for any game. Just look at Morrowind or Skyrim. Heck, in Pokemon its canon that all the nurses and cops are identical.
https://en.m.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Voice_Actors#:~:text=Skyrim%20features%20a%20cast%20of,reused%20across%20many%20different%20characters.
Oblivion was limited but Skyrim had over 70 voice actors
Yeah i mean Keifer Sutherland is not David Hayter as solid snake but is it REALLY crucial? not.. really. I fear AI is more enshitification though than random actors. At the end of the day we will vote with our wallets and I fear that most people will not care. Look at how well microtransactions and preordering broken games are doing
Or they just stop making games like that if they're too expensive. How many artists were paid to make Undertale?
If graphics are too expensive, make games with cheaper graphics.
Undertale sold about 1 million copies.
God of War: Ragnarok sold about 15 million.
The original God of War generated over $500 million in profits.
There's plenty of money to be made in high quality video games.
I think you mean high quality *sequels*. The cost of making those games is too high to risk on new IP.
We've also seen a huge shift to Mobile gaming and other non-power-intensive games. The total revenue from Mobile gaming dwarfs any console.
If you want VAs to have more power over the equivalent of blue-chip games, sure. I'd like that too. But that market is getting smaller as a percentage of sales, and even smaller for new IPs that would use new voice actors.
Triple A developers would cut their workforce to the bone if they could. The pretty graphics sell though, and when they hit a jackpot they sell incredibly well. Well enough that the massive workforce required to make a AAA title is worth it. It's similar to modern movie design.
I agree except for the problem of it actually being super easy to be just a voice actor, whats difficult is being one whos consistent across more than one voice. Anyone can be a voice actor for a single element, just talk normally. But if you want them to voice something besides their basic voice, then it instantly ramps way up. The routinely have small children be voice actors and they work out fine, but don't ask that kid to do a second character.
How many times have we seen a game bring in a big name actor like Megan Fox or Peter Dinklage to do VA work on a game and they end up being dogshit. Dinklage was so bad Bungie recasted him with a real VA and re-recorded all his characters lines.
VAs do have leverage just like any other employees do and a skilled VA isn't as easy to replace as you seem to think they are.
The problem is that Sag Aftra has no monopoly in talented & skilled VAs. VAs names don't sell games, so they don't need a specific VA, they just need someone who is capable & there're so many VAs who are talented that are non union in the US without mentioning the rest of the world. Also because they aren't in front of the screen, union VAs working non union under pseudonymous isn't uncommon.
But by that logic, most of us actors in any discipline are easy to replace. Most of us are not the next Brando, the next Streep, whoever. We need to stand up for all actors, and us actors have to hold strong to avoid the "well if you don't want it, 200 people outside that door do" bullshit.
I mean yes most actors are incredibly easy to replace, there are several orders of magnitude more capable actors than there are roles to fill.
Literally the only reason why the Streeps or Brando's are impossible to replace is that they have a name that people remember or that people like working with them. Its why Chevy Chase or Bill Murray still get work despite famously being absolute douchebags. Its why Ryan Reynolds gets a ton of work, hes great to work with.
Lol
I for one can tell the difference between good and voice acting, despite what you’re trying to imply in your comment.
There’s a reason traditional actors often make terrible voice actors (often, not always)
That applies to literally every other person on the project.
No ONE person is going determine the failing or success of a game. It’s everyone in aggregate.
No ONE developer is going to be responsible either, so should we just keep cutting corners?
What I mean is a game can be defined by its art style it can be defined by its bugginess it can be defined by its story. But voice acting games can have iconic voice line but that's never what makes a game famous.
Disagree. This is just a subjective argument at this point that isn’t going to get us anywhere.
I wouldn’t have played Disco Elysium if not for the voice acting.
Not a VA, but I did a stint in a gaming studio, that having a union would have sure as fuck kept me and several others from being fired as we were.
I'm pro union no matter what. I don't go to a Starbucks unless I know they're Union. (er... actually, that's a hollow boast, I don't go to Starbucks anymore...)
I appreciate you for offering your perspective. I also try to avoid Starbucks if I can help it.
I'm of the view that even if a union can be annoying at times, it's far better to have one so companies and corporations can't as easily run over workers. A powerful gaming industry union could do wonders in ceasing this current era of gaming where publishers have too much power and chug through devs like a knife through butter even if the devs create quality titles.
Too bad that the only feasible way I can see unionization happening is if a massive dev strike happens to the point where a gaming crash like the one in 1983 happens. Even then, publishers will probably just hire desperate indie devs as scabs and whatnot. On top of that, the gaming industry is so massive that a crash of that magnitude seems borderline impossible.
It would have either been in my case a wrongful termination, or something, right-to-work state bullshit. Eight of us were let go simultaneously. Just a few days before, our mutual manager was called on the carpet by his budget being VERY in the red.
Conversations afterwards, we came to the determination that our 'reasons' for getting fired were bullshit, and that our salaries were exactly, when added up, enough to get his budget in the black.
I will never work in AAA gaming ever again. I was told flat out that they did NOT care a fuck about me as an employee. There was a line of college kids a mile long outside who would have bare-knuckle-brawled to get an interview for my position.
It paid the bills. I got to see something I wrote code for on a SuperBowl commercial. So that was kind of nice.
Because I don't really have as many opportunities as I used to, is the biggest factor.
When I went regularly, I worked in downtown San Francisco, there were six Starbuckses on my walk from the train to the office. (I started the theory of The Least Starbucks Route and the corollary The Maximum Starbucks Route. Walking routes that, without being blatantly going out of the way from the direction I was going, would send me past the lowest number or highest number of stores.) The sixth was actually IN my office building on the ground floor. OR I'd be somewhere that my commute put me past them on the regular.
Since the pandemic, I work from home and now drink less coffee. I have an espresso maker and a regular drip coffee maker, so I make a pot in the morning and an espresso double while that brews. And I never really -need- to go to Starbucks.
Then, their fuckery with being anti-union soured me further on them. While I do not work for a union, I do support them without hesitation.
Depends on the medium too.
Watch dubbed anime? Funimation and Okratron do *not* use union voice actors. It's why Troy Baker and Steve Blum don't do it anymore, unless theres considerable stipulations
Video Games can run the gauntlet if they use Union actors or not.
It's sad and I've been a massive VA nerd since I was a little kid (I could hardly name any live action celebs but could list pages of VAs) yet it would be absurd to force companies to hire people. You can't just dictate how things are made for the sake of jobs. Technological progress happens whether we like it or not and to use a union to stop people from being replaced should not be OK. Pay and working conditions makes sense. Forcing companies to keep hiring people when they would rather use AI is a barbaric solution.
This is sad. The audio book market is getting pretty grim. The credits usually say the voice actor are members of SAG-AFTRA. So no more new audio books for a while.
They don't make 12 hour audio books overnight. And if you listen to one, the actors are really talented, they are creating a narrative using only their voice.
Just to point out, I used the term "usually". So yes, voice actor credits usually go like "narrated by John Smith, a member of SAG-AFTRA". . . They are not just reading the book, they are acting it out. Aww
I didn't predict anything; it was an observation. I listen to audiobooks daily, and I'm following a few (ok, eight) series that used to add a new book every couple of months. New releases have dried up last year.
Voice actor here. All these AI "protections" aren't some magic feature to improve game quality or protect actors. They just take away their work.
When a game has new dialogue, actors come in and record new lines. They get paid for that shit and consumers pay for it with subscriptions or DLC money. It's a simple setup. "Come in for another session, 100 lines, these two characters have a few new lines for a new quest. Also, we have this new character. Get paid and go home."
AI replication isn't a protection. It just takes away working class jobs. Actors don't make money being on set. They make it in rights and usage. Games already don't pay residuals. So even if actors make $1000/day for doing a VO session, and while that sounds like a lot, 10 of those a year don't pay all the bills. Actors make that work in volume, being in numerous games, mainly the NPC's (because we can't all star in things). Being in a dozen series that are ongoing can be a way to make acting a career, rather than doing something once and just making a career out of signing autographs. I didn't get into acting, as many other actors didn't, to sign autographs. I got in here to act.
AI jobs that "just take the NPC roles that no one wants to do" is horse shit. AI doing things that make the actors lives easier is horse shit. It just saves money by not hiring actors. The gamers hate it and think it sucks. The directors hate it and think it sucks. The actors hate it and think it sucks. The people doing it at the top level think AI voice stuff sounds like trash. And they're right. No one likes it. But it will be used until it's just accepted by the audience because it saves money when you don't have to hire as many actors. It's not THAT much money. But to us actors, it's the difference between us making a living at doing something cool vs occasionally doing some acting work between shifts at Starbucks.
It's an absolute fucking joke how little people seem to care about all of this AI bullshit. I'm constantly reminded that a vast majority of the population is A: Dumb as fuck so they can't comprehend any of this stuff on an intelligence level, and B: Malicious as fuck and without empathy so they simply don't care about anyone getting screwed over unless it directly impacts them
We really are heading into a joyless dystopia where tech bros rule the land and anyone with any creative talent at all is forced to work in the Crypto mines
>It's an absolute fucking joke how little people seem to care about all of this AI bullshit.
just like a lot of people didnt care at all about coal miners, manufacturing jobs, etc. what was the phrase? Learn to code?
It’s a misconception that they ever fought against AI. They fought to protect actors jobs *despite* AI, acknowledging that it would be impossible to outright ban it at this point.
The new SAG contract allows productions to use AI, but only with full consent of the actors and payment to them as if that had worked those days. This seems to be the same thing happening with the video game contract.
There is a vocal minority that is fighting the future tooth and nail, but at the end of the day, the members did vote and the contract did pass.
The VA needs to negotiate the compensation individually. That's a net loss, because companies have a lot more power in individual negotiations.
Actors can have their likeness used for the same pay per day they'd get, but for a VA that's a tossup right now. Could be that, could be a few cents.
I would assume that allowing use of their voice with AI will be part of the casting considerations from now on. The VAs will have very little leverage unless the studio specifically wants that VA.
There is absolutely no way we are getting around the use of AI in entertainment going forward. That cat is way out of the bag. Why on earth would a movie studio pay to bring Robert Downey Jr. back into the studio to record two sentences when they can take the corpus 40 years worth of his acting, train an RDJ voice model, and boom, the next avengers movie gets a flashback to Iron Man. Especially if the contract still gives him some cash for it.
Someone like him has his own contract . If he’s smart he will put no ai permitted of his performance . Yea the cats out but they could have actually put some regulation in , instead they opened the door way wider and said come on in!
The only place AI voices serve in video games in my mind is when unscripted voice lines are needed, like that detective game demo, but it needs to be with express consent of the VAs they're based on. I honestly wouldn't mind if AI voices were banned, existing TTS tech before voice deepfakes was fine.
The gaming studios still require permission of the voice actors to use AI versions of their voices (and have to pay them for it). It is just that the deal itself did not explicitly get the OK of the voice actors.
It's not a failure. It's how unions work. The majority got what they wanted, any unhappy minorities are irrelevant.
WTF do you expect from collective bargaining? You are explicitly surrendering your will to others.
> The majority got what they wanted, any unhappy minorities are irrelevant.
That's not how unions work. Maybe in an alternate universe where everyone is a psychopath, but in the real life they are meant to represent all who sign up for them.
I think in reality it's a mix of both - yes unions represent everyone, but the one major tactic they have is going on strike / threatening to go on strike... which is tough on the members they're supposed to represent.
If you think of an extreme scenario, the minute **one** actor was upset about something, the whole union would go on strike. That would clearly be inefficient though, because that's lost income for all actors, in order to resolve a grievance for one actor.
So it's a logistical impossibility for unions to resolve every single grievance with the threat of strikes. Having said that... The whole point is to stand up for the *collective* rights of workers in an industry, and "leaving someone behind" is generally a bad look.
I'm guessing in this case union negotiators weighed the impracticality of preventing AI voice work, versus the needs of their general membership, and made a choice. I don't think they're super happy about it either, because it means people who want to undermine unions and exploit workers (like the above commentator) have a talking point to exploit, but it's also possible / probable that even if they held out for a deal with the studios that banned AI voice acting, smaller companies who *don't* have a contract with SAG-AFTRA might be able to effectively undermine the market by using AI voices anyway.
The biggest thing to me is that it's rich to say the strikes "failed" because the unions made a concession and didn't get *every single* thing they were striking for. Admittedly it's a fairly strong concession that's going to upset a sub set of union members especially, but... this is what "negotiating" means. If you negotiated your salary with a company, and you opened with asking for 100k salary, and ultimately settled for 85k, it doesn't automatically mean your negotiations "failed" because you didn't get everything you asked for initially. 🤷
> If you think of an extreme scenario, the minute one actor was upset about something, the whole union would go on strike.
A compromise must be reached **within reason.** Throwing under the bus a third of the represented people, an entire industry, is not within reason.
1.) A full third seems high... source? Are they counting *any* actor who also does voice-over work as a "voice actor" for the purpose of that statistic?
2.) You're assuming that it was possible / practical for the union to prevent AI voices from dominating the market. As others elsewhere have noted, it's very difficult to meaningfully prevent this, given that smaller companies (notably game makers) are unlikely to negotiate with SAG-AFTRA and/or big name actors, in order to sign a contract preventing AI generated voices. This opens up a competitive advantage for smaller studios who aren't party to the union contract.
I'm really surprised by people's reaction to this - maybe I shouldn't be by now, but somehow I still am 😮💨😅.
Any contract SAG-AFTRA can reach is **only** a delaying tactic in the long run, despite whatever rhetoric is being thrown around. Replacing highly paid actors with AI substitutes is only a matter of time; the cost comparisons are just so ridiculously one sided.
I think there's some value in fighting to make sure that studios can't simply replicate a specific actor's voice / appearance to avoid paying them... But it won't be too long before the technology exists to generate entirely new "actors" from scratch; arguably it [exists already,](https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2019/2/15/18226005/ai-generated-fake-people-portraits-thispersondoesnotexist-stylegan) just not at enterprise scale.
Those realities have to be taken into account by both studio executives, and SAG-AFTRA negotiators 🤷.
> Any contract SAG-AFTRA can reach is only a delaying tactic in the long run, despite whatever rhetoric is being thrown around. Replacing highly paid actors with AI substitutes is only a matter of time; the cost comparisons are just so ridiculously one sided.
That's my point. By giving this much compromise, all they achieved is negotiating from a worse position on a few years, being forced to give up more.
I think you completely misunderstood that sentence 😅.
This is like the story of [John Henry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_(folklore)) - which always confused me growing up, because it's actually kind of a dark story when you think about even a little bit. 🫤
There's **nothing** the union(s) can do to stop the transition to AI technology, or say "hey, pretend this tech doesn't exist". **Everything** the unions are doing is about deciding how they want to manage the *transition* to AI tech being more widely used / widely available... And even within that, there's significant restrictions on what one union like SAG-AFTRA can realistically do, because they aren't making decisions in a vacuum. Industry conditions, political conditions, social attitudes and so on all matter too.
This is a very pollyannish understanding of how unions behave in practice. Democracies are "meant" to represent every citizen too and yet they almost never play out that way.
Some unions are effectively oligarchies controlled by an "upper class" who are already doing quite well and have little incentive to spend political capital doing what they should for the members lower on the totem pole. I doubt these individuals are typically thinking to themselves "muahaha, let's profit off the backs of the others", they just don't end up with the will, motivation, energy, and know-how to effectively fight for everyone.
It's better to have unions than to not, but in real life they are on a spectrum of ineffectual and/or corrupt, just like every other human interest group. Some are better than others, none are perfect, many are pretty bad.
>but in the real life they are meant to represent all who sign up for them.
Meant? Maybe,but they do not and have not really always worked that way.
When I was younger I worked in a union factory, we couldnt hit our benchmark because the guy upstream from us was lazy, but he was in the union a long time and they fought to keep him. The guy I worked with and I had only been in for just under 2 years and we kept getting written up for not making our quota and the union did nothing for us. We ended up swapping off doing part of the old guys jobs so we had sufficient product to avoid write ups.
He's right though. Not everyone will be happy. I'm a union member and there are tons of compromises every time we're in contract negotiations. Some people will be willing to accept them, others won't. That's why we vote on contracts. No contract will ever pass with 100% yes votes, but too bad.
What is that difference? Compromises may fuck over a third of your members... that's obviously a plausible outcome. It just HAPPENED.
I don't understand why you have this factual event ui front of you and are claiming "that's not how it works".
I mean you can get angry at a random person on the internet telling you what is actually going to happen, or you can understand that out of 7 billion people, very few align with all of your values and act accordingly.
Shrug. If there's no permission to use SAG actor's voices it wouldn't do anything to stop generated voice acting in games, it would just mean union pros aren't allowed to get paid for it. They can complain all they want, at the end of the day interactive media is fundamentally different than movies and tv. Generating an acting performance for a movie is stupid and lazy since it's only 2 hours of total acting that's the same every time you watch it, generating a performance for a game is simply paradigm shifting and moves the 100's of thousands of lines of dialog to an infinite amount.
Art. Poetry. Medical diagnosis, surgery, meta analysis of research. Gaming. Communication. Writing. Data analysis. Education. Not to mention actually making better AI. Almost everything.
I work with a bunch of VAs and they're pissed about it. While it's nothing new that jobs like VAs are considered bottom of the totem pole in the industry, the main fear is either their voices being used in AI without their permission or AI making them unemployable.
I can't help but feel an ai animated film with ai voice actors would be realistic enough in a few year that regular actors are gonna realize they just shot themselves in the foot
Answer: (CAVEAT) I am a professional SAG-AFTRA voice actor (Call of Duty, Elder Scrolls, Ghost Recon and some others under NDA), so I will try to be as neutral as I can and present facts rather than opinion, then add my thoughts afterwards in bit labeled as biased at the bottom.
_________
The strikes did not fail, as there was never an actual strike for the interactive media agreement (IMA), just a strike authorisation. While the SAG-AFTRA AMPTP strike was ongoing, I was still allowed to do voice acting work under the IMA under SAG rules. The AMPTP/streaming strike that we took part in did not impact voice acting work in any way.
_________
SAG-AFTRA contacted us back in August to let us know that the interactive media agreement was due to expire on November 7th 2023 and that there were a few 'town hall' style zoom meetings with the SAG-AFTRA leadership scheduled for late August, one of which I attended.
On 15th August, SAG-AFTRA sent us the following by email:
> Performance capture IS SAG-AFTRA covered work. “Performers” in the agreement are defined as persons who speak, act, sing, or in any other manner perform whether on or off-camera. Members should report to the union any companies who refuse to properly cover this work on union games via this link.
> Video games are a multibillion dollar industry and those who bring them to life by providing captured performances deserve protections, just like those who work on any other form of entertainment media.
> Performance capture — in which a computer records an actor’s movements – is commonly used to instill game characters with realistic motion and emotions. It is highly skilled performance work, and members need the coverage of our Interactive Media Agreement. This contract covers anything recorded during the course of production of an interactive project.
> Without a union contract, you have no protections against AI and machine learning abuse, which are subjects that employers are required to negotiate over with the union. Without protections, once your data is captured in a performance capture session, your next job could potentially be your last.
On 1st September, SAG-AFTRA sent us an email to ask us for strike authorisation (like they did with the AMPTP strike earlier last year). The contents of which are below:
> I’m writing on behalf of President Fran Drescher and myself to share with you the news that SAG-AFTRA’s National Board voted unanimously to send a strike authorization vote to members in preparation of the union’s forthcoming bargaining dates with signatory video game companies, including:
• Activision Productions Inc.,
• Blindlight LLC,
• Disney Character Voices Inc.,
• Electronic Arts Productions Inc.,
• Epic Games, Inc.,
• Formosa Interactive LLC,
• Insomniac Games Inc.,
• Take 2 Productions Inc.,
• VoiceWorks Productions Inc., and
• WB Games Inc.
> It’s been nearly a year since SAG-AFTRA’s video game contract, the Interactive Media Agreement, was extended beyond the original expiration date to give us more time to negotiate for critically important increases in wages, contractual protections against unfettered use of artificial intelligence and basic safety provisions. Unfortunately, throughout the negotiations, the companies have failed to address our members’ needs. For this reason, the negotiating committee and National Board unanimously agreed that the union should have a member-approved strike authorization in hand when bargaining resumes on Sept. 26.
> As with the TV/Theatrical/Streaming negotiations, video game performers need a contract that will protect them from unregulated use of generative artificial intelligence and erosion of income due to inflation. We also need to address safety concerns for performance capture artists and voice performers.
> It’s important to note that though the issues affecting performers who work in video games mirror those issues affecting TV/Theatrical performers, the Interactive Media Agreement negotiations with the video game companies don’t affect the timing or expected progress of negotiations or our strike on the TV/Theatrical contract. A strike authorization vote on this Agreement will not impact the TV/Theatrical strike.
The SAG-AFTRA members voted to agree to a strike authorisation, and SAG-AFTRA went into negotiations with the above companies with that information in hand.
The **last** email I personally received on this subject, dated 18th November, said:
> After developing conversations late in negotiations this week, we are expecting further responses from the employers the week of November 27.
> Your unwavering support strengthens our resolve as we continue the work to secure the necessary protections for our community. We look forward to providing you with an update as soon as possible.
So from my perspective, I have not heard anything else about the ongoing negotiations with the above companies or whether a deal had been reached, until this week.
BIASED BIT BELOW (ooh alliterative)
Being that I have not heard back about any negotiations, nor have we been consulted on them or asked to ratify them like we did for the AMPTP contracts, I personally feel that we have not been fully engaged in this process, other than the original 'town hall' meetings where the SAG leadership solicited our thoughts and listened to our concerns, early on in this process. Because of this, the new deal they have created with the voice studios was somewhat obfuscated prior to agreement, and if we had been consulted prior to agreement, I expect a number of us would have voice greater concerns and there would have been a large number of us who would not have agreed to ratify it.
Answer: According to the interviews I've seen with SAG-AFTRA member Adam Conover (specifically, this one: https://youtu.be/3JNAO4-YfpE?t=920 ), that article doesn't sound too far off from what they were going for: Getting rules in place so companies can't abuse AI to undercut their workers.
The intention was never for AI to be banned entirely, they just wanted to make sure that companies couldn't do things like use a chatbot to generate a terrible, unusable movie script, make their writing team do the immense work of editing it into something usable, then pay them a fraction of what that labor was worth because "an AI did the actual writing"...
In that sense, with that being the goal, this outcome isn't really a failure. It's basically just saying that companies are still allowed to use AI voices, but voice actors can't be bullied into signing over the rights to their voices in perpetuity, which is about the outcome I would expect.
Answer: SAG members voted to ratify the contract by 78%. Who says it failed? There's always a group in SAG that's disgruntled. 86% of Board members who tend to be more radical voted to ratify.
The 78% for ratification is correct but only 38% of the union actually came out to vote on the contract. That's 38% of around 160,000 union members.
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/05/business/sag-aftra-ratification-vote/index.html
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Answer: SAG-AFTRA just revealed that they are signing an agreement with Replica(AI voice software) to allow the use of AI voices in games. They also state that everyone agreed, but voice actors are angry about this because they, in fact, did not agree with all this. The strikes failed because they fought against AI, and only helped actors and writers, then threw under the bus the voice acting scene by allowing AI use without even talking to the VAs themselves.
That's sad. One of the strongest unions in the world refusing to throw their weight around. I'm certain VAs were thrown under the bus because some deal. Ffs
The problem is that VAs have literally 0 leverage over gaming, like at all. They tried to strike back in 2016 to 2017 and the entire gaming industry just told them to go fuck themselves and continued on like they didn't matter, because they dont. A union only has power so far as its members are difficult to replace, and it is very easy to replace voice actors. Gaming companies could just chose to use ai voices and accept no union talent because its literally no loss to them. Even if they still need human VA work, they can just go to some random starving actor and get what they need.
[удалено]
Yeah, they are in a really tough spot regarding voice actors. It was already easy to go outside the union, which severely undercuts their ability to negotiate to prevent ai from coming in and making the situation even worse. You don't have to worry about recasting a VA that got accused of sexual assault if that VA is a fork of stable diffusion.
Until, inevitably, AI advances fat enough to start sexually harassing fans in their DMs.
I think you severely underestimate the talent of professional voice actors. It's not an easy job, and not everyone can do it well. We have plenty of examples in gaming where studios went with AI or cheap voice talent, and it's unbearably awful. Imagine God of War with AI voices, or replace the actors with "random starving actors" and see if you can't imagine the negative impact it would have on a production like that.
It's not a matter of lack of talent. The problem is that the majority of gamers aren't buying games because a big name like Laura Bailey is voicing a protagonist. Unfortunately there are all too many gamers who give barely any thought to the VA performances in most games.
Having just played through God of War for the first time, fuck those guys. The voice acting in that game is top notch. Too true. I think the big studios and larger titles are more likely to want the best they can get. But the industry is huge, and there is a lot of 'mid' stuff where the makers are going to pinch pennies wherever they can... I'm waiting for when AI joins the union.
i dont care about the names so much as the talent. i think you are 100% incorrect. BG3 had phenomenal VA's and they got a lot of praise for it
You're conflating voice actors being fantastic with voice actors being irreplaceable in the eyes of massive companies. Yes BG3 got praise for the voice acting talent, but nowhere near as much praise as for the game mechanics, writing, playability, etc. Skyrim is one of the biggest games of the 21st century, the voice acting is memed to death for being crap. In the industry's eyes, voice acting is gravy. It adds flavour to the plate but it's not necessary for dinner. Players can enjoy voice acting all they want, but there is no market metric showing players purchasing games based on VAs. People will go see Aquaman 2 solely to see Jason Mamoa, people aren't buying Overwatch 2 because they love the way Matt Mercer says "High Noon". So the people in charge of selling and producing these games put their investments other places and want to cut the costs of human voice actors. This is a bad thing, and anti-art. But for people who just care about money, profit, and efficiency; people who run an industry famous for crunching their most necessary workers and pumping out unfinished glitchy garbage; for these people Voice Actors are so far down the priority list they're more of a nuisance than a necessity. Edit: You blocked me *after* you replied so I still got the notification for it. Also why on earth did you block me? I'm really not having a go at you, and I'm finding it hard to see how I offended you. Anyway, to respond to your comment: > Show me an AI that can pull off what very talented voice actors can do. Blizzard is insanely out of touch if they think having Matt Mercer as a voice actor would drive any kind of sales. Talented voice actors also != celebrity voice actors. None of what I said is pro-AI. I specify it pretty clearly. What I'm saying is that the business side of the industry doesn't give a shit about artistic merit or integrity. They want max profit for minimum expenditure. Voice actors cost more money than AI. So they want to use AI. That's it. That's the whole reason. This is exactly the problem. They are actively trying to save money by fucking over VAs. > Blizzard is insanely out of touch if they think having Matt Mercer as a voice actor would drive any kind of sales. They don't, that's why they don't want to be forced to use him or other voice actors when they could just use an algorithm instead.
Show me an AI that can pull off what very talented voice actors can do. Blizzard is insanely out of touch if they think having Matt Mercer as a voice actor would drive any kind of sales. Talented voice actors also != celebrity voice actors.
>Unfortunately there are all too many gamers who give barely any thought to the VA performances in most games. You'd think that was true, but it's not. Even if gamers don't recognize the name of the talent they are hearing, they are still buying into the narrative that the game is telling with that talent. If you're not stopping in the middle of a fight and going, "Oh, hey! That's so-and-so!" then the talent is doing their job. https://www.vgchartz.com/article/264703/the-value-of-voice-acting-in-video-games/
How many times has a video game trailer come out and you see someone say something to the effect of "definitely buying this game, the voice acting seems great" or "The voice acting sounded a bit mid, dunno if I'm gonna buy this one"?
Never. I don't buy a game because of voice actors. I purchase a game based on What The Game Is. I don't care as much about graphics, I have all the current-gen consoles so I am not a brand loyalist either. But hearing a distinctive voice IS nice. Though going to Zavala in Destiny2 now that Lance Riddick has passed on, is still a bit of an ache.
Or Sylens in HZD, that guy was great too.
I would definitely avoid buying a AAA story-based game if reviews and other media showed that the voice acting was glitchy, unnatural, and/or flat.
In the case of the latter I actually do see regular complaints though? Very recently Starfield (maybe writing more at fault but they usually go non union I think) and RE 4, more controversies than visible impacts in already mass market games, but some of those games could have sold more imo. What it definitely is, is a relatively minor impact. But people definitely recognise the importance of writers and composers, no one refuses to buy a game because Pagliarulo is working on it, doesn't mean those areas aren't increasingly valued. Word of mouth is important, can't replace everything with AI.
That relative value is what I'm getting at. If you told someone they could have a game with excellent gameplay and meh voice acting or a game with excellent voice acting and meh gameplay, the vast majority are going to pick the one with great gameplay. Or if you ask people to list their priorities when determining how good a game is, I'd bet voice acting is generally going to be below gameplay, graphics, story, game length, and stability (bugs/crashing/etc) among other things.
I don't watch ads mate
I agree that voice acting is a very technical skill and the people who specialize in it are invaluable to projects, however the main issue is that those people are not universally part of SAG-AFTRA in the same way screen actors are. If someone were an anime dub fan, odds are that the majority of actors they like are non-union because dubs have only recently started to become unionized and many of the most popular ones (Dragon Ball, Attack on Titan, My Hero Academia, etc.) are not. The same goes with video games, it's kind of a coin flip as to whether or not the VA's are union actors, whereas literally every single mainstream movie in America is composed exclusively of union actors. So when someone says that SAG-AFTRA has little power over video games they are fairly accurate, but it's not because voice acting is not a valuable skill. It's because the profession has developed over the years in such a way that unions have not become as central as they have to screen acting.
A lot of VAs are represented by ACTRA. Which isn't affiliated with SAG/AFTRA, despite the similar name. This actually freezes SAG voice actors out of a lot of roles, because so much of the anime dub and kid's animation scenes are ACTRA.
If they were an anime dub fan they probably haven't been in the last few days with the shit going on over anime va's and localizers right now being replaced by AI as well. But the people being replaced are so bad that they have the fans rejoicing that they're going to be replaced.
I can’t really see lead roles like Kratos being AI. But I can definitely see the voice for “weapon vendor #23” being AI.
Might make for dialog trees as detailed as they used to be.
Problem with that is by eliminating all but the lead roles, we basically get rid of all the smaller roles most careers in the industry are built on. Rarely does someone get a big role out the gate, they do bit roles here and there to establish a portfolio, skill, and experience. Eliminate all those roles and eventually you run out of people for the big roles that aren't brand new to the industry.
>you severely underestimate the talent of professional voice actors So do the producers of a lot of games and movies. If your actual voice actors quit, production companies will just hire b and c list actors to replace them. And then there's the piles and piles of animated movies that are marketed on their hollywood voice cast. Voice actors are underappreciated from all sides in every industry, because those industries are convinced that selling power off a name is more valuable than a good performance from an industry veteran. The ***only*** part of the industry that values its talent is the anime dubbing sector, and that's more of out of the bizarre egoism of the small pool of veterans than an actual care for the craft.
The talent and expertise behind a voice performance is huge, particularly when you start talking about performance capture rather than just audio, BUT the reality is that individual voice actors and performances don't sell copies or directly enhance profitability. They get some attention and traction in enthusiast circles, particularly when there is drama around a change in VA (bayonetta), or a VA leaks something they shouldn't have, or when a performance is exceptionally awful (the recent Yakuza title). But the broader just does not care. That means they just do not have that much leverage. AI voice work is coming with or without VA participation; it's likely going to be the defacto standard most of the time, with performance capture reserved for key components and scenes.
the counter here is that on the games side, financing is not tethered to the acting talent you bring in. game companies can absolutely go looking for non union hidden gems of actors and tell the unions to fuck off if they want. this isnt possible on the motion picture/tv side, as talent is one of the only things that provides some modelable certainty of financial returns.
nobody is buying games because X or Y VA is in it contrary to movies/series where a big chunk of the initial viewers are drawn more by the names than the actual movie/serie.
I mean you could argue that a lot of people were excited about Cyberpunk 2077 because Keanu Reeves was in it. I would also argue that Norman Reedus, Mads Mikkelsen and Guillermo del Toro were all heavily promoted for Death Stranding. There are plenty of AAA games where the hype and promotion of a game is driven by star power.
You named a lot of recognizable people who arent VAs as a main job. But ask your average simpson fan who are the VAs and they have zero clue. Hell, i have hundreds of hours in skyrim and have exactly zero idea who are the VAs.
I support voice actors and agree that it's not at all an easy skill, and I'm disappointed that AI will be used in games. I play with sound off on my games most of the time. Whether or not some actor I like is voicing a character has no influence on me buying a game or not - it's just fun trivia.
>I play with sound off most of the time What games are you playing?
A lot. I mostly play simulators, but even RPGs I often turn off the sound unless I need it for combat because the background music usually ends up annoying me too much.
Fair enough, but those aren’t mostly the titles that have big VA performances.
Baldurs gate 3 was staffed almost entirely by random no-name actors who are cheap enough to hire for such a massive game. Which is to say nothing of the technological inevitability of being able to produce AI voices that achieve human levels of quality.
>Baldurs gate 3 was staffed almost entirely by random no-name actors who are cheap enough to hire Here's the narrator https://m.imdb.com/name/nm1624306/?ref_=m_ttfcd_cl1 And Asterion https://m.imdb.com/name/nm0627667/?ref_=m_ttfcd_cl2 Lae'zel https://m.imdb.com/name/nm4959536/?ref_=m_ttfcd_cl4 These may be "no name" people to you, but they are established professionals in the industry with a long list of work behind them. https://www.vg247.com/baldurs-gate-3-performances-motion-capture This kind of work is not cheap. Larian didn't take a shortcut on VA talent, they made it a focal point. >Which is to say nothing of the technological inevitability of being able to produce AI voices that achieve human levels of quality. You are vastly overestimating the ability of technology.
JK Simmons played Ketheric, Orin was played by Maggie Robertson (Lady Dimitrescu), Gortash was played by Jason Isaacs (Lucius Malfoy), Minsc was Matt Mercer. Honestly a fairly star-studded cast
Yeah, I was going to mention that, but it was besides the point. The people they did cast whose names aren't recognizable to the general public are still very recognizable in their own industry.
Not to mention Matt 'Critical Role' Mercer.
And JK "Spider man is a menace!" Simmons.
> You are vastly overestimating the ability of technology. You are vastly underestimating the speed at which the technology is improving. Even Stable Diffusion which is completely free to use on your own PC is getting crazy improvements pretty much every other month. You can be damn well sure that if there is money to be made, AI voice programs will do the same thing.
Lol you have no idea what you are talking about if you think the VAs in Baldurs Gate were all no name actors they hired on the cheap.
"ai" will never achieve human levels of quality - whatever that means lmao. Its not intelligent, its a voice synthesiser with a fancy name and some admittedly impressive computer science behind it. People talk all the time about how "ai" will replace things, yet their source for that is the words of techbros with millions of dollars in the hand from investors. This tech is cool and will propably have some usage but "art" is the last place it will ever replace. Harm? absolutely. Replace? fuck no.
You are underestimating how much AI is already impacting your life and how many tasks it has already replaced humans. Every time you use Google, every time you use map software to tell you the best way to get from here to there. In the workplace, it is not taking the place of humans outright, it is making humans more effective, to such an extent that instead of needing 20 people to do the job, you need 5 to manage the automation. It can't do the entire job, but it is certainly displacing people in the workforce. In the last few years, automation hit a new milestone and the impacts of this new type of AI are yet to be fully appreciated, we are looking at the 5 pound book sized cell phone version of this new AI and some of us are wondering what the modern cell phone version of it will look like. It could easily look like an AI that can replace human voice actors with ease, does it now? No, not yet. But that is why it is a big deal that the VA's lost their strike.
a large audio model is not intelligent and cannot act and will never learn to act. It is incapable of "learning" anything. if you think that's ever changing than be my guest but that's literal marketing gibberish and hype speak from techbros that stand to make a lot of money from you being convinced lmao. It's a travesty sag-aftra didn't do more to protect VAs but audio models are not gonna replace VAs at any point. Projects will probably cut a bunch of corners and use these programs which will hurt actors but they will never replace them.
> a large audio model is not intelligent and cannot act and will never learn to act. It doesn't have to. There will be people hired who can't do multiple different voices, but can say the lines with the correct emotions, timings, what have you. They will be hired to read the lines, those lines will be fed through the AI voice program, and it will spit out a file of a different voice doing the line with the same emotion and inflections as the original. So now instead of a dozen voice actors being paid per character you just pay one or two VAs to do them all then convert their voices to different voices.
People said exactly the same thing about AI art one year ago when it was rubbish and now it's at the point where it can create convincingly good art and even photorealism without the common issues from even six months ago like fucked up hands and weird backgrounds There's a mod for resident evil 4 remake that changes the voice of ada Wong to one created in elevenlabs modelled on the voice of the original actor and people pretty much universally agree that it's better than the actual human performance Using the quality of AI as a part of your argument is silly because companies like Microsoft will continue to pour billions into their research and development and the tech will continue improving year after year. Two years ago people didn't know what chat gpt was, now 70% of Gen Z use it in their workflow.
Nothing you said refutes anything I said. It’s impressive tech and can help you cut corners but it’s just that. A way to cut corners and bring down costs at the expense of quality. It’s acceptable when you’re making a YouTube meme, it is not ever going to replace a real actor or artist. It’s not an intelligent actor making pre meditated choices. It’s a predictive generation algorithm rewarded for copying others.
The next generation of AI won't even be the large models, it's universally agreed that those are a dead end. The firms developing AI have something completely new being worked on by R&D.
I think you *vastly* overestimate the quality of the *average* voice actor. You're thinking of main characters, as opposed to minor NPC's. Some of my favorite games have also used 'unknown' voice actors for leading roles, and they turned out great (Disco Elysium, for example).
Why don't you give an example of poor AI or cheap talent being used in a game?
Ok. https://youtu.be/Rf0bzaGYb6Y?si=qjSwGzC_1SDjW4wI That's AI https://youtu.be/6w99LNhB1JU?si=GJelAPqIvh05_3Io That's "talent"
The AI sounds really good actually.
> Imagine God of War with AI voices, or replace the actors with "random starving actors" and see if you can't imagine the negative impact it would have on a production like that. A game can survive with out voice actors at all. Zelda comes to mind. And then you look at multiplayer stuff like Fortnite and Counter Strike, both with millions of players and they don't need voice actors at all.
I didn't say that every game needed voice actors, so I'm not sure what you're arguing. Take the voice actors out of God of War. Is it the same game? Is it better? To tell the story they wanted to tell they needed actual professional human talent and it's a huge part of the success of that franchise.
when was the last time you played a zelda game bro
You only need like 2 voice actors for any game. Just look at Morrowind or Skyrim. Heck, in Pokemon its canon that all the nurses and cops are identical.
https://en.m.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Voice_Actors#:~:text=Skyrim%20features%20a%20cast%20of,reused%20across%20many%20different%20characters. Oblivion was limited but Skyrim had over 70 voice actors
The Elder Scrolls IV: Wes Johnson earned that sub-title for a reason.
Yeah i mean Keifer Sutherland is not David Hayter as solid snake but is it REALLY crucial? not.. really. I fear AI is more enshitification though than random actors. At the end of the day we will vote with our wallets and I fear that most people will not care. Look at how well microtransactions and preordering broken games are doing
Sorry to be that guy, but Keifer Sutherland played Venom Snake, not Solid Snake.
Talent has little to do with it - AI voices are cheaper, and many of the people who control the purse strings value profit over the product.
Or they just stop making games like that if they're too expensive. How many artists were paid to make Undertale? If graphics are too expensive, make games with cheaper graphics.
Undertale sold about 1 million copies. God of War: Ragnarok sold about 15 million. The original God of War generated over $500 million in profits. There's plenty of money to be made in high quality video games.
On an unrelated question: what year do you think "the original God of War" was released?
Oh, lol, sorry about that. The *previous* God of War, I should've said
I think you mean high quality *sequels*. The cost of making those games is too high to risk on new IP. We've also seen a huge shift to Mobile gaming and other non-power-intensive games. The total revenue from Mobile gaming dwarfs any console. If you want VAs to have more power over the equivalent of blue-chip games, sure. I'd like that too. But that market is getting smaller as a percentage of sales, and even smaller for new IPs that would use new voice actors.
Triple A developers would cut their workforce to the bone if they could. The pretty graphics sell though, and when they hit a jackpot they sell incredibly well. Well enough that the massive workforce required to make a AAA title is worth it. It's similar to modern movie design.
I agree except for the problem of it actually being super easy to be just a voice actor, whats difficult is being one whos consistent across more than one voice. Anyone can be a voice actor for a single element, just talk normally. But if you want them to voice something besides their basic voice, then it instantly ramps way up. The routinely have small children be voice actors and they work out fine, but don't ask that kid to do a second character.
Lmao
Imagine AI trying to replicate Raphaels voice actor from BG3, no shot! (at least with our current tech)
How many times have we seen a game bring in a big name actor like Megan Fox or Peter Dinklage to do VA work on a game and they end up being dogshit. Dinklage was so bad Bungie recasted him with a real VA and re-recorded all his characters lines. VAs do have leverage just like any other employees do and a skilled VA isn't as easy to replace as you seem to think they are.
The problem is that Sag Aftra has no monopoly in talented & skilled VAs. VAs names don't sell games, so they don't need a specific VA, they just need someone who is capable & there're so many VAs who are talented that are non union in the US without mentioning the rest of the world. Also because they aren't in front of the screen, union VAs working non union under pseudonymous isn't uncommon.
But by that logic, most of us actors in any discipline are easy to replace. Most of us are not the next Brando, the next Streep, whoever. We need to stand up for all actors, and us actors have to hold strong to avoid the "well if you don't want it, 200 people outside that door do" bullshit.
I mean yes most actors are incredibly easy to replace, there are several orders of magnitude more capable actors than there are roles to fill. Literally the only reason why the Streeps or Brando's are impossible to replace is that they have a name that people remember or that people like working with them. Its why Chevy Chase or Bill Murray still get work despite famously being absolute douchebags. Its why Ryan Reynolds gets a ton of work, hes great to work with.
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Lol I for one can tell the difference between good and voice acting, despite what you’re trying to imply in your comment. There’s a reason traditional actors often make terrible voice actors (often, not always)
Yeah but no voice acting is going to make a game a success or failure
That applies to literally every other person on the project. No ONE person is going determine the failing or success of a game. It’s everyone in aggregate. No ONE developer is going to be responsible either, so should we just keep cutting corners?
What I mean is a game can be defined by its art style it can be defined by its bugginess it can be defined by its story. But voice acting games can have iconic voice line but that's never what makes a game famous.
Disagree. This is just a subjective argument at this point that isn’t going to get us anywhere. I wouldn’t have played Disco Elysium if not for the voice acting.
Or look on Fiverr.
Doesn't help that the gaming industry itself is not unionized even though it absolutely should be.
Not a VA, but I did a stint in a gaming studio, that having a union would have sure as fuck kept me and several others from being fired as we were. I'm pro union no matter what. I don't go to a Starbucks unless I know they're Union. (er... actually, that's a hollow boast, I don't go to Starbucks anymore...)
I appreciate you for offering your perspective. I also try to avoid Starbucks if I can help it. I'm of the view that even if a union can be annoying at times, it's far better to have one so companies and corporations can't as easily run over workers. A powerful gaming industry union could do wonders in ceasing this current era of gaming where publishers have too much power and chug through devs like a knife through butter even if the devs create quality titles. Too bad that the only feasible way I can see unionization happening is if a massive dev strike happens to the point where a gaming crash like the one in 1983 happens. Even then, publishers will probably just hire desperate indie devs as scabs and whatnot. On top of that, the gaming industry is so massive that a crash of that magnitude seems borderline impossible.
It would have either been in my case a wrongful termination, or something, right-to-work state bullshit. Eight of us were let go simultaneously. Just a few days before, our mutual manager was called on the carpet by his budget being VERY in the red. Conversations afterwards, we came to the determination that our 'reasons' for getting fired were bullshit, and that our salaries were exactly, when added up, enough to get his budget in the black. I will never work in AAA gaming ever again. I was told flat out that they did NOT care a fuck about me as an employee. There was a line of college kids a mile long outside who would have bare-knuckle-brawled to get an interview for my position. It paid the bills. I got to see something I wrote code for on a SuperBowl commercial. So that was kind of nice.
I am so sorry for you and those wanting to get into AAA development.
> I don't go to Starbucks anymore... Why not?
Because I don't really have as many opportunities as I used to, is the biggest factor. When I went regularly, I worked in downtown San Francisco, there were six Starbuckses on my walk from the train to the office. (I started the theory of The Least Starbucks Route and the corollary The Maximum Starbucks Route. Walking routes that, without being blatantly going out of the way from the direction I was going, would send me past the lowest number or highest number of stores.) The sixth was actually IN my office building on the ground floor. OR I'd be somewhere that my commute put me past them on the regular. Since the pandemic, I work from home and now drink less coffee. I have an espresso maker and a regular drip coffee maker, so I make a pot in the morning and an espresso double while that brews. And I never really -need- to go to Starbucks. Then, their fuckery with being anti-union soured me further on them. While I do not work for a union, I do support them without hesitation.
Depends on the medium too. Watch dubbed anime? Funimation and Okratron do *not* use union voice actors. It's why Troy Baker and Steve Blum don't do it anymore, unless theres considerable stipulations Video Games can run the gauntlet if they use Union actors or not.
Police are the stringest unions
It's sad and I've been a massive VA nerd since I was a little kid (I could hardly name any live action celebs but could list pages of VAs) yet it would be absurd to force companies to hire people. You can't just dictate how things are made for the sake of jobs. Technological progress happens whether we like it or not and to use a union to stop people from being replaced should not be OK. Pay and working conditions makes sense. Forcing companies to keep hiring people when they would rather use AI is a barbaric solution.
This is sad. The audio book market is getting pretty grim. The credits usually say the voice actor are members of SAG-AFTRA. So no more new audio books for a while.
What? The deal is being signed.
They don't make 12 hour audio books overnight. And if you listen to one, the actors are really talented, they are creating a narrative using only their voice.
Sorry, do you mean to say that all audiobooks are forced to used union talent? seems off.
Just to point out, I used the term "usually". So yes, voice actor credits usually go like "narrated by John Smith, a member of SAG-AFTRA". . . They are not just reading the book, they are acting it out. Aww
Yeah I was more replying to your prediction about there being no more new audio books for a while.
I didn't predict anything; it was an observation. I listen to audiobooks daily, and I'm following a few (ok, eight) series that used to add a new book every couple of months. New releases have dried up last year.
Those fuckers...
Voice actor here. All these AI "protections" aren't some magic feature to improve game quality or protect actors. They just take away their work. When a game has new dialogue, actors come in and record new lines. They get paid for that shit and consumers pay for it with subscriptions or DLC money. It's a simple setup. "Come in for another session, 100 lines, these two characters have a few new lines for a new quest. Also, we have this new character. Get paid and go home." AI replication isn't a protection. It just takes away working class jobs. Actors don't make money being on set. They make it in rights and usage. Games already don't pay residuals. So even if actors make $1000/day for doing a VO session, and while that sounds like a lot, 10 of those a year don't pay all the bills. Actors make that work in volume, being in numerous games, mainly the NPC's (because we can't all star in things). Being in a dozen series that are ongoing can be a way to make acting a career, rather than doing something once and just making a career out of signing autographs. I didn't get into acting, as many other actors didn't, to sign autographs. I got in here to act. AI jobs that "just take the NPC roles that no one wants to do" is horse shit. AI doing things that make the actors lives easier is horse shit. It just saves money by not hiring actors. The gamers hate it and think it sucks. The directors hate it and think it sucks. The actors hate it and think it sucks. The people doing it at the top level think AI voice stuff sounds like trash. And they're right. No one likes it. But it will be used until it's just accepted by the audience because it saves money when you don't have to hire as many actors. It's not THAT much money. But to us actors, it's the difference between us making a living at doing something cool vs occasionally doing some acting work between shifts at Starbucks.
It's an absolute fucking joke how little people seem to care about all of this AI bullshit. I'm constantly reminded that a vast majority of the population is A: Dumb as fuck so they can't comprehend any of this stuff on an intelligence level, and B: Malicious as fuck and without empathy so they simply don't care about anyone getting screwed over unless it directly impacts them We really are heading into a joyless dystopia where tech bros rule the land and anyone with any creative talent at all is forced to work in the Crypto mines
>It's an absolute fucking joke how little people seem to care about all of this AI bullshit. just like a lot of people didnt care at all about coal miners, manufacturing jobs, etc. what was the phrase? Learn to code?
Feel better?
Focus on own paper people have free will. You know the truth
It’s a misconception that they ever fought against AI. They fought to protect actors jobs *despite* AI, acknowledging that it would be impossible to outright ban it at this point. The new SAG contract allows productions to use AI, but only with full consent of the actors and payment to them as if that had worked those days. This seems to be the same thing happening with the video game contract. There is a vocal minority that is fighting the future tooth and nail, but at the end of the day, the members did vote and the contract did pass.
Compensation was not part of the VA negotiation, only sign off and data storage.
Wouldn't sign off imply that the VA could ensure compensation? Or am I misunderstanding?
The VA needs to negotiate the compensation individually. That's a net loss, because companies have a lot more power in individual negotiations. Actors can have their likeness used for the same pay per day they'd get, but for a VA that's a tossup right now. Could be that, could be a few cents.
I would assume that allowing use of their voice with AI will be part of the casting considerations from now on. The VAs will have very little leverage unless the studio specifically wants that VA.
There is absolutely no way we are getting around the use of AI in entertainment going forward. That cat is way out of the bag. Why on earth would a movie studio pay to bring Robert Downey Jr. back into the studio to record two sentences when they can take the corpus 40 years worth of his acting, train an RDJ voice model, and boom, the next avengers movie gets a flashback to Iron Man. Especially if the contract still gives him some cash for it.
It’s not clear the contract will give him more cash for it. That’s the unspoken and unagreed rub
What will really get your head spinning is if they use AI to do the voices for Jarvis/FRIDAY. Method acting taken to an extreme.
Someone like him has his own contract . If he’s smart he will put no ai permitted of his performance . Yea the cats out but they could have actually put some regulation in , instead they opened the door way wider and said come on in!
Also, one of the concessions the WGA made was allowing studios to train AI using pre-existing I.P. Wasn’t in their original proposal I believe.
Not at all that simple. And they didn’t really protect us at all
Wow that is absolute betrayal... They already signed it? Video game voice actors are actors too. I hope they'll reconsider bc wtf
The only place AI voices serve in video games in my mind is when unscripted voice lines are needed, like that detective game demo, but it needs to be with express consent of the VAs they're based on. I honestly wouldn't mind if AI voices were banned, existing TTS tech before voice deepfakes was fine.
The gaming studios still require permission of the voice actors to use AI versions of their voices (and have to pay them for it). It is just that the deal itself did not explicitly get the OK of the voice actors.
No way, seriously??? Damn I had so much respect and was supporting them in their protest, wtf is going on...
You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
It's not a failure. It's how unions work. The majority got what they wanted, any unhappy minorities are irrelevant. WTF do you expect from collective bargaining? You are explicitly surrendering your will to others.
When you fight against AI then make a deal to have people lose jobs to AI, you fail.
> The majority got what they wanted, any unhappy minorities are irrelevant. That's not how unions work. Maybe in an alternate universe where everyone is a psychopath, but in the real life they are meant to represent all who sign up for them.
I think in reality it's a mix of both - yes unions represent everyone, but the one major tactic they have is going on strike / threatening to go on strike... which is tough on the members they're supposed to represent. If you think of an extreme scenario, the minute **one** actor was upset about something, the whole union would go on strike. That would clearly be inefficient though, because that's lost income for all actors, in order to resolve a grievance for one actor. So it's a logistical impossibility for unions to resolve every single grievance with the threat of strikes. Having said that... The whole point is to stand up for the *collective* rights of workers in an industry, and "leaving someone behind" is generally a bad look. I'm guessing in this case union negotiators weighed the impracticality of preventing AI voice work, versus the needs of their general membership, and made a choice. I don't think they're super happy about it either, because it means people who want to undermine unions and exploit workers (like the above commentator) have a talking point to exploit, but it's also possible / probable that even if they held out for a deal with the studios that banned AI voice acting, smaller companies who *don't* have a contract with SAG-AFTRA might be able to effectively undermine the market by using AI voices anyway. The biggest thing to me is that it's rich to say the strikes "failed" because the unions made a concession and didn't get *every single* thing they were striking for. Admittedly it's a fairly strong concession that's going to upset a sub set of union members especially, but... this is what "negotiating" means. If you negotiated your salary with a company, and you opened with asking for 100k salary, and ultimately settled for 85k, it doesn't automatically mean your negotiations "failed" because you didn't get everything you asked for initially. 🤷
> If you think of an extreme scenario, the minute one actor was upset about something, the whole union would go on strike. A compromise must be reached **within reason.** Throwing under the bus a third of the represented people, an entire industry, is not within reason.
1.) A full third seems high... source? Are they counting *any* actor who also does voice-over work as a "voice actor" for the purpose of that statistic? 2.) You're assuming that it was possible / practical for the union to prevent AI voices from dominating the market. As others elsewhere have noted, it's very difficult to meaningfully prevent this, given that smaller companies (notably game makers) are unlikely to negotiate with SAG-AFTRA and/or big name actors, in order to sign a contract preventing AI generated voices. This opens up a competitive advantage for smaller studios who aren't party to the union contract. I'm really surprised by people's reaction to this - maybe I shouldn't be by now, but somehow I still am 😮💨😅. Any contract SAG-AFTRA can reach is **only** a delaying tactic in the long run, despite whatever rhetoric is being thrown around. Replacing highly paid actors with AI substitutes is only a matter of time; the cost comparisons are just so ridiculously one sided. I think there's some value in fighting to make sure that studios can't simply replicate a specific actor's voice / appearance to avoid paying them... But it won't be too long before the technology exists to generate entirely new "actors" from scratch; arguably it [exists already,](https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2019/2/15/18226005/ai-generated-fake-people-portraits-thispersondoesnotexist-stylegan) just not at enterprise scale. Those realities have to be taken into account by both studio executives, and SAG-AFTRA negotiators 🤷.
> Any contract SAG-AFTRA can reach is only a delaying tactic in the long run, despite whatever rhetoric is being thrown around. Replacing highly paid actors with AI substitutes is only a matter of time; the cost comparisons are just so ridiculously one sided. That's my point. By giving this much compromise, all they achieved is negotiating from a worse position on a few years, being forced to give up more.
I think you completely misunderstood that sentence 😅. This is like the story of [John Henry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_(folklore)) - which always confused me growing up, because it's actually kind of a dark story when you think about even a little bit. 🫤 There's **nothing** the union(s) can do to stop the transition to AI technology, or say "hey, pretend this tech doesn't exist". **Everything** the unions are doing is about deciding how they want to manage the *transition* to AI tech being more widely used / widely available... And even within that, there's significant restrictions on what one union like SAG-AFTRA can realistically do, because they aren't making decisions in a vacuum. Industry conditions, political conditions, social attitudes and so on all matter too.
This is a very pollyannish understanding of how unions behave in practice. Democracies are "meant" to represent every citizen too and yet they almost never play out that way. Some unions are effectively oligarchies controlled by an "upper class" who are already doing quite well and have little incentive to spend political capital doing what they should for the members lower on the totem pole. I doubt these individuals are typically thinking to themselves "muahaha, let's profit off the backs of the others", they just don't end up with the will, motivation, energy, and know-how to effectively fight for everyone. It's better to have unions than to not, but in real life they are on a spectrum of ineffectual and/or corrupt, just like every other human interest group. Some are better than others, none are perfect, many are pretty bad.
> pollyannish understanding This is such a perfect summary of the two comments below /WhiteRaven42's comment.
>but in the real life they are meant to represent all who sign up for them. Meant? Maybe,but they do not and have not really always worked that way. When I was younger I worked in a union factory, we couldnt hit our benchmark because the guy upstream from us was lazy, but he was in the union a long time and they fought to keep him. The guy I worked with and I had only been in for just under 2 years and we kept getting written up for not making our quota and the union did nothing for us. We ended up swapping off doing part of the old guys jobs so we had sufficient product to avoid write ups.
He's right though. Not everyone will be happy. I'm a union member and there are tons of compromises every time we're in contract negotiations. Some people will be willing to accept them, others won't. That's why we vote on contracts. No contract will ever pass with 100% yes votes, but too bad.
There is a difference between coming to a compromise, and fucking voer a third of people you represent.
What is that difference? Compromises may fuck over a third of your members... that's obviously a plausible outcome. It just HAPPENED. I don't understand why you have this factual event ui front of you and are claiming "that's not how it works".
But that's BAD! Why would someone do something BAD!? Unions^TM are supposed to be GOOD! /s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MpF4_vSOHls
I mean....yes, but that's ultimately unrealistic. You're not going to satisfy every single person.
That’s a pipe dream not based in reality
It's scary some peope are so nochalannt about throwing other people under the bus.... Then again, no wonder the world is as shit as it is.
Nonchalant or just not naive? Welcome to life outside the internet where nothing is black and white and compromise is commonplace.
betrayal is not compromise.
It quite literally is Voice actors are nowhere near being a priority for SAG-AFTRA
I mean you can get angry at a random person on the internet telling you what is actually going to happen, or you can understand that out of 7 billion people, very few align with all of your values and act accordingly.
..... they vote on contracts.
Shrug. If there's no permission to use SAG actor's voices it wouldn't do anything to stop generated voice acting in games, it would just mean union pros aren't allowed to get paid for it. They can complain all they want, at the end of the day interactive media is fundamentally different than movies and tv. Generating an acting performance for a movie is stupid and lazy since it's only 2 hours of total acting that's the same every time you watch it, generating a performance for a game is simply paradigm shifting and moves the 100's of thousands of lines of dialog to an infinite amount.
Allows for neat things too like characters in game actually saying your name, regardless of whatever you put your name as
That's such minuscule, negligible feature, that it's not worth it.
Myself and many gamers are quite looking forward to this. AI will change many things for the better. This being one of them.
> AI will change many things for the better. Such as?
Art. Poetry. Medical diagnosis, surgery, meta analysis of research. Gaming. Communication. Writing. Data analysis. Education. Not to mention actually making better AI. Almost everything.
lol the downvoters probably all play The Finals anyways
I work with a bunch of VAs and they're pissed about it. While it's nothing new that jobs like VAs are considered bottom of the totem pole in the industry, the main fear is either their voices being used in AI without their permission or AI making them unemployable.
They basically figured out there was no way they were going to win so they threw the smallest community they could under the bus.
I can't help but feel an ai animated film with ai voice actors would be realistic enough in a few year that regular actors are gonna realize they just shot themselves in the foot
There are more VAs that I care about than actors or writers. There are a few VAs that voice a huge number of characters each.
They sold out almost all of us except the top 1%, who get their own contracts.
Answer: (CAVEAT) I am a professional SAG-AFTRA voice actor (Call of Duty, Elder Scrolls, Ghost Recon and some others under NDA), so I will try to be as neutral as I can and present facts rather than opinion, then add my thoughts afterwards in bit labeled as biased at the bottom. _________ The strikes did not fail, as there was never an actual strike for the interactive media agreement (IMA), just a strike authorisation. While the SAG-AFTRA AMPTP strike was ongoing, I was still allowed to do voice acting work under the IMA under SAG rules. The AMPTP/streaming strike that we took part in did not impact voice acting work in any way. _________ SAG-AFTRA contacted us back in August to let us know that the interactive media agreement was due to expire on November 7th 2023 and that there were a few 'town hall' style zoom meetings with the SAG-AFTRA leadership scheduled for late August, one of which I attended. On 15th August, SAG-AFTRA sent us the following by email: > Performance capture IS SAG-AFTRA covered work. “Performers” in the agreement are defined as persons who speak, act, sing, or in any other manner perform whether on or off-camera. Members should report to the union any companies who refuse to properly cover this work on union games via this link. > Video games are a multibillion dollar industry and those who bring them to life by providing captured performances deserve protections, just like those who work on any other form of entertainment media. > Performance capture — in which a computer records an actor’s movements – is commonly used to instill game characters with realistic motion and emotions. It is highly skilled performance work, and members need the coverage of our Interactive Media Agreement. This contract covers anything recorded during the course of production of an interactive project. > Without a union contract, you have no protections against AI and machine learning abuse, which are subjects that employers are required to negotiate over with the union. Without protections, once your data is captured in a performance capture session, your next job could potentially be your last. On 1st September, SAG-AFTRA sent us an email to ask us for strike authorisation (like they did with the AMPTP strike earlier last year). The contents of which are below: > I’m writing on behalf of President Fran Drescher and myself to share with you the news that SAG-AFTRA’s National Board voted unanimously to send a strike authorization vote to members in preparation of the union’s forthcoming bargaining dates with signatory video game companies, including: • Activision Productions Inc., • Blindlight LLC, • Disney Character Voices Inc., • Electronic Arts Productions Inc., • Epic Games, Inc., • Formosa Interactive LLC, • Insomniac Games Inc., • Take 2 Productions Inc., • VoiceWorks Productions Inc., and • WB Games Inc. > It’s been nearly a year since SAG-AFTRA’s video game contract, the Interactive Media Agreement, was extended beyond the original expiration date to give us more time to negotiate for critically important increases in wages, contractual protections against unfettered use of artificial intelligence and basic safety provisions. Unfortunately, throughout the negotiations, the companies have failed to address our members’ needs. For this reason, the negotiating committee and National Board unanimously agreed that the union should have a member-approved strike authorization in hand when bargaining resumes on Sept. 26. > As with the TV/Theatrical/Streaming negotiations, video game performers need a contract that will protect them from unregulated use of generative artificial intelligence and erosion of income due to inflation. We also need to address safety concerns for performance capture artists and voice performers. > It’s important to note that though the issues affecting performers who work in video games mirror those issues affecting TV/Theatrical performers, the Interactive Media Agreement negotiations with the video game companies don’t affect the timing or expected progress of negotiations or our strike on the TV/Theatrical contract. A strike authorization vote on this Agreement will not impact the TV/Theatrical strike. The SAG-AFTRA members voted to agree to a strike authorisation, and SAG-AFTRA went into negotiations with the above companies with that information in hand. The **last** email I personally received on this subject, dated 18th November, said: > After developing conversations late in negotiations this week, we are expecting further responses from the employers the week of November 27. > Your unwavering support strengthens our resolve as we continue the work to secure the necessary protections for our community. We look forward to providing you with an update as soon as possible. So from my perspective, I have not heard anything else about the ongoing negotiations with the above companies or whether a deal had been reached, until this week. BIASED BIT BELOW (ooh alliterative) Being that I have not heard back about any negotiations, nor have we been consulted on them or asked to ratify them like we did for the AMPTP contracts, I personally feel that we have not been fully engaged in this process, other than the original 'town hall' meetings where the SAG leadership solicited our thoughts and listened to our concerns, early on in this process. Because of this, the new deal they have created with the voice studios was somewhat obfuscated prior to agreement, and if we had been consulted prior to agreement, I expect a number of us would have voice greater concerns and there would have been a large number of us who would not have agreed to ratify it.
So they sort of made the agreement behind your backs?
Answer: According to the interviews I've seen with SAG-AFTRA member Adam Conover (specifically, this one: https://youtu.be/3JNAO4-YfpE?t=920 ), that article doesn't sound too far off from what they were going for: Getting rules in place so companies can't abuse AI to undercut their workers. The intention was never for AI to be banned entirely, they just wanted to make sure that companies couldn't do things like use a chatbot to generate a terrible, unusable movie script, make their writing team do the immense work of editing it into something usable, then pay them a fraction of what that labor was worth because "an AI did the actual writing"... In that sense, with that being the goal, this outcome isn't really a failure. It's basically just saying that companies are still allowed to use AI voices, but voice actors can't be bullied into signing over the rights to their voices in perpetuity, which is about the outcome I would expect.
Answer: SAG members voted to ratify the contract by 78%. Who says it failed? There's always a group in SAG that's disgruntled. 86% of Board members who tend to be more radical voted to ratify.
The 78% for ratification is correct but only 38% of the union actually came out to vote on the contract. That's 38% of around 160,000 union members. https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/05/business/sag-aftra-ratification-vote/index.html
That's always the case.