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NEWS: SAG-AFTRA Video Game Actors Strike Continues as Negotiations Get Extended


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Vladimir Morales



Joined: 08 Mar 2022
Posts: 195
PostPosted: Mon Oct 28, 2024 8:37 am Reply with quote
To all people who say that striking workers should get real jobs instead of complaining about AIs, I say this: "it won't be funny when it happens to you".
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Swami.



Joined: 22 Sep 2016
Posts: 28
PostPosted: Mon Oct 28, 2024 9:12 am Reply with quote
Anyone want to get into the video game voice-acting industry? Now’s your chance!
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Reuben Lack



Joined: 20 Sep 2022
Posts: 3
PostPosted: Mon Oct 28, 2024 9:17 am Reply with quote
Swami. wrote:
Anyone want to get into the video game voice-acting industry? Now’s your chance!

Ew. Don't be a scab.
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RenimLS



Joined: 26 Mar 2014
Posts: 135
Location: North America
PostPosted: Mon Oct 28, 2024 9:55 am Reply with quote
Swami. wrote:
Anyone want to get into the video game voice-acting industry? Now’s your chance!


Not sure how you think you could get into the industry when their current contracts frequently include them using your voice for AI which in turn will likely be used for all future work. If you want to be a one time use disposable hirer and then have to compete with a corporate owned version of yourself for future work, sure I guess now is your time to shine, but don't expect it to be career generating.
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milkyy



Joined: 24 Jul 2018
Posts: 128
PostPosted: Mon Oct 28, 2024 1:42 pm Reply with quote
It's crazy because literally every single one of those companies has scummy practices, and are bloated messes pumping out failure after failure. Every single one.
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Stampeed Valkyrie



Joined: 10 Aug 2014
Posts: 856
Location: PA
PostPosted: Mon Oct 28, 2024 2:04 pm Reply with quote
Ai is coming for many things, its already woven into many aspects of our lives and the pace is just going to get faster. Life is adapt or get left behind.

I wish the VAs luck, but unfortunately..
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Greed1914



Joined: 28 Oct 2007
Posts: 4606
PostPosted: Mon Oct 28, 2024 4:17 pm Reply with quote
It is still very telling to me that they could reach a tentative agreement on 24 out of 25 things the union wanted, but not on the use of AI. To me, that says that the companies see using AI in voice acting is so important that they would have traded everything else to get it. It's the kind of thing you do because you expect that the savings will come in the form of not needing to hire people in the future.
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MFrontier



Joined: 13 Apr 2014
Posts: 13536
PostPosted: Mon Oct 28, 2024 8:01 pm Reply with quote
I'm with the voice actors, especially when it comes to AI.
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Mr. Bethesda



Joined: 27 Aug 2021
Posts: 6
PostPosted: Tue Oct 29, 2024 1:27 am Reply with quote
Greed1914 wrote:
It is still very telling to me that they could reach a tentative agreement on 24 out of 25 things the union wanted, but not on the use of AI. To me, that says that the companies see using AI in voice acting is so important that they would have traded everything else to get it. It's the kind of thing you do because you expect that the savings will come in the form of not needing to hire people in the future.


It seems like they're willing to play hard ball too. Genshin Impact's latest content does not have an English dubbing for some new characters. Most players play sub so it's not a big deal or anything but it seems to be something companies are willingly to fore go. Given AI's popularity and widespread usage in other fields I guess it's worth an ultimatum since it's such a gamechanger and other VAs will be fine with using it.
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RenimLS



Joined: 26 Mar 2014
Posts: 135
Location: North America
PostPosted: Tue Oct 29, 2024 9:41 am Reply with quote
Stampeed Valkyrie wrote:
Ai is coming for many things, its already woven into many aspects of our lives and the pace is just going to get faster. Life is adapt or get left behind.

I wish the VAs luck, but unfortunately..


The funny thing is they've already found that an AI can do a better job than a CEO during non-fast changing situations (so pretty much their job for the majority of the time), but you won't see them replace CEOs or only have CEOs for temporary critical situations. AI only comes for those who aren't rich.
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Top Gun



Joined: 28 Sep 2007
Posts: 4774
PostPosted: Tue Oct 29, 2024 10:11 am Reply with quote
Stampeed Valkyrie wrote:
Ai is coming for many things, its already woven into many aspects of our lives and the pace is just going to get faster. Life is adapt or get left behind.

I wish the VAs luck, but unfortunately..

Ah yes, just like cryptocurrency, or NFTs, or...
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FishLion



Joined: 24 Jan 2024
Posts: 204
PostPosted: Tue Oct 29, 2024 1:07 pm Reply with quote
RenimLS wrote:
The funny thing is they've already found that an AI can do a better job than a CEO during non-fast changing situations (so pretty much their job for the majority of the time), but you won't see them replace CEOs or only have CEOs for temporary critical situations. AI only comes for those who aren't rich.


Yup, because it is ultimately a cost cutting tool. It is a tool shaped by the desires and uses of upper management at companies so "unnecessary" jobs like the people that actually produce the product can be cut. Because I guess the corporate dream right now is to have a ton of companies operated by robots that vastly overpaid execs boss around with no sass.

Does anyone else remember when corporations swore up and down they shouldn't be taxed as much so they could make more jobs and they indeed get ludicrous tax cuts? Glad that investment paid off and they are only going to use their massive wealth to benefit people (well if you work at a server farm anyway)
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NeverConvex
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Joined: 08 Jun 2013
Posts: 2507
PostPosted: Tue Oct 29, 2024 1:28 pm Reply with quote
ANN wrote:
The agreement's terms include informed consent for the use of AI to create digital voice replicas (recreations of the voice of a real performer, living or dead). They also include requirements for the safe storage of digital assets. The union said that the deal will enable Replica Studios "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," but the agreement also requires that voiceover performers "have the opportunity to opt out of its continued use in new works."


These terms seem very limited; 'informed consent' doesn't do much to protect you from being out of a job offer if you say no, doesn't sound like it involves royalties for voice reuse (although one of the other linked articles mentions "fair compensation for their contributions", so maybe that was meant to be implied by talking about "licensed use" here), and doesn't protect you from being outcompeted by an 'off-the-shelf' version of an already famous voice actor, as someone memorably put it in another thread.

This is the deal they walked away from, though, not the "clear and enforceable language, that they will protect all performers covered by this contract in their A.I. language" the union is seeking, right? Is the language the union wants viewable somewhere?

These issues with voice and translation are pretty interesting as contrasts to image/video AI applications. It feels natural to me that problems with the latter could be heavily mitigated by requiring meaningful compensation to folks' whose work was used (or, in the future, is used) as training data, but I'm not sure how much sense that makes in voice/translation, given how much of that seems more clearly in the public domain (I think, anyway; haven't dug into these specific models and looked at their sources, so guessing a bit).
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FishLion



Joined: 24 Jan 2024
Posts: 204
PostPosted: Tue Oct 29, 2024 2:56 pm Reply with quote
NeverConvex wrote:
These issues with voice and translation are pretty interesting as contrasts to image/video AI applications. It feels natural to me that problems with the latter could be heavily mitigated by requiring meaningful compensation to folks' whose work was used (or, in the future, is used) as training data, but I'm not sure how much sense that makes in voice/translation, given how much of that seems more clearly in the public domain (I think, anyway; haven't dug into these specific models and looked at their sources, so guessing a bit).


It depends on a lot because it can be hard to tell what has gone into the data bank. According to what I read AI is trained by remembering relationships and patterns between images and not the images itself, so it would be almost impossible to get a list of content used to train it unless the creators voluntarily published such a database. Voices seem a little tougher, but I think even if you can't copyright voices you could definitely claim copyright on the recorded material used for training. It comes down to the same issue of if using such materials for training is copyright infringement or if because the product is "original" in a technical sense if they would not consider training material as part of the copyright protections.

As for how translation relates, translations count as a "derivative work" the same as a fan fiction, because it is a version of work made with the input of the translator. The only difference is that in translations that are published they are done with the permission of the copyright holder. You are allowed to copyright any derivative work made with the permission of the origin copyright holder, that why a movie based on a book can be copyrighted by movie studios when they don't own the source material. So the math would work out about the same and we just need to see if copyrighted material is protected or not before seeing if voice and translation are protected.
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NeverConvex
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Joined: 08 Jun 2013
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PostPosted: Tue Oct 29, 2024 5:04 pm Reply with quote
FishLion wrote:
It depends on a lot because it can be hard to tell what has gone into the data bank. According to what I read AI is trained by remembering relationships and patterns between images and not the images itself, so it would be almost impossible to get a list of content used to train it unless the creators voluntarily published such a database.


Yeah, the AI itself can memorize some of its training inputs, and if you're sufficiently clever you may find ways to pull those out, but by-and-large it doesn't come with a list of what it was trained on, and certainly not with a copy of it (which would be vastly larger than the AI itself; it can't perfectly copy all of its inputs---it just isn't big enough, by design). There are common widely used corpuses, but any of these larger models will have involved quite a lot of mostly automated data collection on their own, too.

I was thinking about the kinds of data I'd expect them to train on, though, and more about whether it seems like enabling compensation based on it would result in sustainable economic/legal model, less so on how the the copyright question will ultimately be resolved. i.e., folks being entitled to compensation for reuse of the skilled labor they put into artwork they posted online seems sensible, and also applies to a narrow-ish affected subset of the population, so maybe the result is both AI and artistic community benefit, and without a dramatic amount of extra legal infrastructure (which could be then be re/misused in other contexts, whether or not it works in this one). But I'm not sure it looks the same if, say, the creator of a large language model trained in part on the text of wikipedia pages were expected to compensate the editors of all those pages.

Maybe I'm overestimating the problems it would cause in the translation/voice domains, though. I have no real idea what voice data they would have trained on; scraping Youtube and similar services seems like the obvious option, I guess? I'm not sure how to think about the potential small-change compensation of millions of single-digit-views Youtubers, although given the monetization of Youtube, maybe it's not that weird a thing to imagine.
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