Forum - View topicNEWS: SAG-AFTRA Union Declares Strike Against Video Game Companies Starting on Friday
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ZelosZoidberg
 Posts: 748 |
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Go get'em VA!
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FishLion
 Posts: 268 |
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Good luck to them, it's wild how people say all the time that others are blowing A.I.'s risks out of proportion when you have entire unions striking to make sure they are used in a fair way
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Beatdigga
 Posts: 4633 Location: New York |
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Companies keep poking the union bulls and they’re going to get the horns. All there is to it. You can’t threaten the livelihoods of those you rely on for your games.
I did get a chuckle out of both SAG and Rockstar confirming they weren’t one of the struck studios so GTA 6 wasn’t at risk of delay. |
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mdo7
 Posts: 6500 Location: Katy, Texas, USA |
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I've been following this news report via social media and email newsletters and I have to say: You have my support, go get them!!!
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lesterf1020
 Subscriber Posts: 295 Location: Trinidad and Tobago |
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This isn't going to end well. The video game industry was already losing lots of jobs and had even successful studios closing down. A.I isn't gong anywhere and the Corporations are just going to use this opportunity to cut costs by firing lots of people and outsourcing to south east Asia and eastern Europe.
The untold story of the Hollywood strikes is that a lot of production was shut down and never restarted. Lots of jobs were lost. It is shocking to see how many successful show runners, writers and actors have had to leave the industry because they can't find work in Hollywood anymore. the Corporations took the opportunity to clean house and cut costs with no care towards creating a sustainable, successful industry. Short term profits seem to be all they care about. Unions need to find a better way to deal with these situations. If you do the same thing too many times eventually your adversaries will adapt. |
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TheOnePieceIsReal
Posts: 80 |
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Given that the gaming industry is going through massive lay offs, studio shut downs, over bloated budgets, and several controversies, I feel like the use of AI in the Gaming world is the least of the industries problems right now. Also I feel like it would have been better to go on strike with Anime streaming sites since there have been times when they've been caught using AI to translate which resulted in a mess that ignores the talents of the translators. But that's just my opinion, and you're free to disagree with me. |
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FishLion
Posts: 268 |
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[quote="TheOnePieceIsReal"]
This isn't a video game strike though, it's an actors who work on video games strike. As many problems as the industry as a whole has, I would strongly disagree they have bigger fish to fry and I think that the actors' performances that can sometimes make or break a game experience are something that actor deserves compensation and control over if someone is going to make an AI simulacrum of their performances. If AI is as much of a foregone conclusion as you say (which I would agree with, the tech companies have invested way too much to let it die) then these sorts of boundaries are even more important, I would consider their requested regulations the barest minimum. I do wish translators could strike too, but to my knowledge there is no nationwide translator's union, and it is all to easy for a smaller group of strikers to be replaced, especially if they are underpaid and don't have financial cushion. |
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TheOnePieceIsReal
Posts: 80 |
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I never said that AI wasn't a problem. I'm just saying that the video game industry already has more problems in it compared to the use of AI. Not downplaying it, just saying that the VG industry is a huge mess. I'm very well aware of the discussions related to AI like plagiarism and the fear of taking people's jobs. |
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Greed1914
 Posts: 4671 |
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I don't blame them for the decision. It's possible the genie has made it too far out of the bottle already, but they also can't just let it happen. The companies they were negotiating with said it was disappointing that they could reach terms on 24 out of 25 things, but not this. Personally, my way of looking at that is the ability to use AI is so important to them that they would trade all the rest for it. Terms around better pay and safety don't mean much if the jobs are gone, and it's easier to say yes to to things like better pay if you are planning on hiring less anyway.
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Cardcaptor Takato
 Posts: 5246 |
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AiddonValentine
 Posts: 2359 |
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A lot of productions were shut down because interest rates went up and studios couldn't just play around with fake money anymore. The unions did the right thing by calling out studios on their stinginess, greed, and general incompetence. And AI isn't going to save them due to more and more data revealing it doesn't cut costs or help productions. People committed to that placebo are just engaging in the sunk-cost fallacy. |
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FishLion
Posts: 268 |
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Thar make sense, I hadn't heard that specifically yet but I have long believed that AI is never going to be efficient at replacing creative work in the long term, it's predicted that by 2026 AI, cryptocurrency, and data server energy consumption will more than double so that it equals the energy consumption of Japan (p 8). At average current cost, that's $130 trillion or $65 trillion more than it costs at the moment. Once the people trying to make money get charged for the massive power bill they incur generating content and then still have to pay a team of people to polish the content to a marketable point, the rug is gonna get pulled |
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jdnation
Posts: 2129 |
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If it ends up like the Hollywood strike...
The corps will benefit the most. AI will remain. Non union solutions will grow. The unions will compromise. Union leaders will get rich from dues. Only the established higher tier top talent will be safe. Jobs will shrink. The majority of lower level talent will have no work. More games will rely on presentations that require none or hardly any VA work, or complete AI solutions that are good enough. Games, even narrative ones can get by on text boxes alone, or made-up language and emotive mimicry. Only AAA will have elaborate performance capture, and they'll hire top talent. The bulk of game companies are outside America and this will have zero impact or relevance to them. Even big American publishers will outsource overseas to solve their issues. There are not a lot of cards to play here for Video Game VAs. This is very different from Hollywood films. Gamers don't have the same wants as movie goers. |
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Tenchi
 Posts: 4555 Location: Ottawa... now I'm an ex-Anglo Montrealer. |
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[quote="FishLion"]
That's the macro picture for AI in general where we're talking about giant server farms like Amazon Web Services but, if we're just talking about voice synthesis, it can be done entirely offline on a higher end laptop and game studios already have computers much more powerful than even the most high-end laptops or consumer grade desktops. |
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Cardcaptor Takato
Posts: 5246 |
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