Yeahhhh I heard about this and it sucks. Honestly though, wouldn’t be the first time Troy Baker had done ****ty stuff. Like, there was that
one time he threatened to flay some random woman while improving an audition for Far Cry 4. …So honestly, makes sense he doesn’t care about the environment either.
What confuses me is why he is supporting this particular NFT out of all NFTs. It’s main goal is to use AI voices to replace real actors. Andy Milonakis (Future-Worm, Adventure Time) and Charlet Chung (Overwatch) also support it, but so far they seem to have no one else on board, and understandably so. Basically every actor I have ever seen except these three hate AI voices, and selling your voice to a company so they can turn it into an AI voice is seriously frowned upon in VO. Simply put, why would companies pay for an actor when they could just use a robot that sounds just like them? Oh and also, this company legit stole voices from FifteenAI to make their NFT voices.
Frankly, I don’t think this is gonna like, put loads of people out of a job, but it’s an issue. Luckily I doubt this thing will get the support it needs, since so many VAs hate AI voices. They won’t be able to pay most of those VAs to sign on to their project. I dunno what companies think about AI voices, but I do recall Todd Howard saying that Bethesda wouldn’t use AI voices. Bethesda uses AI voices as placeholders, but the final products always use real people, since Todd believes there’s no replacement for professional voice actors (Very based, actually)
Anyway, here’s a list of cool actors who openly DONT support NFTs.
- Kellen Goff
- Yong Yea
- Belsepher Rusape Jr.
- Elsie Lovelock
- Khoi Dao
- Josh Grelle
- Casey Mongolio
- Lizzie Freeman
- Ryan Colt Levy
- Sean Chiplock
- Gianni Matragrano
- P.M. Seymour
And there’s a whooooole bunch more, obviously. I just really hope folks don’t bashing the VO community for the actions of folks like Troy Baker. The overwhelming majority of VAs I’ve seen and met hate NFTs, and I’d hate for em’ to get mixed up with the crowd that supports them.