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Stellaris gets a DLC about AI that features AI-created voices, director insists it's 'ethical' and 'we're pretty good at exploring dystopian sci-fi and don't want to end up there ourselves' (www.pcgamer.com)

submitted 4 months ago by simple@lemm.ee to c/games@lemmy.world

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[-] deweydecibel@lemmy.world 46 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

The technology was created to replace voice actors. That's the actual purpose. Its very existence hurts their profession and benefits studios. You can not be a studio, use this technology, and claim to care about ethics, anymore than Amazon can claim to care about the workers as it invests in the machines to replace them.

No one is holding a gun to their head forcing them to us AI. They made a choice. There is no "ethical" way to cripple the livelihood of working class people for the benefit of your business. Just stop using the word.

It doesn't matter if you compensate or get their approval, because the fact is the existence of the technology in the industry effectively compels all voice actors to agree to let it use their voice, or they can't get work. It becomes a false choice.

If there was no financial benefit, if it truly made no difference in how much a studio pays in labor or the amount the artists make, there would be no reason for studios to want to use it.

[-] Even_Adder@lemmy.dbzer0.com 24 points 4 months ago

Do you have any source for those claims? There are plenty of better reasons to develop voice synthesis than replacing voice actors.

[-] GalacticHero@lemmy.world 26 points 4 months ago

Voiced characters that use generative AI in real time instead of prerecorded lines and a dialogue tree come to mind as an obvious use. How cool would that be, to be playing an RPG and ask any character any question you want and get an actual verbal answer? No way you can do that with voice actors.

[-] glimse@lemmy.world 12 points 4 months ago

Ever seen the game Vaudeville? It's a fairly basic detective game but all the characters have their own LLM and AI voices. I bought it for the reason you described. I just had to see the technology in action and I can definitely see a future with generative text/voices in games.

It's not perfect by any means but I think it's a very cool approach to a detective game. There have been updates to it since I played that address most of the problems I had with it like characters forgetting past conversations and giving conflicting info.

[-] Ookami38@sh.itjust.works 1 points 4 months ago

I had spitballed an idea similar to this a few months back. Build the characters, world, and situations, and give the AI that information. Pick a few specific pieces of info the AI would have to tell you at specific times, basically to act as guide rails. Then, let the AI and the player just... Interact.

[-] glimse@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago

That's pretty much Vaudeville. The only things you can do is click on locations and talk to people, each of whom has some bit of information you need to figure out.

It's basically an experiment to see what works and what doesn't with the idea. I appreciate that they kept the scope small (no quests, no WASD movement) and have been implementing changes as they discover the shortfalls (like the ones I've mentioned). If it ever does get released as a finished game, it'll be more like a proof of concept for other games to build off of.

[-] nogooduser@lemmy.world 2 points 4 months ago

I find it to be very off putting that Baldur’s Gate 3 doesn’t have voice actors for the main character.

There are so many different races that would have different voices and different accents that it wouldn’t be financially viable to do that with voice actors either.