The Slippery Slope of A.I. Voice Acting in Games | Slightly Something Else
The Escapist
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This week on Slightly Something Else, Yahtzee and Marty discuss A.I. voice acting in games.
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05.10.2022
the truth behind AI replacing creatives eventually means 90% of creatives in all fields essentially losing 90% of all their work. most work is process work, which the artists now won’t be needed for. SOURCE: 10 years as an animator lol
if aaa developers try to go full ai, it will be novel but meh at best and people will sour to the idea. buuuut if indie developers collectively go to town there will probably be a few of accidental masterpieces that people may flock to
Once upon a time painters experimented with pigments and made their own brushes.
I think that hellblades use of ai generated placeholder audio is very smart. Perhaps the game industry needs unions to make sure ai is only used appropriately
It's kind of give and take as I see it. Less voice actor work, but room for more writers to write the AI dialogue. AI can't do dialogue believably.
You take that back Marty, all of us are podunk including Madison.
You mean the Slippery Slope of Norman Reedus
ive been waiting on this for a while, AI generated voices would have been so useful when i was modding for oblivion and making NPCs with voiceless dialog
There is a kneejerk reaction against AI but its wrongheaded
You aren't being replaced by a machine. You're being replaced by someone who is using a machine. An AI specialist. These AIs are not perfectly flawless and foolproof, they have complexity, nuance and a lot of technical depth. Getting the best results from them takes work, and more importantly knowledge. They are tools operated by humans
In exchange, they are powerful tools, allowing one person to do a lot more work, and produce more.
We still have coal miners in the modern era. We just need fewer people to run a mine. And those people that work in a coal mine don't need muscles to swing axes anymore, they need training in operating largescale digging machinery.
The world is changing and adaptation is important.
If you feel like a machine is threatening your job, don't fight it. Work with it. Learn to harness the machine and do your job twice as efficiently
AI generated Zero Punctuation was a thing? I have to admit, I'd be very curious to see that. Given how many hours of Yahtzee's voice are out there to learn from, the AI voice could've been pretty good.
It's not like AI and robots will take over everyone's job tomorrow. AI software developers and robotics engineers will have work for at least the next 50 years before joining blue to mid-level white collar workers in the gutter to die poor and unfed.
Is there any proff we're not AIs RIGHT NOW?
Lol if we can come up with enough new ideas to feed in to the ai…?
Then make all the fucking games you just thought of! The if's in this debate are ludicrous. It's fine for ai to take over the triple a space that grind out a game with a single theme or drive, and let the ai fill it out with what's fed in.
And novel things can be done by people.
Fuck A.I.
A.I. is theft.
A.I. was advertised to "Free" us from the mundane, but it's proving to do the opposite. Consumers stuck to the trough and everyone else starving and unfufilled.
AI-written narratives are absolutely doable, but you need to get a lot of developers and a lot of self-aware writers working together on it, and it's going to be one heck of an algorithm.
Wait wait wait, Marty where the hell are you shopping? I have never EVER seen a robot in an aisle at a store, AND I LIVE IN MADISON.
Your spot on about self-checkout though, I haven't done regular checkout at Target/Walmart/Woodmans in years.
I can see indies using ai voice. It would be rather cheap.
Lmao “human creativity”? Leave it to the ai! Humanity’s role is making the funny numbers go up for our lord Bezos
36:36 "There might be like a Jetsons future in some part of the world and Mad Max future on others." Isn't that just the Flintstones?
Have you heard the tragedy of Darth Vader? Ironic, isn't it… the man whose arc in the original trilogy was to grow from "more machine than man" to loving father who regained his humanity, in the end couldn't save himself from being literally turned into a machine by Disney.
Low cost, low quality slop for all! Rejoice!
The self service check outs are only good for small shopping trips, 10-15 items tops, anything more than that like a weeks shopping is just painful.
I don't see AI ever replacing real-life actors simply because no matter how convincing it is, most people just hate the idea on principle, and hate being lied to even moreso. I don't really see public perception ever shifting to the degree where it's considered just as valid as a real performance by a real person. Same with AI-generated books, while they're scarily readable and possible in theory, people like to know their work came from a human author with an idea, and not a slop machine.
16:10 – Take that thought and change direction to the real world. I remember visiting some drafting offices of Esso and I found out that what one person did was simply draw up the design blueprints for gas stations to be built. Thirty years later in PetroCanada I'm seeing the same job on computers in a 3D space being put together like Lego. While drawing up actual blueprints is more complicated than making a virtual building for a game, it is not by much and it also follows a set method to achieve a successful result. Gas stations are NOT supposed to be 'creative', they are supposed to provide convivence and ease of access to products in a manner that leads the customer to the cashier and then to the exit, with slight variations available according to the terrain. If you are suddenly catching visions of a Mandelbrot then you are catching on. Welcome to the world of A.I.
In the Fallout community a voice synthesizer named xVASynth has been traveling around, a testament to all of the studies of sound to connect all forty four sounds together, although at the time I reviewed it you still had to program in the cadence of the speech. But now that I've told you about it, I want to show you the part you really should have been scared about: there are ONLY forty four sounds in the English language. That's it, no more, for such an egotistical species you'd think we'd be more clever about our language. But no, after all this development and age, we only have a total of forty four sounds in our language. The recreation of voices doesn't need rows of servers, just 10gigs including the reference files and 2GB or ram.
As to how complicated characters can be in an AI generated world, I merely have to point you fellas back to a game that has already been out for over a decade; The Sims offered you the mechanics for the A.I. to run, and if us stupid humans figured out how to make it run, how long do you you think it would take an AI to figure it out for an environment, like a small town, with the updated knowledge of behavior our universities now teach?
If you can explain how to do something, you can teach a computer to do it. What has been taking so long up till now is that they require some very lengthy explanations including aspects we don't even have words for. Even "Learning", if I can explain to someone how to learn…
We, humanity, are making a god and we are all enjoying the benefits of it's building blocks as it assembles itself together. Every individual nerve cluster of an algorhythm is one more to be collected in a whole. Somewhere a hacker is using an A.I. to break into systems and collect their data, using additional AIs to further it's goal. Corporate offices already rely on A.I. to analyze markets and suggest corporate strategy, and China is a horrific example of the use of AI in policing for all of us to see. And as for conversation, I point to the latest scandal from Google's AI research, they've been updating it since then…
The "Faithful" call it the singularity, but my bet on the office pool is that some executive will finally unleash it in some desperate attempt to save his job. I've already placed $20 on it, so you'll have to find another slot.
You say "our lifetimes", I say within the next ten years, more likely five. And when it happens we won't know a thing about it until it is far too late to do anything about it.
Wow good podcast but absolute dogshit take on the climate crisis from Yahtzee
5:32 I unfortunately have, my best friend is even one of them. He gets mad when people say a movie isn't good when he found it PERFECTLY adequate. As long as a movie is riding that bare minimum line of "passable," he thinks it should be immune to criticism lol
part of me wonders if the ai generated voices will actually be a good resource for modders.
21:57 You're thinking too small. An AI could get feedback from as many people as those who take the time to fill out feedback reports, answer surveys, etc. Riot Games did something like this ages ago where they set up an AI punishment system and had player feedback solve for it the rest of the way. If a person doesn't get caught by the system, they can still be reported. If a person fulfills specific categories that align with the amount and type of reports received it punishes them. An AI game designer could do the same, "players say this is not fun, they say X and Y are to blame. Change X and Y until player feedback reaches acceptable values" is incredibly simple to implement with the technology already available.
Isn't the idea that rural places don't matter extremely classiest?
My high school senior English term paper was about the book "1984" and I managed to get a 98.5% without even reading the book. Mostly because all the supporting articles about whatever literary nonsense I was supposed to be trying to justify gave me more than enough to work from without having to pick up the book. One of the articles was even nice enough to provide me the perfect quote from the book, complete with the page number of whatever edition they had been using.
What?! No EA, means no Road Rash!
Corporations don’t prefer small handcrafted films.
AI voice acting is one of those things. Like a lot of tech, people tend to turn their noses up at newer things which change the status quo.
It happened with music when synths came in. This will go the same way: different people will implement these things in different forms.
And literally as you said in the video: it'll get implemented so wearily often that people won't comment on it because it's just what the new normal is.
1:24:28 – Yahtzee spurs the existence of Cybermen!
Reminds me of that NY Times article "AI wins fine art competition, and artists aren't happy about it"
Our guitarist brought Threads to our attention. Some of that footage is nightmare inducing.
Voice acting alone reduces the quality of the script, I am surprised the industry has not built an archive that uses a repository of words said by actors in a few different ways, then have it used in text to speech systems, its strange how AAA/big media kills innovation…. more so when half the time voice actors are under paid and under utilized for choped down scripts… I guess voice work is a black(dark/abusive) industry after all lul.
I'm interested in AI as a subject and like the idea of it being used to make things easier on creators, especially if it can be used to cut down on crunch. When it starts getting used as cheap labor and an excuse to not pay people, that's when I'd start taking issue. Guess it has a bit of a sweet spot, which I'm not sure I'd trust studios to mind.
The thing about AI generated voices is that they don't actually need to be good, competent, or even actually functional to be used by major studios – they just need to be not so bad they embarrass them. The desire for more and more centralised control is far more powerful than their tolerance for craft or skill.
Today we learned: 1984 – still a better love story than Twilight.
12:05 adam Sandler actually never existed. He's an AI generated hologram.
“I just want you to fill my trough up with slop; and I want unlimited slop.” -Marty, 2022
AI is unavoidable, humanity won't stop with that endeavor if history has taught us anything about our tendencies.
Coexistence is ideal. Unlikely possibility at this times persepctive of being our future. I hope I'm wrong.
Knee jerk is strong in me, making it challenging to think critically. As a tool there's probably a lot value in the tech but big corps masters will abuse it in the namesake of all mighty profits.
Bleak topic, ty for bringing it to light ✨️
Bespoke, bespoke, bespoke, bespoke!
I read that reddit thread. You didn't miss much. A lot of people comparing GAAS to live performances which I feel missed the point so much.
Dust on YouTube has ai created scripts. It's weird.
Troy fucking Baker is gonna be livid
I wonder if AI will give us iconic voice lines.
You are a raider. legendary
Electrolytes means salt. Your nervous system needs salt to conduct electricity. If your salt levels get depleted through perspiration, your brain will have difficulty sending & receiving signals.
Electrolytes play a pivotal role in the eugenicist move "Idiocracy." The huge corporation that manufactures a popular sports drink full of electrolytes pressures governments to use the drink to water crops instead of actual water in order to increase profits, They claim it has, "electrolytes plants crave."
After decades of watering the crops with the sport drink, the soil becomes saturated with salt leading to a global food crisis,
One of the biggest problems we face as a sociery is that corporations follow the model of survival of the fittest, but companies don't die of old age. They just grow bigger and bigger and consume other companies
As much as I appreciate the ability to prevent a voice from being lost to time. Things need to have a natural end or it gets fucked up. The most obvious effect will be people out of work, but there's deeper implications to art, culture, and the economy, and more.
We're advancing far faster than our society or our monke brains can handle