I’m a bit afraid that voice actors might no longer be a job in the not too distant future. AI voices have been getting a lot better and I can envision companies wanting to save money and not have to hire an actor at all. Hopefully everything works out and I’m just overthinking things. There’s a lot of cool potential uses for AI to get excited for, especially in video games, but there are definitely downsides as well such as job displacement.
Besides time saving and obviously money, I think part of the problem is some people being unwilling to socialise or interact with people, whether out of fear/discomfort or lack of respect. Particularly, when I think about how most of the higher-ups don't really know the people, the makers, and whatnot who develop and make the things. It's a common issue that's not just been reported to happen, but you can kinda see it when some makers talk about some aspects.
Like how there's that one Arena FPS game or something that uses alot of AI voices and when they were brought up, the makers started talking about voice actors and the difficulties of making contracts with them or something. Which alot of voice actors were confused on why they were making it sound so difficult when it's nowhere near that difficult. Or how some Konami employees talked about how the suits hardly knew anything about their own game series or the developers.
It doesn't help that when most technology is made to make things easier and accessible, you have to take into account that
Everybody can access it. And the ones who make the best use of them are either the people who are the most experienced with it or the people with the money to give. And more often than not, when the people with the money are involved, it's often because they can see something they can take advantage or exploit.
Like while it seems fun and dandy that there are companies pushing for copyrights regarding AI artwork and it taking from the internet to make it's stuff, some people aren't aware that depending on how it's handled, that it can inadvertently give companies more control over things like fan art, fan videos, parodies and whatnot. And it includes the companies who are already a big pain with stuff like that. People need to be very careful and aware that companies are not your friends and that there may very well be a more selfish reason why they are
supportive.
And AI Voices is no different. Even if they didn't use anybody else's voice but their own or people they know and gotten consent from, think about all the voice changers and voice mixers out there. If they have the money to pay for those, there's nothing legally wrong with them using those to make their own voices to use for making AI voices.
In the eyes of people who believe they don't have enough money for pay for voice actors, but can pay an enough amount of money a month for the voice changers, mixers and AI voices, it sounds great since they can use what money they have to get those and not have to worry about infringing on other people's rights. For the big companies who have more than enough money, but hardly want to pay for professionals, it basically means less money spent and less hassle regarding
persistent workers with complaints.
Basically, it's the same big problem of, "When you make something for the intention of everybody, including the ones who couldn't before, it's still accesible by
everybody." And any good intention can easily be distorted.