What a weird article. It doesn’t say what was agreed and it doesn’t say what the voice actors want instead. Voice actor says the deal is “garbage” and the AI company says the deal is “ethical”. But what is the actual deal???
Yeah, it just seems like the deal was announced that there is a mechanism for voice actors to sign away the rights to AI imitation. The story seems to be that so many of the union members had no part or consultation in the negotiations.
Many voice actors object to the ability to sign away the rights to your own voice at all, because studios will insist on hiring only voice actors who are willing to do so. AI replication of voices will pretty much eliminate the need to ever pay another voice actor forever. You could probably count on one hand the number of voice actors with the power to negotiate that out of a contract on their own.
It’s sort of like a union saying that there’s a way for companies to hire members who will work more than 18 hours a day. You think, “well they can just say ‘no’ if they don’t want to.” But then the company will only hire people willing to work those longer hours, and it becomes the default. Great applicants will have to give something up to negotiate it out of their contracts. That’s the sort of abusive bargaining positions that union negotiations exist to prevent.
I could be wrong, though. There could be some detail or rate that they negotiated that everyone is unhappy with.
Many voice actors have suggested this new deal is at odds with the purpose of that industrial action, with Fallout and Mortal Kombat voice actor Sunil Malhotra saying he “sacrificed to strike half of last year to keep my profession alive, not shop around my AI replica”.
Copying existing voices is the silliest use of this technology. Why do I want another fictional character to sound like Nolan North?
Hire Nolan North anyway, but make him sound like whatever the hell you want. Let artists create the voice they hear in their head for this character they’ve invented. Use a real actor to get the performance, not the raw recording. Then if you need some throwaway lines added later, you don’t need to call the big-name actor back in, you can have anyone do the character.
This is turning the human voice into an instrument that anyone can play. No kidding it’s so-so if you just text-to-speech some generic dialog, or put sheet music into a MIDI. Talent matters. But now it can matter the way guitarists matter, rather than the way singers matter. Alex Lifeson could join Cannibal Corpse. Geddy Lee cannot.
Why? saving money for the company, as always
They could save even more by using a completely fabricated voice.
Neither the article or the blog post really give any concrete details about the deal, so it’s hard to say how bad it really is. I guess it all depends on how you define “fair” compensation for a person’s voice. The fact that so many voice actors weren’t even informed about it is concerning though. Obviously there has to be some confidentiality, but it’s odd how many voice actors seem surprised by the deal if it was made after consulting union members who were going to be affected.
I guess it all depends on how you define “fair” compensation for a person’s voice.
I know I’m taking this out of context, but this kind of thing was the stuff of fairy tales a couple hundred years ago, and the ones making the deals to take people’s voices have never once been the good guys
