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SAG-AFTRA Files Unfair Labor Practice Complaint Against Epic Games Due To A.I. Darth Vader
(www.gameinformer.com)
this post was submitted on 19 May 2025
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TL;DR: their argument is that using AI trained on an actor, even with said actor's blessing, is unfair because it shuts out other actors who used to get work imitating that voice.
A little more than that, actually.
I mean......of all the things to hate on AI for, this isn't one. You don't WANT an immitation voice. You want James Earl Jones. But he's dead. AI is the best outcome possible.
I disagree, I want working actors to get paid. I will always take Maurice LaMarche over an AI Orson Welles. Just get that YouTube Grocery Vader guy like they did for Force Unleashed, he's great.
Link?
Chad Vader: Day Shift Manager
Ha! That's good shit. Thanks buddy :)
and I want higher quality lower budget games Irrigardless of silly actors.
You're getting downvoted, but the move to fully-voiced dialogue absolutely killed the level of reactivity in games, and AI is one of the few ways to bring that level of detail back without bloating budgets even higher than they already are.
Voice acting is expensive (and makes rewrites expensive too), and spending development funds on anything players won't hear is considered "wasted money" so you rarely see meaningful branching in storylines anymore outside of the biggest budget games. Conversations have also became short and stilted to keep recording costs and disk space down. Just look at the freaking encyclopedia that was Morrowind dialogue compared to the single sentence sound bytes used for conversations in Oblivion and Skyrim.
I'm not a fan of how AI has been handled by corporations, but if they set up a system where voice actors (and other creatives) could be hired to train models, get paid for every project that uses them, and they (or their estate) have the right to look at and refuse projects the same as if they'd taken the contract normally, I'd be all for the AI revolution.
There's a middle ground where generative AI is fair to creative talent and opens up a world of possibilities. It's unlikely, but hopefully one day we get there.
Agreed, it's very obvious which way the wind is blowing.