Games

AI could have some pretty cool uses as an enhancement to voice actors. Imagine all of the NPCs in an RPG being able to say the customized name of your character aloud instead of everyone using a title or nickname that you were assigned. It's a real shame that we have to use everything for evil instead.

The lifeless performances will come through in the end product. Wish them nothing but the worst.

I want to agree with Beart but...

SAG et al have already more or less abandoned voice actors. In the very near future it won't matter if actors agree to work for these companies because they won't NEED those actors. They'll have training data or they'll pay randos off the street to generate some training data that they then heavily tweak to sound like Ashley Burch and so forth.

And before people pretend that consumers won't stand for that: Anyone with any knowledge of scene composition or lighting clowns on Netflix et al near constnatly. Guess what the super popular movies that everyone watches are? Because, yeah, there will still be works of art like a Blade Runner or even an Anora (the plot was shite but the cinematography was peak). They'll pale in comparison to people pretending they aren't going to watch Happy Gilmore 2.

And same with VA. People will claim they are opposed and it is horrible and complete trash compared to a human... and they'll still buy the games until having "human" voice acting is the exception and only for "arthouse" games.

I had a thought earlier in the bathroom about AI. It's like building a fancy indoor toilet when you don't have plumbing.

If people's basic needs were met, housing food health care all that, then it wouldn't really matter as much if people want to fuck around with AI. People who do things for passion could still do so.

But we live in a capitalist hell, this AI stuff will primarily benefit the ownership class while everyone else suffers.

I don't need a fancy toilet. I need clean running water.

The problem is the way they're pushing the tools as magic lamps, and shoving them down everyone's throats.

AI is a really neat tool that got dragged into an incredibly toxic system that enshittified it. Not a useful tool to help development, no, skip straight to replacing employees even if it doesn’t freaking work.

"eXtRaCt VaLuE!!1"

ruins everything

"wHeRe MoNeY gO@!?"

Rinse, repeat, etc.

Well yeah, AI is a tool for the wealthy to remove economic opportunities from the working class.

Now get back in the mine, slave.

I think Béart is a good voice actor but I don't think that gives her special insight into the future of AI development. On the contrary, those people who would lose both money and meaning if a certain task is done well by a machine will be biased towards underestimating the probability that that task will be done well by a machine in the near future.

I'm about half way through Blood in the Machine by Brian Merchant, a book about the Luddites, and one of the things he's emphasised quite a lot is the complaints of people at the time about the lower quality of automated textiles compared to artisan-made ones.