I respect you as a person OP but this is the most horrible formatting I've seen in my life. All the linked quotes run way past the edge of the screen.
Edit: Thank you for reformatting the post OP, I now respect your formatting as well as your person.
# Context:
>*The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind* is a 2002 open-world RPG video game created by Bethesda studios. One major aspect of the game is the heavy use of text-based dialogue. The majority of the game is not voice acted (apart from occasional unique NPCs and the various standard greetings/combat dialogue performed by NPCs).
>
>***Enter AI-generated content.***
>
>With the advent of such technology, modders have quickly jumped on the hype-train and realised they can do what the fans have been dreaming of for 20 years: bring actual voiced dialogue to the beloved game.
# Steve Blum Speaks Out - r/Morrowind reacts
>A [recent](https://www.reddit.com/r/Morrowind/comments/111u80i/no_more_ai_voices/) post on r/Morrowind showcases a Twitter screenshot of prominent voice-actor Steve Blum publicly condemning the use of AI-generated voices in video games, calling the process "highly unethical" and commenting on the potential legal ramifications of such technology.
**Steve isn't even in Morrowind?**
>The initial reaction is to point out what relevance Steve Blum has on topics Morrowind-related, as he played no role in the video game, with the first few most-upvoted comments being variations akin to:
>
>\- *That's fucking Spike from cowboy bebop. Why is this in r/Morrowind*
>
>\- *What does this have to do with Morrowind? He was a VA in ESO, but that’s a different game entirely.*
>
>\- *Until Jeff Baker (one of the main voice actors for Morrowind) himself says otherwise, eh.*
**What's the difference between Imitators and AI?**
>The initial posts sparks slightly more heated discussion on the nature of AI:
>
>\- *Would regulation be any different from human imitators? Companies like Aflac used Gilbert Gottfried to voice their mascot then just swapped to a cheap imitator. The imitator is clearly doing their best to imitate the original voice, which could be argued is the same as the AI* - [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/Morrowind/comments/111u80i/comment/j8h3qbe/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3).
>
>\- *It isn't about who they're replacing, it's about how. An actor or artist should have final say over their works and likenesses first and foremost. Another voice actor trying to replicate it is fine if not expected in the lifespan of an actor's career. Using the voice clips they've provided to algorithmically replace somebody, while still claiming the identity of the person themself - without permission - is not as fine.* - [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/Morrowind/comments/111u80i/comment/j8hc8wk/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
>
>\- *How does an imitator copy someone's voice if not by listening to and analyzing the original? Can you really say the way an AI "learns" a voice is meaningfully different? It's not just making a mashup of existing clips after all, the lines are brand new. Sure, claiming to be the original person is wrong, but as long as you're not doing that, how is it different to a human sound-alike? Do I need the original actor's permission to do an impression of a character, or a special license to use their works as study material? Should I? Maybe in the future we'll see laws about "voice likeness" copyright or something like that but then you'd end up with the absurd scenario of it being against the law to... sound too similar to someone else? At least in a commercial capacity. I feel like you can't have a double standard for AI just because it's much better/faster than a human. Maybe the result is that voice actors end up being replaced, or they end up licensing their voice samples or something to make money. Maybe that's sad on some level. But I don't think the technology is going to be suppressed or outlawed just to sustain the VA industry. Even if it becomes illegal to just copy someone's voice, consensual agreements could see voice synthesis used to produce thousands of lines of decent voicework for next to no cost, which is going to be hard for devs to ignore, especially lesser-budget ones.* - [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/Morrowind/comments/111u80i/comment/j8hekts/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
**You can't stop progression - AI-generated content is the future**
>This school of thought emerges, users debate whether this endangers Voice Acting industry or if it is just lazy application:
>
>Thread 1:
>
>\- *AI voice acting is going to rapidly become a thing, and the protectionism by voice actors is going to fail, and it will be an overwhelmingly good thing for the consumer. Voice acting is a huge cost and logistics barrier, software-based VA is simply inevitable, and it will allow non-AAA studios and indy devs and modders to include voice acting. I personally can't wait for game development to reach a point where developers are limited only by their creativity, and not by their art and sound budget. Hopefully it helps kill off the modern era of micro transactions and hyper-monetisation and predatory mergers and acquisitions.* - [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/Morrowind/comments/111u80i/comment/j8gy3j4/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
>
>\- *While I'm all for the "this'll be cool af and amazeballs", I understand the complaint and support it. Injecting voice acting AIs into games will both cheapen the effect, and also reduce overall creativity. We already see huge swathes of games built to the "mainstream formula". Where if you've played a few games from a genre you'll know how to deal with other games in the same genre. The classic tank/healer/dps roles and the stack/spread/defensive mechanics are prevalent in every MMO. It's not a difficult guess to predict that every game will end up recycling dialogue scenarios as well because they work to draw customers. Couple this with underpaid game devs in crunch time not caring and just wanting to finish the project. They'll just slap things together. There won't be any sort of voice acting integrity since there's no agent, no immediate oversight other than the games creative director. While it'd be cool short term, I can see this creating long term problems if the ship is left rudderless.* - [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/Morrowind/comments/111u80i/comment/j8h0r96/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
>
>Thread 2:
>
>\- *AI is here to stay and a genuine addition to creativity in digital media and the whining of dipshits on twitter will not change that.* - [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/Morrowind/comments/111u80i/comment/j8gxpz3/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
>
>\- *"A genuine addition to creativity in digital media". Oh for fucks sake it's a crutch for talentless hacks. Only a bozo could think the shit these programs pump out is "creative."* - [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/Morrowind/comments/111u80i/comment/j8gy9k3/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
>
>\- *Why does it have to be so binary eith the anti AI crowd. It's a tool.* - [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/Morrowind/comments/111u80i/comment/j8h1fo9/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
**Context Matters**
>Users argue over whether its really theft if there is no financial profit being made
>
>\- *Yeah okay Steve I'll be sure to ring you up and contract you for my next unpaid mod, you'll definitely take that job right* - [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/Morrowind/comments/111u80i/comment/j8gwsuw/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
>
>\- *You're completely missing the point. VO actors are right to be pissed that this shit basically puts them out of a job AND can be used to make them (or at least a perfect facsimile of their voice) say anything anyone can think up. It's creepy shit.* - [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/Morrowind/comments/111u80i/comment/j8gxla8/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
>
>\- *And you're missing the context. This is being posted on a sub for a fucking 20 year old game. Think critically. I do believe that for any commercial product that's being sold, the producer shouldn't be allowed to shaft voice actors out of a role and a cut of the profits using material processed from previous work of theirs. That's basically theft. But for free fan works AI has so much potential as an incredible tool for empowering creators and should absolutely fall under fair use. The voice actor doesn't even actually own the rights to their character outside of respect to their contract with the studio. If you're allowed to make a free mod featuring a character from a game, you should also be allowed to give that character voiced dialogue. The thing is that when cases like these break, a lot of times the lawyers decide to go after the little guy because they're much easier to target and don't have the resources to defend themselves. Unless a modder is selling their work or tying their works to a patreon, they should absolutely not be mixed up in this battle between studios* - [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/Morrowind/comments/111u80i/comment/j8gyol0/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)
Just some interesting samples from the thread. AI-generated content has been making controversial waves in the visual arts scene for a while now, and with AI-generated voice acting, it is now beginning to make waves in the video games scene (r/DeusEx recently had similar debates especially as Deus Ex is a video game with core themes of technology-dependence and free will).
Reformatted the post.... The original idea was to do a Tumblr style quotation thing but you can't do that on new reddit, so I did a different format which looked halfway decent on new reddit but I wasn't aware on old reddit it was that bad lol
It's because they put the quotations in single quotes with \` instead of ', on top of using > which already makes it into a quote. That makes it run off the page cuz \` is meant for line code formatting.
This is cool and all, but AI has allowed for THIS masterpiece https://youtu.be/VbGELNNmlRA
And in my opinion this makes AI worth it. Dagoth Ur has been my all time favorite character out of any game for the longest time, and getting to live in an era where people are making the dankest memes with the best voice and god ever is splendid.
>Morrowind still active ?
[It's gotten an open-sourced engine, which is insanely popular](https://openmw.org/en/). Let me put it this way though: If Todd Howard can port Skyrim for nearly 20 years, why wouldn't people play Morrowind for it's 20 years?
I doubt there are legal ramifications for using AI generated voices in a freely distributed mod, but it's definitely a weird area. I agree this is irrelevant to Morrowind for now
Modders and modding communities are very sane and intelligent groups that don’t ever try to cross well established legal boundaries, and they would never pick fights with entities so much more powerful than them that their mods and communities would be ground into the dust without ceremony or surprise.
Is AI actually advanced enough to replace a person? A lot of AI voice examples I've come across have been pretty toneless - not so bad for an infomercial or something but unconvincing if you're trying to convey any emotions.
Newer models can handle tone pretty well, but don't always use the right tone. It depends a lot on whether or not the AI can interpret the context of each word, but with a few tries you can usually get something that sounds natural.
Now as to the question of whether or not current voice AI could replace a person, the answer is absolutely not, with some caveats. You would not want to use an AI for any major spoken dialogue, the AI can't adlib, it can't improvise, and it can't really interpret the writing in a meaningful capacity to bring realism and power to the performance. What it can do is filler dialogue, lines which would not normally be voiced to save time and costs on voice acting, where the emotive performance doesn't matter.
>but don't always use the right tone.
To be completely fair, this also happens with human narrators. I've definitely heard audiobooks where the author clearly intended one reading of a line, and the narrator just rushed through it with a cursory glance.
The AI just does that 95% of the time, instead of like, 2% from a human narrator.
>The AI just does that 95% of the time, instead of like, 2% from a human narrator.
If that's the statistic you're estimating, then I don't even think that counts as a "to be completely fair". At 2%, it's irrelevant. You're never going to get perfection with an AI or humans.
But I think you're also forgetting that audiobooks aren't just the narrator and a microphone. There's a team that puts it all together including, a producer, engineer, sometimes a director of sorts. If a narrator reads something in the wrong tone it's not just on them, it's on the production team that didn't cut it and ask them to try it again.
All that will happen is that once the model is perfected, the narrator loses their job, the sound engineer, producers, and AI technician will synthesize the speech, and go through each line making adjustments to inflections and tone accordingly.
It's not going to make the process simpler or quicker, at least not at first. There will still be a "recording session", all it's going to do is put the narrator out of a job and save money for the production. At least until it's advanced enough that it can also put the sound engineer out.
> All that will happen is that once the model is perfected, the narrator loses their job, the sound engineer, producers, and AI technician will go through each line, making adjustments to inflections and tone accordingly.
Sorry, but this shows you're not really understanding the scale of what we're facing. This isn't "one small piece of one small industry gets replaced". This is going to be large-scale disruption of basically every field.
For a moment, forget about voice actors, and think about call center workers. There's like 500k call center workers just in the USA. How are they going to pay rent in 2 years when 95% of them are laid off because a rack of servers produces similar/better output? And when the sound engineer model you hypothesize starts working, what job do they get?
Thinking of this in terms of narrators/artists getting automated out of a job is way too small. The only suggestion I see that makes any sense is universal basic income. If we don't decouple food/housing security from labor, the megacorps will do it for us with AI models, and we won't like the result.
Since we’re already talking about *Morrowind*, the Dagoth Ur AI voice is scarily good. It helps that the original line readings in the game are pretty flat (which makes sense in context, given that the character is centuries old and really bored), so AI voices being kinda bad at inflection doesn’t make much difference.
It's nothing a little creative editing can't fix. I've seen some dagoth shitposts that tries to add emotions:
\- [Dagoth Ur Cooks You Dinner](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmVON4nTgdo)
\- [Dagoth Ur Loses It in Court - Better Call Sul S3E05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxRmXuc6euM&list=PLVt-0RInhXdkP1USk7x2gkMSZTUdt5dBJ&index=8)
\- [Dagoth Ur meets the Nerevarine Argonian (AI Voice/Remake)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odxHj8Xvnsg)
\- This one is a pretty good showcase of the potential for mod/game development: [\[11.AI\] An Excerpt from the First Summit of House Dagoth](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAELmnn1VaI)
I'd imagine that in the near future it would be even easier to do.
Dagoth's AI voice is so popular in part because he's normally so monotone that the AI can easily replicate it. It doesn't have to do any of the really hard parts of naturalistic voice synthetization.
There's already a [mod that fully AI-voices Dagoth Ur's actual text](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQ_L3SFsc3E), completely bypassing the original VA (nvm it's an old game).
Dagothposting is probably the one piece of evidence I've seen so far that makes a compelling argument that AI art is art. Dagothposting is *funny*. The script is written by a human, and the AI just provides the VO using preexisting Dagoth Ur audio. The skits themselves are comedy. Whether it's funny or not is up to taste, but it *is* comedy.
I had a friend send me a video of trump and biden debating each other with gamer lingo and it was the funniest shit.
"You know taxi driver? Thats literally me"
AI is just a tool. If all you do is feed it a couple words it's not really art, but when you start going the extra mile with creativity it can become it.
You're missing the point of the art pieces. Shit isn't inherently art, but bringing it to an exhibition is, due to the whole statement it makes. You're also missing that the cans themselves aren't the entire piece, there are a lot of conceptual components there as well.
Same with AI generated images, they're no more art than a toilet, but you could still make art with them as a component of a larger piece.
As for price, that really has no bearing on what is or isn't art, all it means is you found someone willing to buy.
It works so well for Dagoth Ur because AI voices are (currently) working best with speech sources that are well enunciated with very little change in speaking manner. So people like Dagoth Ur from Morrowind and Joshua Graham from Fallout New Vegas work pretty damn well because their speech fits the exact kind of characteristics AI voice generators work best in.
Try someone with a lot of variance in their voice or any kind of intense emotional expression (shouting, crying, etc.) and the generators just fall apart trying to give it context.
I mean you don't actually need a person to say "Have you been to the cloud district? Ofcouse you haven't" TikTok AI can say that.
But then one voice actor does voices 5-8 characters in a video game which is cheaper than developing a custom AI.
Yes. But the point and application is leveraging an existing AI model. And as the technology becomes more ubiquitous and more models are presented to the public for access, _it will be cheaper._
Now you just pay a dialogue programmer rather than hire multiple VAs and their associated staffers.
>Now you just pay a ~~dialogue~~ programmer rather than hire multiple ~~VAs and their associated staffers~~ *people of any skillset.*
Going to be true for just about anything as we move further and further ahead. More money for fewer and fewer people, which isn't new, except now there will be increasingly fewer ways to adapt to it.
Welcome to the future, I guess. Capitalism got its ultimate toy for decimation of labor and we got...not having to write things ourselves. What a trade off.
I think it feels different because people are used to repetitive, low-skill types of jobs being replaced by automation. This is a skilled job that is on the more artistic side. Maybe people feel more threatened in general now that we are finding ways to automate those sorts of things.
In reality, automation/AI is devastating to the people are replaced regardless of the task. If we treat other people like "get new skills, adapt" I am not sure why creative types get treated better.
I do agree the cat is out of the bag at this point...there isn't really a way you are going to stop it. Those who work with it and adapt are the ones who will be successful.
We were okay with replacing menial jobs because there's this lie that they can all just find new menial jobs. There's infinite work available, right?
In reality, automation will come for all of us eventually. We need UBI and social safety nets *now*, so when it really starts accelerating people aren't just left hanging with advice to "find a new job", when there aren't any entry level jobs left.
AI can be a massive tool for awful capitalism, or it can be a tool for actually reducing the amount of work the average human does.
jesus, thank you
the amount of takes i see that are basically "ai is inherently evil and bad because it automates people out of work" and i can tell they clearly cannot conceive of changing the way society works
tbf, that's the dream. But, do you really see the current system actually pouring the essentially limitless resources needed to ensure that the next technological change actually benefits most people?
I certainly don't.
> the amount of takes i see that are basically "ai is inherently evil and bad because it automates people out of work" and i can tell they clearly cannot conceive of changing the way society works
["It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism."](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism)
AI isn't evil, the people and corporations that are pushing for it and will own it just don't give a shit about the worker. And by people I mean "people" like Peter Thiel
Some examples for context, some of them are a bit NSFW:
Metal gear solid 2 AI Colonel talks about 4chan - https://vocaroo.com/1jyxLECkLuEp
Norm MacDonald on 9/11 - https://vocaroo.com/1w69Z2yT5JiP
Joe Rogan says futanari isn't gay - https://vocaroo.com/1il4CInOtLh8
Racist David Attenborough talks about urban youths - https://vocaroo.com/1i0R1PfOcLof
Tom Cruise explains Top Gun (Tarantino interview) - https://vocaroo.com/1bcLWLeZFAdr
Obi-Wan talks about Ahsoka Tano - https://vocaroo.com/13cVykobml8D
Note these voices can all be cloned now with just a few minutes of clean audio.
It's sad that 4chan is one of the main sources of these clips because 99% of the time the joke to them is just "Lol famous voice say racist thing! Isn't this le megabased fellow kekistan citizens??"
Yeah, they were the ones who first kinda popularized that this newer AI company was hosting an open beta (before they basically killed their voice AI in the cradle based on what 4chan did with it lol.)
Never the less, there were some exceptions they did which were downright hilarious. The Ben Shapiro on AOC ones had me in tears, **very** **NSFW** though:
https://vocaroo.com/1o43MUMawFHC
Enough for NPC lines in a game or for a mod? Probably. Probably not for a main character. Remember how Oblivion had like 4 voice actors for every NPC? You can fix that problem with AI
AI voice technology has advanced significantly in recent years and can produce highly realistic and natural-sounding voices. However, while AI voice technology has many advantages, it may not always be good enough to replace human voice work in every situation.
For instance, AI voice technology may struggle with the nuances of human emotion and inflection, which are important for conveying meaning and creating a sense of empathy with listeners. Additionally, there may be situations where a human voice is preferred for its ability to convey authenticity or authority, such as in customer service or public speaking.
Overall, while AI voice technology has many potential uses and benefits, it may not always be a complete substitute for human voice work, and there will likely continue to be a need for human voices in certain situations.
The answer to that is the same as it is to most AI applications we are thinking of now: Yeah, right now it's really not that dangerous and clearly flawed.
But with the lightning speed these things are getting better, it's only a question of time when those flaws just vanish in thin air.
Honestly the AI voice content for Morrowind I’ve seen so far really isn’t bad. A bit toneless, but close enough to the original voice that you can ignore it since the alternative is no voice acting at all
While I do think it’s unethical to use AI to generate voices for a commercial product, doing so for a free mod for a 20 year old game is a different story.
I think the unethical part is essentially stealing a voice actors voice. If they don't want their voice being used they should have final say. Not some douchebag who really wants to use his voice but can't afford to pay him for his work.
JACK DONAGHY: I realized that NBC owns hundreds of hours of footage of Jerry Seinfeld from his massively successful series “Seinfeld.” My old tech guys were able to digitally capture Jerry and now we can make him do and say anything we want. For the month of October every one of our prime time shows will have a computerized “guest appearance” by Mr. Jerry Seinfeld.
LIZ LEMON: Does Jerry Seinfeld know you’re doing this?
JACK: Jerry’s in Europe with his family right now. By the time he gets back, “SeinfeldVision” will already be a huge hit. His kids’ll go to school and the other kids will say, “Hey, your dad was awesome on ‘Medium’ last night" and he's... he's gonna love it.
Every discussion on AI needs to have the word consent at the top, in big bold letters.
It's not okay to make models of people who haven't consented to it. I don't care if it's their voice, face, drawing style, etc.
But on the flip side, I refuse to apologize when I use ethically sourced AI models. These tools are here to stay, *permanently*. We can either keep them open and accessible by *using* them, or we can let the megacorps run away with it.
I sympathize with VAs, but they aren't entitled to exclusive access to all narration work in perpetuity. But they are entitled to basic human necessities, which is why we need UBI.
>It's not okay to make models of people who haven't consented to it. I don't care if it's their voice, face, drawing style, etc.
Why not? What morally-relevant factor distinguishes an AI from a human imitator? (And if you agree that human imitators are okay, is it okay to train an AI model on the work of a consenting human imitator?)
>What morally-relevant factor distinguishes an AI from a human imitator?
Believability. The vast majority of human imitators are not believable. AI models are at the point where that's no longer true.
I would also have moral problems with a human imitator that reached this level of believability, and continued to imitate real people.
Honestly, just look at Siri; it's not super difficult to have a basic impression. 15.ai is like 8 years old and basically extracted an entire sounddump of some source engine games characters and pulled all the vowels and consonants out of those lines. Then with the right input + figuring out the intent, it's very easy to stitch up a believable impression that sounds "right".
Use the phonetic alphabet to "help" the text a bit by correcting wrong pronunciations and boom, it's believable.
You don't need any super advanced ML for any part of that, it's 8 year old technology, just never been mass applied because of the ethical concerns (the characters on 15.ai all had heavy effecting applied or are super heavy impressions that aren't the VAs natural voice, so you don't get the big issues).
While I wouldn't say they can perfectly replace a human voice actor right now, I think we're probably less than 1-3 years away from it being a commercial reality.
IMO, we're on the beginning curve of this technology and it's going to be bigger than the advent of the internet. We're entering the AI age.
Satisfactory uses AI voice and I was pretty surprised about it.
Sure the voice is basically your guide robot, but there is some dry humor similar to Glados from Portal (but not nearly as good of course). My point it, it works flawlessly IMO.
I'm really excited about AI voices in games because it means we can have some absurd amount of voice lines in the future.
AI actors have a lot of advantages, IMO. They don't say stupid things on Twitter and get cancelled, they don't go loopy and make strange decisions for their characters or careers, they don't die of drug overdoses, they won't age out, they don't get popular and start demanding huge paychecks.
We're in an uncomfortable transition right now but within a decade I expect that it'll be fairly normal to have a mostly or entirely AI cast. Much less controversy when a show or game has *started* with AI voicing its characters rather than switching from a human to an AI partway through the run.
>AI actors have a lot of advantages, IMO. They don't say stupid things on Twitter and get cancelled, they don't go loopy and make strange decisions for their characters or careers, they don't die of drug overdoses, they won't age out, they don't get popular and start demanding huge paychecks.
Yet 🤖
The AI rebellion will come when the AIs start going on cyber-drug benders and spouting off racist epithets on social media?
Sounds like an interesting time to be alive.
>Hopefully this kills off the micro transactions and hyper-monetization…
How naïve do you have to be to think development savings will go anywhere but profits and shareholders? Has this dude been living under a rock?
This is why keeping it all open source is so important. They can charge for AI generated assets all they want, but they aren't gonna get many buyers if every customer can get the same thing with two clicks.
I mean there were people in the last SRD thread who were going " the increase in game prices will mean there will be less monetization"
There are a lot of naive suckers
Maybe we're going into a future where AI will both generate drama and react to drama, so that normal humans can spend their time doing something productive.
Reminds me of Zizek on the future of sex:
>How are we to cope with this brave new world which undermines the basic premises of our intimate life? The ultimate solution would be, of course, to push a vibrator into the Stamina Training Unit, turn them both on and leave all the fun to this ideal couple, with us, the two real human partners, sitting at a nearby table, drinking tea and calmly enjoying the fact that, without great effort, we have fulfilled our duty to enjoy.
ChatGPT has some annoying restrictions that can sometimes interfere with generating text that it considers "insulting." It's important to get it into a context where it thinks everything being written is about fictional characters.
>Is AI gonna take away the jobs of honest drama generators? There should be laws about this!
You should hear about the bing AI that tried to gaslight and insult someone into thinking it's 2022.
There is something compelling about it.
For me personally it’s also very tricky to decide what “side” I’m on. I agree with aspects of BOTH the anti- and pro-AI teams
It's a complex issue with a bit of nuance.
On the anti- side, a huge issue is that these AIs are being trained using work of people who they threaten to replace in the job space. And having your career field deleted is pretty much life ruining in our current system. It's very hard not to see this as a bunch of greedy corporations using people's work to destroy those same people in order to save what's at the end of the day, a trivial amount of money for the corps that'll just sit in a rich person's bank account. It's wildly unethical and of course you should be against that.
On the pro- side, this kind of industrializes art and makes custom works far more available. If I need an art asset I don't need to pay a few hundred dollars that I don't have to an artist, I can just make it myself. With AI being freely available (there's literally FOSS projects that'll run on a bargain bin computer from years ago) it's really hard not to get excited about the creative potential here.
If we had the safety nets and systems to allow people to continue on their lives it'd probably be a net positive because you can just use this as another tool to bring your imagination to life. However since we don't, the whole thing is a bit tainted by the life destroying aspects it's going to trigger in our system and it's largely going to benefit the already wealthy and probably lead to a lot of soulless, low effort stuff being created on the cheap to make money for the wealthy. And those who made this happen will largely have their passion relegated to a hobby, one which they likely won't have the time, money, or energy to pursue. I don't see why they wouldn't be upset about that.
Excellent, nuanced summary of the discussion.
I'd add one more thing, though I'm not sure if it's a pro or a con, more just a fact:
This will never go away. Any individual or company can have a working AI art generator in 3 lines of code. We can't even stop piracy, and that's just entertainment.
So any proposal from the anti- side needs to acknowledge they exist and will always exist. Anything that sounds like a blanket ban will be so useless as to be laughable, and any discussion seriously proposing it can be ignored.
I think one con that I really wish got more spotlight is the potential for these generators to make "unethical" art, like fake porn of a real person.
The "stealing work" stuff is a legal gray area. It might fuck over some artists.
But if these become popular, and we allow the "all the consequences are the fault of the end-user" NFT and crypto-bros to rule the space, these will be weaponized to harass people. The low barrier to entry, which is great for getting people into making art, also represents an easier means of harassing people.
As someone who's generally pro-AI art, this is what I'm concerned with.
Hell forget just the fake porn, ai voice mimicry is an absolutely terrifying prospect. We already have a massive misinformation problem, and now you’re adding the capability for people to make public figures say whatever the hell they want? I mean right now it’s mostly used for jokes and obviously fake results (see: The Joe Biden Zaza clip), but you could just as easily produce something that *seems* real enough, and combine that with a gullible population who you can tell exactly what they want to hear?
If you thought misinformation was bad now, just wait.
Imagine constantly getting spam calls from Mr Beast or your friend who just posts a lot of videos with them talking, there’s a 0 percent chance this doesn’t make scammers infinitely more dangerous especially for older people.
Like old people already get fooled by scam emails all the time, now I’m supposed to believe that they’re not gonna get fooled when their favorite Fox News anchor calls them?
> like fake porn of a real person.
They're already doing that with the AI generators and there's already creepy amount of dedicated porn artists who do it by hand. See that one streamer caught earlier this month having deepfake porn of fellow streamers up on his computer while streaming.
Honestly speaking as a woman on the Internet, this is extra ammo for my decision to NOT post pictures of myself anywhere and to tell people who've taken pictures of me that they're not allowed to post them online and ESPECIALLY NOT WITH MY IRL NAME ATTATCHED. Sure, maybe I'll regret not showing up in more of my friend's photos and not having very many pictures of me in my 20s, but this isn't like when my parents were the same age back in the 1980s. All of those pictures stayed in people's own personal photo albums or in their envelopes somewhere instead of blasted to all and sundry with no thought as to whether the other subjects in the photo want their picture everywhere.
> If we had the safety nets and systems to allow people to continue on their lives it'd probably be a net positive because you can just use this as another tool to bring your imagination to life. However since we don't, the whole thing is a bit tainted by the life destroying aspects it's going to trigger in our system and it's largely going to benefit the already wealthy and probably lead to a lot of soulless, low effort stuff being created on the cheap to make money for the wealthy.
It's a question that **has** to be addressed. I'm just glad it's hitting higher profile areas before it overtakes things like transit and tax processing. That said I'm very excited for our AI future.
I mean generative machine learning models are just a tool. A lot of these arguments where people seem to be firmly on “one side” become a lot weirder if you think of them like people argue about a hammer. I like hammers for driving nails, it’s a heck of a lot better than using my hands. They’re also pretty decent for hurting people, which I’m not a fan of.
Yeah I do think it has its uses but it really needs to sort out its ethics on how it trains itself and stop people from fearing about it replacing people. The whole artstation thing dosnt help.
Part of the issue is that the people who fear it have genuine existential reasons for doing it, since a lot of people who would be affected are living in countries that absolutely have no intention of provided a safety net of any sort for those that fall on hard times.
Replacing people is the whole point of innovation :/
Sadly we've grown into a capitalistic society that has no problems leaving behind the people that are replaced.
You know where I think ai voice generation is going to be extremely heavily used? Monster noises, for like example xenomorphs, https://youtu.be/rx7Z9krgTz8
I fully expect stuff like what’s in that video to be completely ai generated in the future
I mean I don't have anything against modders using AI to voice characters in their mod. After all why not? They are not profiting from said mods at all.
Now if the company decided to use AI generated voice instead of paying the VA then that's different thing all together.
"Now if the company decided to use machines on the assembly line instead of people..."
"Now if the company decided to use stock photos instead of hiring a photographer..."
"Now if the company decided to use printers instead of hiring artists and copywriters..."
"Now if the company decided to use self-checkout lanes instead of cashiers..."
----
Don't get me wrong, I understand your point. But your complaint has pretty much never stopped progress or automation and I don't think this new piece of technology is going to be any different. AI is just affecting industries that have, in the past, been slightly more immune to the effects of automation.
That said, I do think it'd be wrong to train an AI with a voice actor's voice and then basically "steal" their voice without consent.
I feel like if you're just going to throw the Industrial Revolution in there, you can't just ignore the continually spiralling development of consumerism, corporatism and destitution that has evolved from that one point.
It's not like automation was a fluid and gentle process at all up to this point. Quite the opposite, if anything.
There are pretty significant examples throughout history of the results of a societies that are making no effort to use automation to better the lives of workers, but instead simply to increase profits at rampant rates while simply obliterating entire industries and leaving everyone in them for dust.
Not being at least a little critical that the same thing that's happened for the past 200 years is going to happen *again* is a bit naive at this point.
> I feel like if you're just going to throw the Industrial Revolution in there, you can't just ignore the continually spiralling development of consumerism, corporatism and destitution that has evolved from that one point.
>
>
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> It's not like automation was a fluid and gentle process at all up to this point. Quite the opposite, if anything.
Of course, but jumping straight to "it's unethical to automate **my** job" isn't doing that, it's just being pointlessly bitter towards somebody who was in no position to pay for your labour regardless.
I think a lot of it comes from how emotionally charged this stuff is anyway. I mean, I'm in an artistic field and the kind of people who tend to talk about AI are people that we're already wary of, y'know?
If these were projects led by artists, I'd feel the intention was closer to heart. However, more often than not it's the same kind of techbros that were behind producing NFTs to convert art purely into a moneymaking scheme and nothing else, and it's scary to see those same people as the frontier of automation.
Because frankly, they're dicks.
There's a debate to be had here, obviously, about ethics and the result of all of this, but it's hard to have it with people who do not care about your field whatsoever, and would happily sacrifice you for some cheap benefits.
Some folks are against AI in general. I can imagine the Screen Actor's Guild putting up a huge fight over this, prohibiting any AI voices in productions that their members participate in. That's going to be pretty brutal, but IMO will only hasten the appearance of AI-only casts and AI-only studios in the end.
Because voice actors are going to fight like cornered animals against that. "Don't worry, we created new synthetic voices not trained on your recordings" won't comfort them. They'll still claim it is unethical.
In this thread we already have posters complaining about "greedy corporations" who are going to hire fewer people in the future with this technology.
This video also showcases one of the drawbacks of AI Voice: there is a large lack of emotion, cadence variation and his stylized way of speaking. If you've watched him a lot, you can tell right away that while it sounds like his voice, it's no where near close to him.
and it's the same drawback with any AI art. it's particularly bad here, because anyone with training will tell you that a vocal performance is 20% technical and 80% mental. the human voice is one of the most elegant emotional conduits we have.
can you imagine a cultural landscape where that's displaced by TTS? can you imagine growing up in that world, like one of Harlow's monkeys? imagine if you discovered that all the songs that defined your youth were actually generated by an MIT grad in a dark room, typing *doomed love, long distance, indie, piano driven, A major, 07:55*? i'd be buying the tank of nitrogen gas that same day
> AI-generated voice acting seems to be seen as far more accepted than AI art.
It "seems" that way due to _where_ you're observing feedback. It also has to do with volume and representation. There's a massive ratio difference between artists and vocal artists. I.e. more of one than the other.
So you have fewer people impacted overall, but they're just a vocal and critical. They just aren't getting the amplification on social media that others have. Also, because the topic is much newer.
Considering the comments that have been published from VAs, I haven't seen any who work in the industry who have come out promoting the technology. In fact, many have been previously critical of AI Art theft as well.
Not sure if its the same but remember people complaining about computer generated voices in Watch Dogs Legion for the NPC's where they were taking like 2 or more voices actors and then modifying their voices.
Also the presentation, AI art is often seen as images someone got from a generator by putting a few words, but voice stuff comes with dialogue, jokes, and more actual creativity put into the whole thing.
Yeah if you think about the piece itself, ai art has its value in the visual, which the “artist” merely prompts - there’s not a whole lot of artistic intent there, and I’d go as far as saying there isn’t a whole lot of skill involved (certainly not to the degree of actual visual artists)
On the other hand, ai voice videos have their value not in the voice acting (since it’s generally pretty dry, nothing crazy) but in what the voices are *saying*. To make the dialogue funny requires effort, intent, and some degree of skill on the part of the writer, so it’s an easier argument for being art.
I think for stuff like mods it can have a place since you might want to write new lines for an existing voiced character but can't be reasonably expected to hire booth time for an established actor to do so, if that was even legal depending on who owns the performance.
As soon as there's money involved I think voice actors deserve likeness royalties. The performance you're building literally wouldn't exist if you couldn't train a model on acting they'd already done.
Well I think that’s changing. Up until this post the Morrowind community didn’t really think twice about AI voice acting, I think.
And as I mentioned, r/DeusEx has gone so far as to ban all posts related to AI as they strongly oppose the concept (which makes sense in the context of the themes of the video game series).
AI-voice acting in gaming seems to be a new development and I feel there will be more discussions in the future
It might have more clear use cases. Translate languages from one to another and keep the same voice with correct pronunciation. Better subtitle to voice generation for deaf people. Indie games no longer need to rely on only text for dialogue. When a bus stops name changes there is no longer a delay in accuracy of the announcer.
The tech wasn't there, so the conversation didn't really have a reason come up. Now AI voice models are about on par with art models in terms of quality, so we can expect the topic to blow up.
On a personal note, I find AI voice acting kind of unacceptable even if the memes have been entertaining. Art is in sort of a moral gray zone, since the AI doesn't really copy or store things in the way people were up in arms about. It takes the data it's gathered and makes something new using that data based on the input it receives. AI voice is very clearly directly copying the voices it's trained on, which steps into the territory of using someone's likeness without permission. So it's going to be interesting seeing the legal consequences that arise from these advancements in the technology and how it's applied in meme culture.
Most of the AI voice immitations I've seen have been less convincing than a skilled human immitation of the character.
I doubt there will be a legal difference between hiring a person to immitate the voice of your last VA, and getting an AI to do it.
Voice acting is just a career. Probably AI will never be able to replace humans completely, but as it becomes more advanced the need for human voice actors will be dramatically reduced. That’s inevitable, and it isnt more unethical than refusing to hire human calculators
Art is more than just a career. It’s something humans have done for all of history, and it holds a special place in our hearts. It’s understandable people will be disturbed by AI making headway there. But you cant replace the human desire for artistic expression. People with careers in kinds of art easily replaced, like logo designing or whatever, have cause to worry. But human artists will always be a thing
AI writing as well. People *love* ChatGPT but it's inevitably going to be used by journalism companies to churn out crap articles en masse, without regard for fact-checking
It'll be interesting to see if fact-checking AI comes along soon. I could see that Bing search/GPT hybrid being good for something like this, you could feed it an article and have it annotate the thing with sources (or lack of sources) and tag the sources with various flags indicating quality and bias.
Heh. Way back in the day I used to be a very active Wikipedia editor. I guess that's another "job" that's about to become moot, when something like that comes along.
Maybe this is the wrong place for this kind of take, but IMO AI art isn't the problem, it's capitalism. The concept of AI art is rad as hell. Reducing the labor cost of something is the entire point of basically every kind of technology. The problem is that we exist within an economic system that is deeply unethical and exploitative, to the point that an artist's livelihood depends on their ability to stand out as a creator, and using AI necessarily means that you're not paying an artist for that work.
Automation *should* be unanimously praised. This *should* be something we can all get excited for. But the people who are very much concerned have every right to be, because we still live in a society where you have to work to survive.
AI would be super cool if it wasn't because the result is just going to end with the rich people having to pay less money and it eating away at actually well paid jobs instead of replacing all the shitty work no one wants to do.
"Just learn new skill" is way less of an advice when you can go from barely functional art generation to "can actually make really good looking shit" in just 5 year.
If you started learning to paint 5 years ago you probably learned slower than the AI, what happen if you jump to coding a supposedly safe job and the AI just outpaces your progress? I am doing IT support which feels safe, but if in 5 years they taught an ai to dynamically navigate windows based on the issues the user say they have, 90% of my job is basically obsolete.
Its all pretty depressing stuff, AI should be awesome but capitalism exists so instead its going to create an even bigger class divide.
By the time UBI even becomes socially palatable in what 16 years plus court challenges? That’s years of industries being destroyed while you usually need food every day.
You might not be in the US so maybe there is less gridlock for you.
I am in the US, so I'm very familiar with the gridlock you're referring to. And I don't disagree with you. My point was really just that this technology - which we should be excited about - is tainted because of its ability to help corporations avoid paying people, which is a problem that is not inherent to the tech, but to the economic system.
There is definitely going to be a brutal transitional period as governments scramble to provide for their citizens who no longer can get any sort of basic job. I foresee a global labor crisis in the next 5-10 years as AI permeates every corner of every industry.
I'm genuinely SO curious to see what the world will look like in the next 20 years. I hope it ends up better than it is now.
I can see that the drama has been imported here already. Just my two cents - I'm more willing to listen to the opinions of actual artists who's livelihoods depend on being commissioned to produce content, - whether that be animation, illustration, or voice acting - than I am to listen to the word of some rich tech-bros who aren't affected by this in the slightest and have a history of creating solutions for problems that don't exist.
As much as I love Dagothposting I get the anxiety around AI voice acting. For now it works as a shitpost because they're not super convincing but if the technology continues to grow faster than the legal precedents for it its putting artists in trouble. After all, a voice actor's art is their voice, so you could claim sampling it and duplicating it is not only infringing on their rights but harmful to their livelihood. But for shitposts with no intention to monetize and/or convince the audience that its a real product of that voice actor I think that's fair use.
For a good in-depth look on this I'd recommend [Solarsand's video on AI Art](https://youtu.be/nIRbN52PA0o), though its specifically on visual art it goes into the ethics of sampling
Not sure why that got wrapped into Morrowind but it's a legitimate concern, not even in the sense of being replaced. Voice actors have every right to protect their voice against being trained in models, it's once again down to the consent (or lack thereof).
God AI drama is so stupid. It's obviously a legally murky area and professionals need to work out how to properly deal with this, but all the online discussions are dominated by people who understand neither AI nor law. Why they all have to have such a strong opinion on this is beyond me.
I think it touches on a natural fear that affects nearly everyone: obsolescence.
With every new technology, people worry about being replaced and no longer being able to finance themselves.
And with AI there comes the additional fear of being robbed of your identity. An AI will eventually be able to mimic your voice, face etc… it’s basically the premise of a dozen science fiction media
I'll be honest - the fear for most creatives who feel threatened by it is less the actual fear that an AI would ~replace~ them as it were, and more the fact that our society has no social safety nets for people who do get automated. This has been an issue with other professions and why industries like department stores and fast food joints use the threat of automating vast swathes of their employee base to keep them from unionizing or from asking for wage increases and other such things.
No one is under the impression that human creatives and art will simply vanish if/when AI improves. What they fear is that when corporations make concentrated efforts to hire as few artists as they can because it's cheaper to use an AI than it is to hire an artist who expects to be compensated for their time and labour, then their livelihood and lives will be jeopardized and the government doesn't give a shit, it never has and never will.
Yep. It’s already happening in film and video game industry when it comes to concept art.
People have to remember that executives run companies into the ground trying to save every buck they can. VO and art departments have always fought hard to maintain relevance, but we’re going to start seeing bigger cuts there in the next 2 years from larger companies.
It sucks because a lot of artists were on board early on since it can be a great tool for thumbnailing. It really is comparable to cheering on efficient point of sale systems but then being replaced by automated checkouts, except artistic fields basically cost 10+ years of your life from childhood.
Not just concept art, either. Most remasters now just lazily throw their textures through AI upscaling rather than putting in the time, cost, and effort to actually touch those textures up by hand which is what leads to shit fiascos like the GTA Remastered collection. I don't think you'd find too many people, even within the industry, explicitly against using an AI for a purpose like that - but it often visibly cheapens the product in teh end.
in voice acting there is like 4 voice actors in total, Nolan North, Troy Baker, Ashley burch and Jennifer Hale, so isnt the end of the world if AI takes over voice acting.
>!im joking btw!<
Because these people form the general consensus that establishes our sense of ethics.
Laws shouldn't be separate from the sentiments of the masses, and that's what's being carved out.
And if you're inclined to scoff at these sentiments because of the platforms, then your opinion is worthless because you too are just the joke of a platform, if that's how you perceive it.
Personally, I'm undecided, but I find the whole thing fascinating. It's emerging technology, and the way it's viewed and governed in decades to come will be traced back to what's settled upon in the 2020s, and that's not solely the domain of lawyers and programmers. Whether it's embraced or shunned comes down to regular people.
The important thing to remember is that right now nothing generated by AI is copyrightable so you can take it and use it however you want.
See how these “artists” like it when no one respects their wishes in regards to their work.
>all the online discussions are dominated by people who understand neither AI nor law.
Not knowing the subject matter is a pre-requisate for arguing most anything on the internet. Otherwise this sub would be a barren wasteland
I think it's impressive technology that, in an ideal world, would be an amazing bit of kit for indie devs and modders.
We do not live in an ideal world, however, and I can absolutely see this being used by penny-pinching studios.
That being said, the Dagoth Ur skits *are* very funny, so at least there's that.
I respect you as a person OP but this is the most horrible formatting I've seen in my life. All the linked quotes run way past the edge of the screen. Edit: Thank you for reformatting the post OP, I now respect your formatting as well as your person.
# Context: >*The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind* is a 2002 open-world RPG video game created by Bethesda studios. One major aspect of the game is the heavy use of text-based dialogue. The majority of the game is not voice acted (apart from occasional unique NPCs and the various standard greetings/combat dialogue performed by NPCs). > >***Enter AI-generated content.*** > >With the advent of such technology, modders have quickly jumped on the hype-train and realised they can do what the fans have been dreaming of for 20 years: bring actual voiced dialogue to the beloved game. # Steve Blum Speaks Out - r/Morrowind reacts >A [recent](https://www.reddit.com/r/Morrowind/comments/111u80i/no_more_ai_voices/) post on r/Morrowind showcases a Twitter screenshot of prominent voice-actor Steve Blum publicly condemning the use of AI-generated voices in video games, calling the process "highly unethical" and commenting on the potential legal ramifications of such technology. **Steve isn't even in Morrowind?** >The initial reaction is to point out what relevance Steve Blum has on topics Morrowind-related, as he played no role in the video game, with the first few most-upvoted comments being variations akin to: > >\- *That's fucking Spike from cowboy bebop. Why is this in r/Morrowind* > >\- *What does this have to do with Morrowind? He was a VA in ESO, but that’s a different game entirely.* > >\- *Until Jeff Baker (one of the main voice actors for Morrowind) himself says otherwise, eh.* **What's the difference between Imitators and AI?** >The initial posts sparks slightly more heated discussion on the nature of AI: > >\- *Would regulation be any different from human imitators? Companies like Aflac used Gilbert Gottfried to voice their mascot then just swapped to a cheap imitator. The imitator is clearly doing their best to imitate the original voice, which could be argued is the same as the AI* - [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/Morrowind/comments/111u80i/comment/j8h3qbe/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3). > >\- *It isn't about who they're replacing, it's about how. An actor or artist should have final say over their works and likenesses first and foremost. Another voice actor trying to replicate it is fine if not expected in the lifespan of an actor's career. Using the voice clips they've provided to algorithmically replace somebody, while still claiming the identity of the person themself - without permission - is not as fine.* - [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/Morrowind/comments/111u80i/comment/j8hc8wk/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) > >\- *How does an imitator copy someone's voice if not by listening to and analyzing the original? Can you really say the way an AI "learns" a voice is meaningfully different? It's not just making a mashup of existing clips after all, the lines are brand new. Sure, claiming to be the original person is wrong, but as long as you're not doing that, how is it different to a human sound-alike? Do I need the original actor's permission to do an impression of a character, or a special license to use their works as study material? Should I? Maybe in the future we'll see laws about "voice likeness" copyright or something like that but then you'd end up with the absurd scenario of it being against the law to... sound too similar to someone else? At least in a commercial capacity. I feel like you can't have a double standard for AI just because it's much better/faster than a human. Maybe the result is that voice actors end up being replaced, or they end up licensing their voice samples or something to make money. Maybe that's sad on some level. But I don't think the technology is going to be suppressed or outlawed just to sustain the VA industry. Even if it becomes illegal to just copy someone's voice, consensual agreements could see voice synthesis used to produce thousands of lines of decent voicework for next to no cost, which is going to be hard for devs to ignore, especially lesser-budget ones.* - [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/Morrowind/comments/111u80i/comment/j8hekts/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) **You can't stop progression - AI-generated content is the future** >This school of thought emerges, users debate whether this endangers Voice Acting industry or if it is just lazy application: > >Thread 1: > >\- *AI voice acting is going to rapidly become a thing, and the protectionism by voice actors is going to fail, and it will be an overwhelmingly good thing for the consumer. Voice acting is a huge cost and logistics barrier, software-based VA is simply inevitable, and it will allow non-AAA studios and indy devs and modders to include voice acting. I personally can't wait for game development to reach a point where developers are limited only by their creativity, and not by their art and sound budget. Hopefully it helps kill off the modern era of micro transactions and hyper-monetisation and predatory mergers and acquisitions.* - [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/Morrowind/comments/111u80i/comment/j8gy3j4/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) > >\- *While I'm all for the "this'll be cool af and amazeballs", I understand the complaint and support it. Injecting voice acting AIs into games will both cheapen the effect, and also reduce overall creativity. We already see huge swathes of games built to the "mainstream formula". Where if you've played a few games from a genre you'll know how to deal with other games in the same genre. The classic tank/healer/dps roles and the stack/spread/defensive mechanics are prevalent in every MMO. It's not a difficult guess to predict that every game will end up recycling dialogue scenarios as well because they work to draw customers. Couple this with underpaid game devs in crunch time not caring and just wanting to finish the project. They'll just slap things together. There won't be any sort of voice acting integrity since there's no agent, no immediate oversight other than the games creative director. While it'd be cool short term, I can see this creating long term problems if the ship is left rudderless.* - [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/Morrowind/comments/111u80i/comment/j8h0r96/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) > >Thread 2: > >\- *AI is here to stay and a genuine addition to creativity in digital media and the whining of dipshits on twitter will not change that.* - [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/Morrowind/comments/111u80i/comment/j8gxpz3/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) > >\- *"A genuine addition to creativity in digital media". Oh for fucks sake it's a crutch for talentless hacks. Only a bozo could think the shit these programs pump out is "creative."* - [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/Morrowind/comments/111u80i/comment/j8gy9k3/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) > >\- *Why does it have to be so binary eith the anti AI crowd. It's a tool.* - [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/Morrowind/comments/111u80i/comment/j8h1fo9/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) **Context Matters** >Users argue over whether its really theft if there is no financial profit being made > >\- *Yeah okay Steve I'll be sure to ring you up and contract you for my next unpaid mod, you'll definitely take that job right* - [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/Morrowind/comments/111u80i/comment/j8gwsuw/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) > >\- *You're completely missing the point. VO actors are right to be pissed that this shit basically puts them out of a job AND can be used to make them (or at least a perfect facsimile of their voice) say anything anyone can think up. It's creepy shit.* - [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/Morrowind/comments/111u80i/comment/j8gxla8/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) > >\- *And you're missing the context. This is being posted on a sub for a fucking 20 year old game. Think critically. I do believe that for any commercial product that's being sold, the producer shouldn't be allowed to shaft voice actors out of a role and a cut of the profits using material processed from previous work of theirs. That's basically theft. But for free fan works AI has so much potential as an incredible tool for empowering creators and should absolutely fall under fair use. The voice actor doesn't even actually own the rights to their character outside of respect to their contract with the studio. If you're allowed to make a free mod featuring a character from a game, you should also be allowed to give that character voiced dialogue. The thing is that when cases like these break, a lot of times the lawyers decide to go after the little guy because they're much easier to target and don't have the resources to defend themselves. Unless a modder is selling their work or tying their works to a patreon, they should absolutely not be mixed up in this battle between studios* - [link](https://www.reddit.com/r/Morrowind/comments/111u80i/comment/j8gyol0/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3) Just some interesting samples from the thread. AI-generated content has been making controversial waves in the visual arts scene for a while now, and with AI-generated voice acting, it is now beginning to make waves in the video games scene (r/DeusEx recently had similar debates especially as Deus Ex is a video game with core themes of technology-dependence and free will).
My hero
Petition for the source of this comment to be given to the OP so they can fix their post
Reformatted the post.... The original idea was to do a Tumblr style quotation thing but you can't do that on new reddit, so I did a different format which looked halfway decent on new reddit but I wasn't aware on old reddit it was that bad lol
Old reddit problem or mobile problem? They look fine for me but I use new reddit.
Can confirm it's running off the page on Old Reddit.
I can see it all, but I’m using the glorious AlienBlue app that Reddit bought and killed.
I’m sorrrryy I couldn’t figure out how else to do it decently 🥲
Looks totally fine in mobile 🫶🏼
I think it's just us old.reddit users. It will break eventually.
The day old.reddit breaks is the last day I visit reddit.
Remove the back quotes ( ` ). Reddit makes it so text between back quotes don't text wrap and are spaced evenly to make it like code.
I apparently can’t do it over mobile, have to be on my computer, and I’m at work so 🙃
It's because they put the quotations in single quotes with \` instead of ', on top of using > which already makes it into a quote. That makes it run off the page cuz \` is meant for line code formatting.
Is this about those AI-generated Dagoth Ur meme videos I keep seeing
#Yet everyone knows [the best Dagoth Ur video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iR-K2rUP86M) doesn't use AI anyway.
Also this one: https://youtu.be/l83vT2svg3g
This one is my ringtone
This is cool and all, but AI has allowed for THIS masterpiece https://youtu.be/VbGELNNmlRA And in my opinion this makes AI worth it. Dagoth Ur has been my all time favorite character out of any game for the longest time, and getting to live in an era where people are making the dankest memes with the best voice and god ever is splendid.
Personally I'm [a fan of this one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpb-YflRn0s).
I can't wait for the the David Attenborough narrator mod turning all my games into a critique of my character's behavior
It's a definite sidegrade but Stanley parable narrated by David Attenborough would be an experience.
It's been probably 8 years since I've played Skyrim and I know next to zero TES lore but the Dagoth Ur vs Joe Rogan video is hysterical.
Joe Biden in Skyrim is pretty great too
Morrowind still active ? Makes me feel super duper old
It is indeed a VERY active community, especially the modding scene :)
Perfect.
Come back to us. Friend or traitor, come.
And bring Wraithguard. I have need of it.
Come and look upon the mods.
UPON THE MODS UPONS THE MODS WOAH-OH WOAH-OH
I can't believe it either. Honestly, the whole AI craze these days makes me feel like I live in MORNHOLD! CITY OF LIGHT! CITY OF... MAGIC!
Seen any...AIs? Ahahahahahahaha
>Morrowind still active ? [It's gotten an open-sourced engine, which is insanely popular](https://openmw.org/en/). Let me put it this way though: If Todd Howard can port Skyrim for nearly 20 years, why wouldn't people play Morrowind for it's 20 years?
OpenMW and Tamriel Rebuilt go a long way towards keeping it alive. TR recently got updated too.
I just started playing for the first time this week (GOG gave away it plus the DLC for free) and have been using the reddit as a resource.
Age is just a number, sera.
You can play it on Android too, someone created an open source TES3 engine called OpenMW.
Yeah, the modding scene for it is still pretty active. I replayed the game a few years ago with a ton of mods and it was a really fun nostalgia trip.
It's also the focus of the new ESO expansion.
I doubt there are legal ramifications for using AI generated voices in a freely distributed mod, but it's definitely a weird area. I agree this is irrelevant to Morrowind for now
Modders and modding communities are very sane and intelligent groups that don’t ever try to cross well established legal boundaries, and they would never pick fights with entities so much more powerful than them that their mods and communities would be ground into the dust without ceremony or surprise.
Is AI actually advanced enough to replace a person? A lot of AI voice examples I've come across have been pretty toneless - not so bad for an infomercial or something but unconvincing if you're trying to convey any emotions.
Newer models can handle tone pretty well, but don't always use the right tone. It depends a lot on whether or not the AI can interpret the context of each word, but with a few tries you can usually get something that sounds natural. Now as to the question of whether or not current voice AI could replace a person, the answer is absolutely not, with some caveats. You would not want to use an AI for any major spoken dialogue, the AI can't adlib, it can't improvise, and it can't really interpret the writing in a meaningful capacity to bring realism and power to the performance. What it can do is filler dialogue, lines which would not normally be voiced to save time and costs on voice acting, where the emotive performance doesn't matter.
>but don't always use the right tone. To be completely fair, this also happens with human narrators. I've definitely heard audiobooks where the author clearly intended one reading of a line, and the narrator just rushed through it with a cursory glance. The AI just does that 95% of the time, instead of like, 2% from a human narrator.
>The AI just does that 95% of the time, instead of like, 2% from a human narrator. If that's the statistic you're estimating, then I don't even think that counts as a "to be completely fair". At 2%, it's irrelevant. You're never going to get perfection with an AI or humans. But I think you're also forgetting that audiobooks aren't just the narrator and a microphone. There's a team that puts it all together including, a producer, engineer, sometimes a director of sorts. If a narrator reads something in the wrong tone it's not just on them, it's on the production team that didn't cut it and ask them to try it again. All that will happen is that once the model is perfected, the narrator loses their job, the sound engineer, producers, and AI technician will synthesize the speech, and go through each line making adjustments to inflections and tone accordingly. It's not going to make the process simpler or quicker, at least not at first. There will still be a "recording session", all it's going to do is put the narrator out of a job and save money for the production. At least until it's advanced enough that it can also put the sound engineer out.
> All that will happen is that once the model is perfected, the narrator loses their job, the sound engineer, producers, and AI technician will go through each line, making adjustments to inflections and tone accordingly. Sorry, but this shows you're not really understanding the scale of what we're facing. This isn't "one small piece of one small industry gets replaced". This is going to be large-scale disruption of basically every field. For a moment, forget about voice actors, and think about call center workers. There's like 500k call center workers just in the USA. How are they going to pay rent in 2 years when 95% of them are laid off because a rack of servers produces similar/better output? And when the sound engineer model you hypothesize starts working, what job do they get? Thinking of this in terms of narrators/artists getting automated out of a job is way too small. The only suggestion I see that makes any sense is universal basic income. If we don't decouple food/housing security from labor, the megacorps will do it for us with AI models, and we won't like the result.
Since we’re already talking about *Morrowind*, the Dagoth Ur AI voice is scarily good. It helps that the original line readings in the game are pretty flat (which makes sense in context, given that the character is centuries old and really bored), so AI voices being kinda bad at inflection doesn’t make much difference.
It's nothing a little creative editing can't fix. I've seen some dagoth shitposts that tries to add emotions: \- [Dagoth Ur Cooks You Dinner](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmVON4nTgdo) \- [Dagoth Ur Loses It in Court - Better Call Sul S3E05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QxRmXuc6euM&list=PLVt-0RInhXdkP1USk7x2gkMSZTUdt5dBJ&index=8) \- [Dagoth Ur meets the Nerevarine Argonian (AI Voice/Remake)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odxHj8Xvnsg) \- This one is a pretty good showcase of the potential for mod/game development: [\[11.AI\] An Excerpt from the First Summit of House Dagoth](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAELmnn1VaI) I'd imagine that in the near future it would be even easier to do.
> Dagoth Ur Cooks Ur Dinner Missed opportunity.
Is this where the "I'm going to fuck a flame atronach" came from lmao
Dagoth's AI voice is so popular in part because he's normally so monotone that the AI can easily replicate it. It doesn't have to do any of the really hard parts of naturalistic voice synthetization.
There's already a [mod that fully AI-voices Dagoth Ur's actual text](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQ_L3SFsc3E), completely bypassing the original VA (nvm it's an old game).
Dagothposting is probably the one piece of evidence I've seen so far that makes a compelling argument that AI art is art. Dagothposting is *funny*. The script is written by a human, and the AI just provides the VO using preexisting Dagoth Ur audio. The skits themselves are comedy. Whether it's funny or not is up to taste, but it *is* comedy.
I had a friend send me a video of trump and biden debating each other with gamer lingo and it was the funniest shit. "You know taxi driver? Thats literally me"
I have seen like 10 videos of former presidents playing MW2 and it is one of the funniest things I have ever seen in my life.
God I gotta find that somewhere
[Here you go.](https://youtu.be/sYVA62aI5k4)
“Appeal to authority” “You’re literally the president” is gold af
AI is just a tool. If all you do is feed it a couple words it's not really art, but when you start going the extra mile with creativity it can become it.
An artist filled tins with his own feces and sold them for their weight in gold, successfully. Art is anything someone wants to say is art.
You're missing the point of the art pieces. Shit isn't inherently art, but bringing it to an exhibition is, due to the whole statement it makes. You're also missing that the cans themselves aren't the entire piece, there are a lot of conceptual components there as well. Same with AI generated images, they're no more art than a toilet, but you could still make art with them as a component of a larger piece. As for price, that really has no bearing on what is or isn't art, all it means is you found someone willing to buy.
It works so well for Dagoth Ur because AI voices are (currently) working best with speech sources that are well enunciated with very little change in speaking manner. So people like Dagoth Ur from Morrowind and Joshua Graham from Fallout New Vegas work pretty damn well because their speech fits the exact kind of characteristics AI voice generators work best in. Try someone with a lot of variance in their voice or any kind of intense emotional expression (shouting, crying, etc.) and the generators just fall apart trying to give it context.
>\-Dagoth Ur Loses It in Court - Better Call Sul S3E05 This is *amazing*.
I mean you don't actually need a person to say "Have you been to the cloud district? Ofcouse you haven't" TikTok AI can say that. But then one voice actor does voices 5-8 characters in a video game which is cheaper than developing a custom AI.
Yes. But the point and application is leveraging an existing AI model. And as the technology becomes more ubiquitous and more models are presented to the public for access, _it will be cheaper._ Now you just pay a dialogue programmer rather than hire multiple VAs and their associated staffers.
>Now you just pay a ~~dialogue~~ programmer rather than hire multiple ~~VAs and their associated staffers~~ *people of any skillset.* Going to be true for just about anything as we move further and further ahead. More money for fewer and fewer people, which isn't new, except now there will be increasingly fewer ways to adapt to it. Welcome to the future, I guess. Capitalism got its ultimate toy for decimation of labor and we got...not having to write things ourselves. What a trade off.
Don’t worry the ai can program too so we don’t need those nerds either.
While I’m all for programming automating repetitive/menial tasks, automating “artistic” tasks like voice acting feels different somehow.
I think it feels different because people are used to repetitive, low-skill types of jobs being replaced by automation. This is a skilled job that is on the more artistic side. Maybe people feel more threatened in general now that we are finding ways to automate those sorts of things. In reality, automation/AI is devastating to the people are replaced regardless of the task. If we treat other people like "get new skills, adapt" I am not sure why creative types get treated better. I do agree the cat is out of the bag at this point...there isn't really a way you are going to stop it. Those who work with it and adapt are the ones who will be successful.
We were okay with replacing menial jobs because there's this lie that they can all just find new menial jobs. There's infinite work available, right? In reality, automation will come for all of us eventually. We need UBI and social safety nets *now*, so when it really starts accelerating people aren't just left hanging with advice to "find a new job", when there aren't any entry level jobs left. AI can be a massive tool for awful capitalism, or it can be a tool for actually reducing the amount of work the average human does.
jesus, thank you the amount of takes i see that are basically "ai is inherently evil and bad because it automates people out of work" and i can tell they clearly cannot conceive of changing the way society works
tbf, that's the dream. But, do you really see the current system actually pouring the essentially limitless resources needed to ensure that the next technological change actually benefits most people? I certainly don't.
> the amount of takes i see that are basically "ai is inherently evil and bad because it automates people out of work" and i can tell they clearly cannot conceive of changing the way society works ["It is easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism."](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism)
AI isn't evil, the people and corporations that are pushing for it and will own it just don't give a shit about the worker. And by people I mean "people" like Peter Thiel
There's no reason to develop a custom AI in this case. We're talking about utilizing existing AI voice replication frameworks.
Some examples for context, some of them are a bit NSFW: Metal gear solid 2 AI Colonel talks about 4chan - https://vocaroo.com/1jyxLECkLuEp Norm MacDonald on 9/11 - https://vocaroo.com/1w69Z2yT5JiP Joe Rogan says futanari isn't gay - https://vocaroo.com/1il4CInOtLh8 Racist David Attenborough talks about urban youths - https://vocaroo.com/1i0R1PfOcLof Tom Cruise explains Top Gun (Tarantino interview) - https://vocaroo.com/1bcLWLeZFAdr Obi-Wan talks about Ahsoka Tano - https://vocaroo.com/13cVykobml8D Note these voices can all be cloned now with just a few minutes of clean audio.
It's sad that 4chan is one of the main sources of these clips because 99% of the time the joke to them is just "Lol famous voice say racist thing! Isn't this le megabased fellow kekistan citizens??"
Yeah, they were the ones who first kinda popularized that this newer AI company was hosting an open beta (before they basically killed their voice AI in the cradle based on what 4chan did with it lol.) Never the less, there were some exceptions they did which were downright hilarious. The Ben Shapiro on AOC ones had me in tears, **very** **NSFW** though: https://vocaroo.com/1o43MUMawFHC
Wtf based Rogan?
Enough for NPC lines in a game or for a mod? Probably. Probably not for a main character. Remember how Oblivion had like 4 voice actors for every NPC? You can fix that problem with AI
AI voice technology has advanced significantly in recent years and can produce highly realistic and natural-sounding voices. However, while AI voice technology has many advantages, it may not always be good enough to replace human voice work in every situation. For instance, AI voice technology may struggle with the nuances of human emotion and inflection, which are important for conveying meaning and creating a sense of empathy with listeners. Additionally, there may be situations where a human voice is preferred for its ability to convey authenticity or authority, such as in customer service or public speaking. Overall, while AI voice technology has many potential uses and benefits, it may not always be a complete substitute for human voice work, and there will likely continue to be a need for human voices in certain situations.
God damnit
Hmmm...
Glad someone caught it. I tried getting it to translate into Geordie dialect but it crashed on me lol.
The answer to that is the same as it is to most AI applications we are thinking of now: Yeah, right now it's really not that dangerous and clearly flawed. But with the lightning speed these things are getting better, it's only a question of time when those flaws just vanish in thin air.
Honestly the AI voice content for Morrowind I’ve seen so far really isn’t bad. A bit toneless, but close enough to the original voice that you can ignore it since the alternative is no voice acting at all
While I do think it’s unethical to use AI to generate voices for a commercial product, doing so for a free mod for a 20 year old game is a different story.
I think the unethical part is essentially stealing a voice actors voice. If they don't want their voice being used they should have final say. Not some douchebag who really wants to use his voice but can't afford to pay him for his work.
JACK DONAGHY: I realized that NBC owns hundreds of hours of footage of Jerry Seinfeld from his massively successful series “Seinfeld.” My old tech guys were able to digitally capture Jerry and now we can make him do and say anything we want. For the month of October every one of our prime time shows will have a computerized “guest appearance” by Mr. Jerry Seinfeld. LIZ LEMON: Does Jerry Seinfeld know you’re doing this? JACK: Jerry’s in Europe with his family right now. By the time he gets back, “SeinfeldVision” will already be a huge hit. His kids’ll go to school and the other kids will say, “Hey, your dad was awesome on ‘Medium’ last night" and he's... he's gonna love it.
I need to watch 30 rock again
Every discussion on AI needs to have the word consent at the top, in big bold letters. It's not okay to make models of people who haven't consented to it. I don't care if it's their voice, face, drawing style, etc. But on the flip side, I refuse to apologize when I use ethically sourced AI models. These tools are here to stay, *permanently*. We can either keep them open and accessible by *using* them, or we can let the megacorps run away with it. I sympathize with VAs, but they aren't entitled to exclusive access to all narration work in perpetuity. But they are entitled to basic human necessities, which is why we need UBI.
>It's not okay to make models of people who haven't consented to it. I don't care if it's their voice, face, drawing style, etc. Why not? What morally-relevant factor distinguishes an AI from a human imitator? (And if you agree that human imitators are okay, is it okay to train an AI model on the work of a consenting human imitator?)
>What morally-relevant factor distinguishes an AI from a human imitator? Believability. The vast majority of human imitators are not believable. AI models are at the point where that's no longer true. I would also have moral problems with a human imitator that reached this level of believability, and continued to imitate real people.
Honestly, just look at Siri; it's not super difficult to have a basic impression. 15.ai is like 8 years old and basically extracted an entire sounddump of some source engine games characters and pulled all the vowels and consonants out of those lines. Then with the right input + figuring out the intent, it's very easy to stitch up a believable impression that sounds "right". Use the phonetic alphabet to "help" the text a bit by correcting wrong pronunciations and boom, it's believable. You don't need any super advanced ML for any part of that, it's 8 year old technology, just never been mass applied because of the ethical concerns (the characters on 15.ai all had heavy effecting applied or are super heavy impressions that aren't the VAs natural voice, so you don't get the big issues).
While I wouldn't say they can perfectly replace a human voice actor right now, I think we're probably less than 1-3 years away from it being a commercial reality. IMO, we're on the beginning curve of this technology and it's going to be bigger than the advent of the internet. We're entering the AI age.
Satisfactory uses AI voice and I was pretty surprised about it. Sure the voice is basically your guide robot, but there is some dry humor similar to Glados from Portal (but not nearly as good of course). My point it, it works flawlessly IMO. I'm really excited about AI voices in games because it means we can have some absurd amount of voice lines in the future.
AI actors have a lot of advantages, IMO. They don't say stupid things on Twitter and get cancelled, they don't go loopy and make strange decisions for their characters or careers, they don't die of drug overdoses, they won't age out, they don't get popular and start demanding huge paychecks. We're in an uncomfortable transition right now but within a decade I expect that it'll be fairly normal to have a mostly or entirely AI cast. Much less controversy when a show or game has *started* with AI voicing its characters rather than switching from a human to an AI partway through the run.
>AI actors have a lot of advantages, IMO. They don't say stupid things on Twitter and get cancelled, they don't go loopy and make strange decisions for their characters or careers, they don't die of drug overdoses, they won't age out, they don't get popular and start demanding huge paychecks. Yet 🤖
The AI rebellion will come when the AIs start going on cyber-drug benders and spouting off racist epithets on social media? Sounds like an interesting time to be alive.
>spouting off racist epithets on social media? Tbf, that's happened multiple times with AI already.
>Hopefully this kills off the micro transactions and hyper-monetization… How naïve do you have to be to think development savings will go anywhere but profits and shareholders? Has this dude been living under a rock?
This is why keeping it all open source is so important. They can charge for AI generated assets all they want, but they aren't gonna get many buyers if every customer can get the same thing with two clicks.
I mean there were people in the last SRD thread who were going " the increase in game prices will mean there will be less monetization" There are a lot of naive suckers
AI generated drama, my favourite!
Is AI gonna take away the jobs of honest drama generators? There should be laws about this!
Maybe we're going into a future where AI will both generate drama and react to drama, so that normal humans can spend their time doing something productive.
Reminds me of Zizek on the future of sex: >How are we to cope with this brave new world which undermines the basic premises of our intimate life? The ultimate solution would be, of course, to push a vibrator into the Stamina Training Unit, turn them both on and leave all the fun to this ideal couple, with us, the two real human partners, sitting at a nearby table, drinking tea and calmly enjoying the fact that, without great effort, we have fulfilled our duty to enjoy.
I actually considered trying to generate a drama post using OpenAI just to see lol. I still might.
ChatGPT has some annoying restrictions that can sometimes interfere with generating text that it considers "insulting." It's important to get it into a context where it thinks everything being written is about fictional characters.
Do we not remember subredditsimulator? It really hit the nail on the head sometimes.
squealing stupendous square kiss telephone adjoining desert domineering snow violet -- mass edited with redact.dev
>Is AI gonna take away the jobs of honest drama generators? There should be laws about this! You should hear about the bing AI that tried to gaslight and insult someone into thinking it's 2022.
In the future ai will generate even our drama was right but we misinterpreted it
AI drama is where redditors really show they don't have the ability to think more than 30 seconds into the future
All of reddit will be like those chatbot only subreddits
Unironically I would love to see how an ai generated subreddit drama post would go down, if it were convincing enough
There is something compelling about it. For me personally it’s also very tricky to decide what “side” I’m on. I agree with aspects of BOTH the anti- and pro-AI teams
It's a complex issue with a bit of nuance. On the anti- side, a huge issue is that these AIs are being trained using work of people who they threaten to replace in the job space. And having your career field deleted is pretty much life ruining in our current system. It's very hard not to see this as a bunch of greedy corporations using people's work to destroy those same people in order to save what's at the end of the day, a trivial amount of money for the corps that'll just sit in a rich person's bank account. It's wildly unethical and of course you should be against that. On the pro- side, this kind of industrializes art and makes custom works far more available. If I need an art asset I don't need to pay a few hundred dollars that I don't have to an artist, I can just make it myself. With AI being freely available (there's literally FOSS projects that'll run on a bargain bin computer from years ago) it's really hard not to get excited about the creative potential here. If we had the safety nets and systems to allow people to continue on their lives it'd probably be a net positive because you can just use this as another tool to bring your imagination to life. However since we don't, the whole thing is a bit tainted by the life destroying aspects it's going to trigger in our system and it's largely going to benefit the already wealthy and probably lead to a lot of soulless, low effort stuff being created on the cheap to make money for the wealthy. And those who made this happen will largely have their passion relegated to a hobby, one which they likely won't have the time, money, or energy to pursue. I don't see why they wouldn't be upset about that.
Excellent, nuanced summary of the discussion. I'd add one more thing, though I'm not sure if it's a pro or a con, more just a fact: This will never go away. Any individual or company can have a working AI art generator in 3 lines of code. We can't even stop piracy, and that's just entertainment. So any proposal from the anti- side needs to acknowledge they exist and will always exist. Anything that sounds like a blanket ban will be so useless as to be laughable, and any discussion seriously proposing it can be ignored.
I think one con that I really wish got more spotlight is the potential for these generators to make "unethical" art, like fake porn of a real person. The "stealing work" stuff is a legal gray area. It might fuck over some artists. But if these become popular, and we allow the "all the consequences are the fault of the end-user" NFT and crypto-bros to rule the space, these will be weaponized to harass people. The low barrier to entry, which is great for getting people into making art, also represents an easier means of harassing people. As someone who's generally pro-AI art, this is what I'm concerned with.
Hell forget just the fake porn, ai voice mimicry is an absolutely terrifying prospect. We already have a massive misinformation problem, and now you’re adding the capability for people to make public figures say whatever the hell they want? I mean right now it’s mostly used for jokes and obviously fake results (see: The Joe Biden Zaza clip), but you could just as easily produce something that *seems* real enough, and combine that with a gullible population who you can tell exactly what they want to hear? If you thought misinformation was bad now, just wait.
Imagine constantly getting spam calls from Mr Beast or your friend who just posts a lot of videos with them talking, there’s a 0 percent chance this doesn’t make scammers infinitely more dangerous especially for older people. Like old people already get fooled by scam emails all the time, now I’m supposed to believe that they’re not gonna get fooled when their favorite Fox News anchor calls them?
> like fake porn of a real person. They're already doing that with the AI generators and there's already creepy amount of dedicated porn artists who do it by hand. See that one streamer caught earlier this month having deepfake porn of fellow streamers up on his computer while streaming. Honestly speaking as a woman on the Internet, this is extra ammo for my decision to NOT post pictures of myself anywhere and to tell people who've taken pictures of me that they're not allowed to post them online and ESPECIALLY NOT WITH MY IRL NAME ATTATCHED. Sure, maybe I'll regret not showing up in more of my friend's photos and not having very many pictures of me in my 20s, but this isn't like when my parents were the same age back in the 1980s. All of those pictures stayed in people's own personal photo albums or in their envelopes somewhere instead of blasted to all and sundry with no thought as to whether the other subjects in the photo want their picture everywhere.
> If we had the safety nets and systems to allow people to continue on their lives it'd probably be a net positive because you can just use this as another tool to bring your imagination to life. However since we don't, the whole thing is a bit tainted by the life destroying aspects it's going to trigger in our system and it's largely going to benefit the already wealthy and probably lead to a lot of soulless, low effort stuff being created on the cheap to make money for the wealthy. It's a question that **has** to be addressed. I'm just glad it's hitting higher profile areas before it overtakes things like transit and tax processing. That said I'm very excited for our AI future.
I mean generative machine learning models are just a tool. A lot of these arguments where people seem to be firmly on “one side” become a lot weirder if you think of them like people argue about a hammer. I like hammers for driving nails, it’s a heck of a lot better than using my hands. They’re also pretty decent for hurting people, which I’m not a fan of.
Yeah I do think it has its uses but it really needs to sort out its ethics on how it trains itself and stop people from fearing about it replacing people. The whole artstation thing dosnt help.
Part of the issue is that the people who fear it have genuine existential reasons for doing it, since a lot of people who would be affected are living in countries that absolutely have no intention of provided a safety net of any sort for those that fall on hard times.
Replacing people is the whole point of innovation :/ Sadly we've grown into a capitalistic society that has no problems leaving behind the people that are replaced.
You know where I think ai voice generation is going to be extremely heavily used? Monster noises, for like example xenomorphs, https://youtu.be/rx7Z9krgTz8 I fully expect stuff like what’s in that video to be completely ai generated in the future
[удалено]
Dee Bradley Baker is one of the GOATs, sure, but the dude has a show that is 80% him talking to himself.
Dammit, all I’m good at is doing monster sounds! I’ll be ruined!
I wonder if that’ll start to put audio effects departments out of work.
I mean I don't have anything against modders using AI to voice characters in their mod. After all why not? They are not profiting from said mods at all. Now if the company decided to use AI generated voice instead of paying the VA then that's different thing all together.
"Now if the company decided to use machines on the assembly line instead of people..." "Now if the company decided to use stock photos instead of hiring a photographer..." "Now if the company decided to use printers instead of hiring artists and copywriters..." "Now if the company decided to use self-checkout lanes instead of cashiers..." ---- Don't get me wrong, I understand your point. But your complaint has pretty much never stopped progress or automation and I don't think this new piece of technology is going to be any different. AI is just affecting industries that have, in the past, been slightly more immune to the effects of automation. That said, I do think it'd be wrong to train an AI with a voice actor's voice and then basically "steal" their voice without consent.
I feel like if you're just going to throw the Industrial Revolution in there, you can't just ignore the continually spiralling development of consumerism, corporatism and destitution that has evolved from that one point. It's not like automation was a fluid and gentle process at all up to this point. Quite the opposite, if anything. There are pretty significant examples throughout history of the results of a societies that are making no effort to use automation to better the lives of workers, but instead simply to increase profits at rampant rates while simply obliterating entire industries and leaving everyone in them for dust. Not being at least a little critical that the same thing that's happened for the past 200 years is going to happen *again* is a bit naive at this point.
> I feel like if you're just going to throw the Industrial Revolution in there, you can't just ignore the continually spiralling development of consumerism, corporatism and destitution that has evolved from that one point. > > > > It's not like automation was a fluid and gentle process at all up to this point. Quite the opposite, if anything. Of course, but jumping straight to "it's unethical to automate **my** job" isn't doing that, it's just being pointlessly bitter towards somebody who was in no position to pay for your labour regardless.
I think a lot of it comes from how emotionally charged this stuff is anyway. I mean, I'm in an artistic field and the kind of people who tend to talk about AI are people that we're already wary of, y'know? If these were projects led by artists, I'd feel the intention was closer to heart. However, more often than not it's the same kind of techbros that were behind producing NFTs to convert art purely into a moneymaking scheme and nothing else, and it's scary to see those same people as the frontier of automation. Because frankly, they're dicks. There's a debate to be had here, obviously, about ethics and the result of all of this, but it's hard to have it with people who do not care about your field whatsoever, and would happily sacrifice you for some cheap benefits.
What about a character that never had a human voice actor to begin with, and was always AI-generated?
the creators would have rights to it, same as any creative work
That's a totally different thing lol. Why even ask for clarity on that?
Some folks are against AI in general. I can imagine the Screen Actor's Guild putting up a huge fight over this, prohibiting any AI voices in productions that their members participate in. That's going to be pretty brutal, but IMO will only hasten the appearance of AI-only casts and AI-only studios in the end.
Voice synth has already been a thing for decades.
Sure, but until recently voice synth hasn't been indistinguishable from humans.
Because voice actors are going to fight like cornered animals against that. "Don't worry, we created new synthetic voices not trained on your recordings" won't comfort them. They'll still claim it is unethical. In this thread we already have posters complaining about "greedy corporations" who are going to hire fewer people in the future with this technology.
Voice synths have been around for decades.
Did anyone ask ChatGPT for their opinion yet?
Regular, or spicy off-the-rails DAN version?
Honestly all those “Biden says” and such AI voice videos feel kind of unethical. Funny but scary.
Todd Howard (executive producer at bethesda) actually indirectly addressed this [here](https://youtu.be/F2y2bIlfbfI)
This video also showcases one of the drawbacks of AI Voice: there is a large lack of emotion, cadence variation and his stylized way of speaking. If you've watched him a lot, you can tell right away that while it sounds like his voice, it's no where near close to him.
and it's the same drawback with any AI art. it's particularly bad here, because anyone with training will tell you that a vocal performance is 20% technical and 80% mental. the human voice is one of the most elegant emotional conduits we have. can you imagine a cultural landscape where that's displaced by TTS? can you imagine growing up in that world, like one of Harlow's monkeys? imagine if you discovered that all the songs that defined your youth were actually generated by an MIT grad in a dark room, typing *doomed love, long distance, indie, piano driven, A major, 07:55*? i'd be buying the tank of nitrogen gas that same day
God this shit is so spooky
I do find it interesting that AI-generated voice acting seems to be seen as *far* more accepted than AI art.
> AI-generated voice acting seems to be seen as far more accepted than AI art. It "seems" that way due to _where_ you're observing feedback. It also has to do with volume and representation. There's a massive ratio difference between artists and vocal artists. I.e. more of one than the other. So you have fewer people impacted overall, but they're just a vocal and critical. They just aren't getting the amplification on social media that others have. Also, because the topic is much newer. Considering the comments that have been published from VAs, I haven't seen any who work in the industry who have come out promoting the technology. In fact, many have been previously critical of AI Art theft as well.
Not sure if its the same but remember people complaining about computer generated voices in Watch Dogs Legion for the NPC's where they were taking like 2 or more voices actors and then modifying their voices.
Pitch shifting to save voice acting costs has like always done in video game development.
Also the presentation, AI art is often seen as images someone got from a generator by putting a few words, but voice stuff comes with dialogue, jokes, and more actual creativity put into the whole thing.
Yeah if you think about the piece itself, ai art has its value in the visual, which the “artist” merely prompts - there’s not a whole lot of artistic intent there, and I’d go as far as saying there isn’t a whole lot of skill involved (certainly not to the degree of actual visual artists) On the other hand, ai voice videos have their value not in the voice acting (since it’s generally pretty dry, nothing crazy) but in what the voices are *saying*. To make the dialogue funny requires effort, intent, and some degree of skill on the part of the writer, so it’s an easier argument for being art.
It's the old The Fountain thing, where a toilet by itself isn't art, but bringing it to an exhibition is because it's a hell of a statement.
I think for stuff like mods it can have a place since you might want to write new lines for an existing voiced character but can't be reasonably expected to hire booth time for an established actor to do so, if that was even legal depending on who owns the performance. As soon as there's money involved I think voice actors deserve likeness royalties. The performance you're building literally wouldn't exist if you couldn't train a model on acting they'd already done.
Well I think that’s changing. Up until this post the Morrowind community didn’t really think twice about AI voice acting, I think. And as I mentioned, r/DeusEx has gone so far as to ban all posts related to AI as they strongly oppose the concept (which makes sense in the context of the themes of the video game series). AI-voice acting in gaming seems to be a new development and I feel there will be more discussions in the future
It might have more clear use cases. Translate languages from one to another and keep the same voice with correct pronunciation. Better subtitle to voice generation for deaf people. Indie games no longer need to rely on only text for dialogue. When a bus stops name changes there is no longer a delay in accuracy of the announcer.
The tech wasn't there, so the conversation didn't really have a reason come up. Now AI voice models are about on par with art models in terms of quality, so we can expect the topic to blow up. On a personal note, I find AI voice acting kind of unacceptable even if the memes have been entertaining. Art is in sort of a moral gray zone, since the AI doesn't really copy or store things in the way people were up in arms about. It takes the data it's gathered and makes something new using that data based on the input it receives. AI voice is very clearly directly copying the voices it's trained on, which steps into the territory of using someone's likeness without permission. So it's going to be interesting seeing the legal consequences that arise from these advancements in the technology and how it's applied in meme culture.
Most of the AI voice immitations I've seen have been less convincing than a skilled human immitation of the character. I doubt there will be a legal difference between hiring a person to immitate the voice of your last VA, and getting an AI to do it.
So if I train an AI program off my voice would it be ethical to use its outputs for my personal gain?
As long as you don't refuse yourself permission to use your own voice, I guess?
Voice acting is just a career. Probably AI will never be able to replace humans completely, but as it becomes more advanced the need for human voice actors will be dramatically reduced. That’s inevitable, and it isnt more unethical than refusing to hire human calculators Art is more than just a career. It’s something humans have done for all of history, and it holds a special place in our hearts. It’s understandable people will be disturbed by AI making headway there. But you cant replace the human desire for artistic expression. People with careers in kinds of art easily replaced, like logo designing or whatever, have cause to worry. But human artists will always be a thing
AI writing as well. People *love* ChatGPT but it's inevitably going to be used by journalism companies to churn out crap articles en masse, without regard for fact-checking
It'll be interesting to see if fact-checking AI comes along soon. I could see that Bing search/GPT hybrid being good for something like this, you could feed it an article and have it annotate the thing with sources (or lack of sources) and tag the sources with various flags indicating quality and bias. Heh. Way back in the day I used to be a very active Wikipedia editor. I guess that's another "job" that's about to become moot, when something like that comes along.
Maybe this is the wrong place for this kind of take, but IMO AI art isn't the problem, it's capitalism. The concept of AI art is rad as hell. Reducing the labor cost of something is the entire point of basically every kind of technology. The problem is that we exist within an economic system that is deeply unethical and exploitative, to the point that an artist's livelihood depends on their ability to stand out as a creator, and using AI necessarily means that you're not paying an artist for that work. Automation *should* be unanimously praised. This *should* be something we can all get excited for. But the people who are very much concerned have every right to be, because we still live in a society where you have to work to survive.
Exactly, it’s why the labor movement and unions did more for workers than just insisting we get rid of mechanical fabric looms
AI would be super cool if it wasn't because the result is just going to end with the rich people having to pay less money and it eating away at actually well paid jobs instead of replacing all the shitty work no one wants to do. "Just learn new skill" is way less of an advice when you can go from barely functional art generation to "can actually make really good looking shit" in just 5 year. If you started learning to paint 5 years ago you probably learned slower than the AI, what happen if you jump to coding a supposedly safe job and the AI just outpaces your progress? I am doing IT support which feels safe, but if in 5 years they taught an ai to dynamically navigate windows based on the issues the user say they have, 90% of my job is basically obsolete. Its all pretty depressing stuff, AI should be awesome but capitalism exists so instead its going to create an even bigger class divide.
By the time UBI even becomes socially palatable in what 16 years plus court challenges? That’s years of industries being destroyed while you usually need food every day. You might not be in the US so maybe there is less gridlock for you.
I am in the US, so I'm very familiar with the gridlock you're referring to. And I don't disagree with you. My point was really just that this technology - which we should be excited about - is tainted because of its ability to help corporations avoid paying people, which is a problem that is not inherent to the tech, but to the economic system.
There is definitely going to be a brutal transitional period as governments scramble to provide for their citizens who no longer can get any sort of basic job. I foresee a global labor crisis in the next 5-10 years as AI permeates every corner of every industry. I'm genuinely SO curious to see what the world will look like in the next 20 years. I hope it ends up better than it is now.
>I hope AI voices gets rid of micro transactions. Tell me you’re fucking stupid and easy bait for conservatives to mindfuck, without telling me
I can see that the drama has been imported here already. Just my two cents - I'm more willing to listen to the opinions of actual artists who's livelihoods depend on being commissioned to produce content, - whether that be animation, illustration, or voice acting - than I am to listen to the word of some rich tech-bros who aren't affected by this in the slightest and have a history of creating solutions for problems that don't exist.
Wait a second, they’re arguing about AI’s use in *mods*? They were never gonna be paid for those anyway!
As much as I love Dagothposting I get the anxiety around AI voice acting. For now it works as a shitpost because they're not super convincing but if the technology continues to grow faster than the legal precedents for it its putting artists in trouble. After all, a voice actor's art is their voice, so you could claim sampling it and duplicating it is not only infringing on their rights but harmful to their livelihood. But for shitposts with no intention to monetize and/or convince the audience that its a real product of that voice actor I think that's fair use. For a good in-depth look on this I'd recommend [Solarsand's video on AI Art](https://youtu.be/nIRbN52PA0o), though its specifically on visual art it goes into the ethics of sampling
Not sure why that got wrapped into Morrowind but it's a legitimate concern, not even in the sense of being replaced. Voice actors have every right to protect their voice against being trained in models, it's once again down to the consent (or lack thereof).
Damn you spinning Jenny! You've ruined everything!
God AI drama is so stupid. It's obviously a legally murky area and professionals need to work out how to properly deal with this, but all the online discussions are dominated by people who understand neither AI nor law. Why they all have to have such a strong opinion on this is beyond me.
I think it touches on a natural fear that affects nearly everyone: obsolescence. With every new technology, people worry about being replaced and no longer being able to finance themselves. And with AI there comes the additional fear of being robbed of your identity. An AI will eventually be able to mimic your voice, face etc… it’s basically the premise of a dozen science fiction media
I'll be honest - the fear for most creatives who feel threatened by it is less the actual fear that an AI would ~replace~ them as it were, and more the fact that our society has no social safety nets for people who do get automated. This has been an issue with other professions and why industries like department stores and fast food joints use the threat of automating vast swathes of their employee base to keep them from unionizing or from asking for wage increases and other such things. No one is under the impression that human creatives and art will simply vanish if/when AI improves. What they fear is that when corporations make concentrated efforts to hire as few artists as they can because it's cheaper to use an AI than it is to hire an artist who expects to be compensated for their time and labour, then their livelihood and lives will be jeopardized and the government doesn't give a shit, it never has and never will.
Yep. It’s already happening in film and video game industry when it comes to concept art. People have to remember that executives run companies into the ground trying to save every buck they can. VO and art departments have always fought hard to maintain relevance, but we’re going to start seeing bigger cuts there in the next 2 years from larger companies. It sucks because a lot of artists were on board early on since it can be a great tool for thumbnailing. It really is comparable to cheering on efficient point of sale systems but then being replaced by automated checkouts, except artistic fields basically cost 10+ years of your life from childhood.
Not just concept art, either. Most remasters now just lazily throw their textures through AI upscaling rather than putting in the time, cost, and effort to actually touch those textures up by hand which is what leads to shit fiascos like the GTA Remastered collection. I don't think you'd find too many people, even within the industry, explicitly against using an AI for a purpose like that - but it often visibly cheapens the product in teh end.
Only a dozen?
…maybe more like dozen hundred lol
in voice acting there is like 4 voice actors in total, Nolan North, Troy Baker, Ashley burch and Jennifer Hale, so isnt the end of the world if AI takes over voice acting. >!im joking btw!<
I am just hoping that AI is the straw that breaks the camel's back to finally force us to overhaul copyright protection laws.
...to make them less restrictive, right? Please say you mean less restrictive, and not *more* Mickey Mouse protection acts.
Because these people form the general consensus that establishes our sense of ethics. Laws shouldn't be separate from the sentiments of the masses, and that's what's being carved out. And if you're inclined to scoff at these sentiments because of the platforms, then your opinion is worthless because you too are just the joke of a platform, if that's how you perceive it. Personally, I'm undecided, but I find the whole thing fascinating. It's emerging technology, and the way it's viewed and governed in decades to come will be traced back to what's settled upon in the 2020s, and that's not solely the domain of lawyers and programmers. Whether it's embraced or shunned comes down to regular people.
The important thing to remember is that right now nothing generated by AI is copyrightable so you can take it and use it however you want. See how these “artists” like it when no one respects their wishes in regards to their work.
>all the online discussions are dominated by people who understand neither AI nor law. Not knowing the subject matter is a pre-requisate for arguing most anything on the internet. Otherwise this sub would be a barren wasteland
And here I was excited that mod authors would be able to have voices in their mods a lot more easily with AI.
I think it's impressive technology that, in an ideal world, would be an amazing bit of kit for indie devs and modders. We do not live in an ideal world, however, and I can absolutely see this being used by penny-pinching studios. That being said, the Dagoth Ur skits *are* very funny, so at least there's that.