SAG-AFTRA Approves AI Voice Actors, Enrages the VA Community::SAG-AFTRA has approved AI voice actors and partnered with Replica Studios, enraging the voice acting community on a global scale.
… Isn’t sag the one that was just up in arms over AI? Wasn’t that a huge part of the fucking protests?
For film and TV, yes. For video games, no.
If you can convince the lowest Hollywood actor he’s better than the best video game VA, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.
Yes, but somehow this deal will be okay even though it looks like some pretty big names in the VO/A community were never asked for their opinion or approval.
When it says “SAG-AFTRA Approves” - doesn’t that imply that all union members were given a vote?
In fact, yes, yes it does…
"The agreement between the leading AI voice company and the world’s largest performers’ union will enable Replica to engage SAG-AFTRA members under a fair, ethical agreement to safely create and license a digital replica of their voice. Licensed voices can be used in video game development and other interactive media projects from pre-production to final release.
Approved by affected members of the union’s voiceover performer community, this contract marks an important step towards the ethical use of AI voices…"
“Approved by affected members” is the critical part of the quote. So no it absolutely wasn’t “all union members”, they evidently cherry picked who voted on this.
The SAG protests were pretty transparently about protecting old money. Actors with hundreds to thousands of hours of footage already out there that can be easily turned into AI models.
So much for labor unions establishing worker’s rights.
Represented everyone. When animators were adequately represented yet the CGI techs weren’t, Disney just stopped making drawn animated films and resorted to CGI, which is all we get now.
Essentially, however unions fail to provide for the working class gets exploited by the owning class.
And it’s fair if labor unions can’t fix everything, but then let us admit that our capitalist system is broken beyond what labor can do to fix it. Let’s stop pushing unions as a solution, except as a short-term one that is going to leave some people cold and hungry.
I can’t speak for how unions work in the US but over here in Sweden they work because of member engagement. Of course, the opposite is true too: they doesn’t work when there is no engagement shown by the members.
If unionmembers don’t show up on the meetings, especially the annual one, where the board election take place each year, the board doesn’t know what the members want. Furthermore, if members do hint show up on election day they are getting the board they deserve. (The same goes for government and elections)
My experience is that most of the people complaining about the union not representing them, being corrupt and/or being toothless, are people who never visited an annual meeting. They never participated in the election of representatives and they most often think of the union like it’s their personal legal team.
Unions are positive and bring good things, not only to workers/members but also to the “area of business”, when the members are active in the discussions and understand the issues. Unions are bad, almost cancerous, when members just pay the monthly fee and aren’t really engaged…
I don’t know if the persons complaining are super engaged in the union work but tweets like “you don’t represent me but happily take my money” smell a little bit of “you’re the worst legal team I’ve ever had”.
When it comes to the issue here I wonder what the alternative would be? SAG-AFTRA saying no to AI voice overs? Going out on strike?
In what way would that not end up in the companies just use more AI VO AI is an investment and a recurring cost you can calculate. Human labor is not. There is all sorts of unknowns connected to human labor and AI never make threats about going out on strike (yet!?)
So, a little more in detail, what do you think will be the result of what they did here? What should they have done differently and what result would they have gotten then?
When animators were adequately represented yet the CGI techs weren’t, Disney just stopped making drawn animated films and resorted to CGI, which is all we get now.
Weren’t the old school animation movies all outsourced to low wage countries anyway?
Voice actors are likely to lose their entire industry because screen actors are going to eat their jobs. Why pay voice actors when you can just pay for a cheaper AI voice pack of any famous actor you want?
Here I go again, playing devil’s advocate…
So, this is an opt-in situation. That means that actors still have to give their permission to have their voice used. Furthermore, they must still give their consent on a per-project basis. Further-furthermore, they still get paid when their voice is used this way.
That being said, this seems like a smart move on the side of SAG-AFTRA if for no other reason other than it’s going to happen one way or the other, though it would have been better to do this a decade ago and have more control, but more on that later. AI is a boulder rolling down the mountain, and creatives are the house at the bottom of the mountain. The boulder is going to destroy the house, and there is no stopping it. SAG-AFTRA is taking actions to save what they can from the house and at least make sure that there are protections in place for future houses. This is what happens when no one wants to keep up with tech and has to be reactive instead of pro-active.
We rolled the corpse of TUPAC on stage at Coachella in 2012, 11 years ago. That’s 11 years to sort all of this shit out and set up some protections for using likenesses with the prospect of new tech. That’s 11 years to get your shit together for the future. But everyone was like, “Ha ha, truck drivers, fast food workers, and the rest of the poors will be the first to suffer under the boot of advanced automation. AI won’t come to Hollywood. No one can replicate such masterpieces as Catwoman and Bee Movie. We are invincible.” Well, here we are, and Hollywood and other creatives are caught with their pants down. None of this shit is new. Hell, Hollywood has been making movies about this kind of shit for decades, they were just too busy sniffing their own farts to realize they were the ones in trouble.
So, now, SAG-AFTRA are having to make concessions to stay relevant in an emerging system, instead of making the rules themselves like they should have been doing a decade ago. Is anything going to change? Is anyone going to be looking forward? Or can we expect another strike in 10 years because the policies put in place today were merely stop-gaps and did nothing to shore up for the next boulder the rolls down the mountain?
You missed something crucial:
Film, TV, and streaming are still protected from AI voice actors crowding their space with soulless slop. It’s video games that aren’t.
In addition, this means that real voice actors will now have to compete with AI actors who don’t even have to show up to audition. And who wouldn’t like to play Disney’s new Black Panther game featuring the real* voice of Chadwick Boseman?
It’s a race to the bottom.
Yes, you can decline to opt in, but the guy next to you (or the guy next to him) will opt in and sell his AI voice package for less than it costs to employ a real person. And unlike a real person, the AI voice package can work 24/7 on 10,000 productions at the same time.
If anyone can opt in, then no one can really opt out.
Is this a good thing? For the bottom line of the people making the games, sure. And maybe 3% of that savings will trickle down to the consumer.
But it’s pretty bad for the voice actors.
I absolutely agree with this take. This isn’t something that will just go away. Especially for something like video games it just makes too much sense. The best time to address this topic might have been a long time ago, but they are still in a position where they can shape how things will play out. In the short term it might be better to not do so, but eventually someone else will take the opportunity if they don’t.
This is going to be the future of gaming, AI is going to be heavily involved in many parts of game dev going forward. AI voices aren’t perfect yet, but when they are companies are naturally going to use them.
This is a tough subject, because I agree with you.
I’m not sure what a good agreement would look like in this circumstance. I think, even if this sounds outlandish, we need to start preparing for a post-work world.
I don’t mean post-work in the sense that no one will work, just that the assumption that everyone should find a job is breaking down. Surplus labor is growing, and it’s going to grow more and more, faster and faster, in different industries before others. And it’s going to be disruptive.
Currently, I think that labor unions are a critical part of securing worker rights, but this is another example that they’re not going to be enough to respond to shifts on the order we’re witnessing. We need strong unions, but we need a broad social movement towards guaranteed services as well.
Sounds like a union leadership shakeup is gonna happen at SAG-AFTRA in the very near future
More than likely the video game performers form a new guild/union because they’ve been getting skullfucked since the SAG-AFTRA merger repeatedly. More and more VG performances are going non-union because they gaming companies can sit out the labor actions SAG-AFTRA brings and the talent is there.
