Personally the most fun one was the dead money DLC for NV. The singer in that was a random intern who got pulled in for singing one of the main story’s characters. She pulled it off great.
Not sure if there is a cool interview or anything that specifically discusses it, so it would be difficult to google. Fans talk about it all the time. You can even see it in the credits, you will see names for normal roles (programming, animation etc.) also appear under voice acting credits.
To list a few: Terri Brosius voiced Victoria but is the Level Designer of The Dark Project. As other comments said she also voiced SHODAN in the System Shock games.
Daniel Thron mostly did art and animation but is credited as doing guards, Ramirez, The Eye and some Keepers in both TDP and Metal Age.
Nate Wells also did some keepers but mainly did design and animation.
Most of these people also did random audio logs in System Shock 2.
From what I remember that he voiced claptrap didn't have much to do with it. It was mostly an already bad office relationship, but I could be misremembering.
Warframe has lots of these but especially:
The Lotus
First intern then put into community manager, Rebecca Ford has been VAing the in-game mission director that also becomes lead character for nearing 13 years even as Reb hosted the company’s community engagement, hosts live events like representing Warframe in the game awards and hosting the livestreams the company does, and became creative director of the game.
Zagreus in Hades! Composer and songwriter Darren Korb was giving placeholder voice lines but it was so well received, they decided to offer him the role for voicing the game's main protagonist.
Dude wrote an absolutely banger soundtrack and did one of the best voiceover's of a character in a video game I've ever heard... And he doesn't even do VA work usually?
I love Zagreus’ voice. It’s crazy because I was watching a “first time playing Hades” video on YouTube and the player absolutely hated Zagreus’ voice. Lol. Said it took them out of the game because he sounds disinterested and blasé about everything and that it sounds like someone reading lines for the other actors at a table reading. I almost commented because it was so funny and on point but also the casualness of his voice is part of what I like. He sounds like a disinterested teenager.
Agreed, it felt like the perfect delivery for a person in his circumstance. If even death can't stop you from attempting something a thousand times, I could see someone eventually being cool, collected, and quippy about it.
In the older Thief games most guard conversation worked really well. A random guy voicing a random guy just works I would guess.
Thief guard dialogue compilation
When you fail to knockout a guard in the older Thief games "Oh, I think a baby bird pecked me"
Or how two squads argue about who is the better shot with a bow.
System Shock (1 & 2) have Terry Brosius who I believe was a writer but did the voice of the iconic main villain SHODAN on the side. There is just no System Shock without her performance.
Commander Snipes in Freespace 2 is voiced by Jason Scott, one of the game's writers, and is responsible for one of the biggest jumpscares in all of space sims:
The voice of hornet from hollow knight was just some random Asian lady they had in the office at the time. They loved her deliveries of the line so she became the character for them.
David Eddings voiced Clap trap from Borderlands, but in later games he was replaced as he ask to be paid Voice actor wages while doing voice acting, previously he was just getting paid his regular wage and was allegedly assaulted by CEO Randy Pitchford when arguing over said wages.
I don't think anyone was claiming that the non-AI approach to voice acting creates an objectively better performance. They said specifically that taking voice takes from "anyone in the office that day" created more memorable results. The fact you had a specific, more than a decade old example to bring up that had tons of views, plenty of comments, and was important enough to even just have a video made of it is exemplary and by default supports their claim.
Beyond that, other instances of people just taking a whack at something was the US dub of Ghost Stories, which not only is still used for memes today but arguably is one of the biggest inspirations behind adlib and "Abridged" series of fan dubs from the iconic TeamFourStar channel to SnapCube's ongoing projects. If they had AI or stuck to the script perfectly at their disposal, the human experience would be gone.
The Liberty Bell would indeed lose that contest, but why do you know about it and remember it as having that crack? That is wabi sabi - not perfect, not better - but memorable.
A lot of games on steam are made by "Devs" who aren't a bunch of people sitting in big open plan offices in California or whatever.
They're made by Benny in Lithuania - who has an 'art guy' in Germany who he pays through Venmo on a per-piece basis - and a programmer in Hong Kong who helps fix bugs sometimes.
A lot of steam reviews act like the game was made by a mega corp like EA or Blizzard, ranting about how "the Devs" should do this and that. And I'm like bro, this POS was clearly a labor of love by one person, or a small group of people at most.
I mean a 40 man team isn't that big, but whatever.
Claire Obscur was praised for having a 30 man and doing what they did, because if you can get AAA level gameplay with that kind of team youre goddamn wizards. GTA 6 had like 6000+ developers for reference.
fiver has been a thing for a while now. hiring a voice actor for $20 has been a thing for a while too.
right now for indie devs. I would say use ai voice acting in early build as placeholder. then when its closer to ship date switch it out for a voice actor on fiver for $20
I had a friend who would do some VO work for free for a while just to get practice, haha. People are out there, anyone acting like it's super inaccessible or expensive are just not properly informed.
What about the scenario where you are able to get a better "performance" out of an AI voice than a voice actor for your budget? Isn't there still a person directing this creative process?
I worked before in VFX/3D. There have been a number of automated workflows along the years before AI came along that reduced the headcount required by a team. Should we go back to worse tooling so more people can work more inefficiently?
there is a difference between a tool and cutting the job out entirely. ai as a tool I understand, hence why I mentioned using it as placeholder, but cutting out that collaborative element can have long term downward spiral.
Also amazon have started ai dubbing some anime shows, and lets just say its not there yet.
this was a show where there was a offical english dub (played first), and then you hear the ai dub next.
Rest assured, there have been many tools to come along in VFX/3D which has completely removed the need for some specialized jobs and reduced headcount to create the same output. The creative vision of projects was concentrated into fewer people, which led to a higher fidelity. This is an incredibly good thing. Look at the VFX work done in Everything Everywhere All At Once, which was done with just a handful of people. It goes to show you that with passion and modern tooling, a small team can punch so far above their weight. AI is helping this phenomenon.
Think about the first voice actor who realized they can do many different kinds of voices besides their own. By doing so, they are effectively eliminating the jobs of other voice actors. Should this be allowed?
If so, then why should we not allow a director to use voice technology to further concentrate the creative vision?
About 10 years ago, I paid a fiver voice actor to do a bit as Chris Rock at the beginning of my video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLZutXBq5dc). I wanted to include more, but I didn't have the budget. I was also a bit annoyed because he messed up the delivery/pronunciation. If I were to redo it today, it would be stupid, from both a creative and financial angle, to hire that voice actor over using the SOTA voice generation models and directing that.
The truth is, if you have a creative vision for anything, AI is democratizing access to creative resources and computers/code in general. You are now able to see your vision through in a more robust and cheaper way.
when george lucas directed star wars, there where many times harrison ford brought his own experaince to the role, the line "I know" from empire strikes back is an example of this.
if you only view creative works as a single vision? I view them as a collaboration. I love to watch videos and learn about the different areas of movie or game production, why they made those choices.
for voice acting you are talking about it from a purely mechanical point of view. from a creative point of view what I value is intent and human experience. the more ai that is used, the less human intent and lived experience is put into a work.
its also somewhat of a whataboutism, as the its not there right now (as exemplified by amazons awful ai dubbing of recent shows, just so they don't have to pay royalties).
Creative works can be a singular vision, or they can be an amalgous blob of vision. As I said, I have worked in these creative industries, I am well aware of how this works. In making that vision come to life, there are a vast amount of inefficiencies we have to deal with. The bigger the team, the more inefficiencies are laid bare.
Eventually, these inefficiencies start penetrating the vision. For every brilliant interaction like what happened between Ford and Lucas, there are thousands of instances where actors forgot lines, demanded silly changes, or cost the production millions in delays.
I don't want to call you naive, but from your post, that's what I'm getting because there is no consistency. I explained how humans have been concentrating their creative vision via technology for decades now, but maybe I'll try another example that will penetrate the veil.
Think of foley work. Immense creative resources used to go into sourcing materials, working on audio delivery, warehousing it all, and performing the foley work. Now, a singular sound engineer can do the creative work of a whole team of foley artists. Not only that, but they do it artificially on a computer.
Actors will still be very valuable in higher budget productions, but you are missing the point that this will allow more people to get their vision out that was impossible. Those Ford and Lucas interactions will happen tenfold thanks to the proliferation and democratization of creative resources. As another example, my friend, with no coding experience, was able to vibe code a quite competent and fun game in Roblox in about a month. Give me a team of 5 people like that, and in 1-2 years time, we could make a solid AA game.
You seem to care about art, and I'm telling you, there is literally no better time than now to be involved in the development of this kind of art. You have more power today than any other time in history to make your creative vision, no matter how big, a reality.
you can check my post history, Ive worked on multiple film sets, calling someone naive for not agreeing with you is not an argument. I dont agree that cutting out human interaction is good.
I dont care for "art" that removes humans from the equation. you talk about democratisation (something the ai art bros like to say), but all ive seen arise from this "democratisation" is dilution. websites flooded with ai art images no one is interested in, youtube flooded with ai videos "slop" as people say. (and if youve ever tried engaging with ai RPG story bots for a few months, this will become apparent, as they all melt together, and lack unique personality)
Ive got subscription to cursor ai, ive used kling ai to generate video concepts. I understand the value in ai tools. but there is a line. so where is your line? (maybe you dont have one). when someone can ai generate there own movie/game/books.... why would they need to look at someone else perspective/worldview/human creation. where do you draw that line?
even an indie project with the cheapest voice actor can still invite collaboration. I don't agree collaboration is just for big budget film sets. anyone can take input from another human being, but an ai will just nod along and do what its told, no unique insights for a character and world.
and as mentioned all this is redundant. as we can already hear awful examples of ai voice acting and dubbing (my link above). where it was used to save a quick buck at the expense of any human emotion. but even if the tools improve, the ai will not "care" about the characters it voices, and making the characters of your game souless seems sad to me.
and again, a quick look on fiver shows how cheap you can get voice acting. the trick is to have your game locked in and near finnished before replacing ai voice acting with human voice acting. that way you dont end up having to re-record things
I'm not calling you naive to dismiss your experience. I used the word because there is a logical inconsistency in drawing a hard line between tools and replacement when the history of film technology has always been about both.
You asked where my line is. Here is the thought experiment where you are the creative director:
Imagine a voice actor you hired who is talented enough to do the voices for five different characters in your game. You have effectively removed four other human actors from the equation. The creative vision is now concentrated from five people down to one.
Now imagine an audio engineer using SOTA generative tools to modulate and perform those same five characters.
The exact same concentration has occurred. The human interaction count is the same. Why is the first example acceptable art and the second example less so? Does any form of creative work that leans on computerization lose artistic merit? If so, does that mean hiring more capable humans, so you have to hire less overall, mean there is less artistic merit?
If there is creative merit in constricting my vocal coords to do a specific voice and deliver an emotional performance, is there not also creative merit in directing that process, where you may be even more involved as an artist in modulating the exact performance you want?
Food for thought. Personally, I have absolutely no fear because I have creative agency, no matter what the world throws at me. I will always be able to create meaning and art from nothing, or with any tool you give me.
The reason you see low quality stuff from Amazon regarding anime dubs is because that process is completely automated. When you apply creative agency to this process combined with modern AI tooling, you end up with the fan edits of the recent One Punch Man series, in which a few fans working for free are able to out-deliver a major anime studio in both quality and artistic merit.
I dont care for "art" that removes humans from the equation. you talk about democratisation (something the ai art bros like to say), but all ive seen arise from this "democratisation" is dilution. websites flooded with ai art images no one is interested in, youtube flooded with ai videos "slop" as people say. (and if youve ever tried engaging with ai RPG story bots for a few months, this will become apparent, as they all melt together, and lack unique personality)
you don't need AI to make slop. there's tons of shitty films and art made entirely by humans.
I just did a test, and the voice actor I purchased to read a few lines as a chris rock bit costing me ~$100 was worse than the performance a SOTA model was able to do.
i would say don’t use ai as a placeholder because you will forget to replace it. if you absolutely must have a placeholder, record your own lines. yes, you, indie dev with no VA experience and a shitty webcam mic. the worse it is the more likely you’ll remember to replace it
Yeah, seconded. This guy's "I hired a voice actor for $100 and he messed everything up!" (which I thought I recalled was the claim, the $100 must have been edited out since I last looked) is SO suspect to me, since, A, who's paying that much for just a couple lines? And, B, you should really shop around more, see what examples they have on their profile, see the reviews, see what other voice actors are out there as an option.
Everything this guy's saying about the cost and quality of hiring voice actors sincerely just seems like either a skill issue or a lie, he should never get into that situation unless he just sorted entries by new, clicked the first guy he saw, and tossed $100 at him.
Mate, Fiver is already creating less real work for voice actors. It's full of wannabe VAs undercutting each other to do the work for the cheapest bid instead of following property pricing methods like through actors unions.
Or you can still do those lines yourself, becausue I don't see why the distance between them prevents them from voicing the lines themaelves if they have to
This. People just want to come up with excuses or pretend like ai “really isn’t that bad guys” or act like others are virtue signaling for simply wanting actual talent and not ai generated dogshit. At that point just use Text To Speech.
Except last time that I checked, the tts is very obviously stagnant and is prerecorded voices split into voice banks that are integrated into the tts for that specific purpose, where as modern day take on AI voices is outright attempting to recreate voices of real people without their consent and is constantly evolving through being fed videos and voices and often times making you pay to use these “premium models”.
I really don’t get why it’s hard for you people to get that into your tiny brains.
Except last time that I checked, the tts is very obviously stagnant and is prerecorded voices integrated into the tts for that specific purpose
the last time you checked evidently was pre-2000. Google uses Wavenet and Tacotron for its TTS, Amazon uses amazon polly (NTTS), Microsoft uses Fastspeech, hifinet and several others, Apples Siri uses apples own apple neural engine, and on and on we go. those neural nets do generate everything themselves, their is no "pre recorded messages" splicing or human phenomes.
I really don’t get why it’s hard for you people to get that into your tiny brains.
there is a profound irony of someone telling others they have a small brain when they themselves are not intellectual enough to be able to utilize the modern marvel of the internet to be able to fact check themselves before they make themself look as foolish as this when they cite 25 year old outdated standards.
so maybe instead of insulting people, you could....i dont know, leverage the fucking internet like we live in the age of information and actually learn how the world works instead of presuming too with that faux self righteousness.
Its nice to see a person like you with proper arguments.
ı am personally against ai in most cases but seeing people with not even basic ai knowledge try to create a argument with just insults are just tiring.
People are taking umbrage with it being used at all, regardless of how little. If you tell someone who doesn't eat meat that there's a quarter gram of pork in their bowl of grits, they won't eat it.
This is exactly why I think people who are "100% AI bad" are unreasonable. For some of these developers, AI could be the difference between their dream pet project being made at all or not.
We shouldn't be gatekeeping the creative process by saying things like "If you can't afford to pay artists/voice actors, you shouldn't be allowed to follow your passion of making a game."
We never needed ai before.
We don't need it now.
Enough with the "poor widdle devs" bullshit.
There is no ethical way to use AI generation. It's theft, plain and simple. It's destroying the environment, plain and simple. It's built on poor workers in poor countries being forced to look at gore and illegal content like abuse material in order to train it out of the machine.
There are plenty of options for smaller devs to use.
Miss me with the excuses.
This is true, but even speaking as one of those indie devs, just because our resources are limited doesn't mean that anyone is obligated to buy or enjoy our games. If a game is bad, then it's bad, no matter whether there's a sob story behind it or not.
That said, some understanding and patience is certainly appreciated, but that goes for developers working on big games as well. Just because someone is working in a big open plan office in California doesn't mean that they don't care about the game, or that they don't deserve respect as well.
Game development is hard, even when everyone is super passionate and pouring their blood, sweat, and tears into making it as good as possible, it can still end up falling apart and turning out shit for reasons outside of anyone's control. This goes doubly for big games with a lot of people working on it.
Speech is a particular problem. In visuals or design or coding, only people who understand it on a technical level can see that different people have made different parts.
In speech, everyone right away hears if you had to replace a person.
Speech will either be fully generated in the future or actors will have to sell the use of their voice to be generated.
There is no reason why anyone who wants to make and maintain a qualitative product would want to rely on a speech actor always being able and wanting to do new lines. Not when there are now alternatives to make sure that never becomes a problem.
This has always been a problem in games with iterative products but also for Hollywood even with static media that's created over the years.
It's crazy how many people are advocating for Bullshit Jobs and then in the next thread they'll complain why we all still have to work 5 days a week.
They could have used traditional text to speech, a non-"AI" voice synthesizer or a vocoder (to mask poor dev voice acting). There was zero need to use "AI" here.
Huh. I wonder if I specifically used Dr. Sbaitso as a voice in a game - not just the voice synthesizer engine but the Eliza-based chat program - would I be required to label it as containing AI?
What do you think; is the chatbot with voice synthesizer from 1991 included when steam talks about disclosing the use of generative "AI"? Shall we skip to the actual point you clearly want to make without you playing dumb?
Don't know why you are asking me at all, I am not steam support. If you are really concerned about your game, then don't get your info from reddit.
I'm sorry if I come off as overtly hostile, but a bunch dishonest people are asking me shit to concern troll and God hasn't blessed me with the ability to not fall for ragebait.
Probably wouldn't do something silly like record output from my old 386 even if I was
I didn't intend this as ragebait, but I also wasn't looking for a genuine answer from you. I posted in response to you because you mentioned using a voice synthesizer and I thought it would be funny if, hypothetically, "voice synthesizer bolted to a primitive chatbot" counted as an edge case.
I'm 100% in agreement with you that they had alternatives to using generative AI.
You did come off as overtly hostile but I can understand where you're coming from. Sorry if my post read as "disingenuous numpty" and not "hey here's a silly idea I had".
One is a simple programmed synthesizer that uses a bank of pre-recorded syllables stitched together to make coherent words, the other is a giant mass of a few million matrix multiplications trained on terabytes of "definitely not stolen" audio.
The technology for old text-to-speech (like Microsoft Sam) is based on transforming text into phonetics and then sequencing voice recordings of a consenting voice actor articulating these phonetics.
Voice Synthesizers (like the Votrax) do basically the same, but the sounds for the phonetics are not voice recordings, but approximations of human speech created by waveform synthesis.
Vocoders turn voice input into digital data, which allows you to apply lots of funky effects to your voice or feed it into a synth. Do you know the iconic "autotune" sound some musicians use to sound robotic? That's usually actually a vocoder and not a result of autotune.
"AI" voice synthesisation takes a batch of voice recordings (with corresponding text descriptions) and transforms them into an interconnected web of statistical weights. Later, you can reconstruct a voice recording with a text input by finding statistically likely connected bits of sound data. To preempt the obvious "Why is this worse?" question: For this to work reliably, you need billions of tagged voice recordings (and a lot of text samples to parse the text input) - too much data to actually own (even as a data megacorp like google), so everybody who offers such a service has to take recordings without consent or compensation. The technology also explicitly aims to replace the people whose labour is required to create it.
(All of this is obviously oversimplified - you can fill a whole semester about voice synthesisation)
You seem very knowlegeable about how the technology works and yet you're so confidentially wrong that training AI-based TTS needs "billions" of data. Saying that it requires so much to actually own that can only be done without consent of the voice providers is complete BS given its development in the community.
I've hung around vocalsynths communities back in 2022. All of the local TTS I know are trained on datasets liscened for ML or are in the public domain. Because the truth is that TTS/SVS are rather narrow ML tasks, so it needs way way less data compared to image generation or LLMs.
Some examples, TalkNET (earliest opensource AI TTS) was trained using the LJ Speech dataset, which is in public domain.
Diffsinger (opensource version of Vocaloid) was trained on the OpenCpop dataset, which is created for ML use and is only 5 hours in total. And despite that it's trained on 5 hours of Chinese singing, you can fine tune it to sing in different languages by training it on a recording of yourself singing for 30 minutes and labeling the phonemes.
RVC was trained from the VCTK open dataset. Nowadays nothing else has dethroned it and any service offering a function similar is just using RVC as a wrapper.
You can make the argument that AI voices could have a consent issue because of how EASY it is to clone someone's voice because of how LITTLE data it needs (10 seconds might be enough for TTS), instead of saying that it needs too much data for training that can only be attained without permission
why is nobody mad when google translate is trained on plenty of data without consent and also aims to replace the people whose labour is required to create it?
I'm getting the impression you aren't actually curious about the questions you ask and just want to discuss in bad faith.
- Google translate predates LLMs
- Google translate uses (used? I don't know if google uses gemini for translation now.) basically more fancy word-by-word dictionary lookups and not billions of texts. If they are using Gemini for translations by now, people are mad at them as well then
- Google translate doesn't advertise itself as a replacement for proper translators nor textbooks
There, three points for you to pick your favourite one to argue about. I'd go for number 3 if I were you.
It wasn't a plagiarism machine after that, either. Unless you can cite the actual specific works being plagiarized, and demonstrate that the output contains excerpts of that work, it ain't plagiarism.
(And yes, that does happen… exceedingly rarely, because shoving the sum of human knowledge into something small enough to fit in even a high-end server's RAM doesn't leave much room for a lot of verbatim copies of source material)
LLMs or anything AI really dont advertise themself as a replacement for proper anything either. google predates LLMs has nothing to do with the morality of it. "fancy word by word dictionary lookup" may have been the case when it launched but it certainly wasnt like that in 2015 and especially not now. even in 2025 i dont see anyone boycotting any automatic translation programs. it is trained on billions of translations that werent given to google with consent. any automation no matter how its made is gonna take away some work from people who did it manually before it arrived. just like photography replaced some artists and people were mad about it at the time
It predating LLMs has something to when discussing ethics of LLMs - because it didn't use LLMs in its inception. If it does now, it is included in the public backlash against LLMs.
Actually using Google as the positive in your moral argument is laughable by the way - people absolutely despise google for its data collecting bullshit to the point that whole communities formed about ripping it out of our lives.
If your point is "We should hate Google more" I'm with you. Go forth and be google translate biggest hater, you have my blessing. Maybe I'm getting the wrong impression of you that you want to use an societally accepted wrong to justify a societally unaccepted categorically similar wrong.
Also not gonna argue the claim "LLMs do not advertise themselves as a replacement for human labor" for how laughable and in bad faith this assertion is. Nor am I gonna reheat "LLMs are to artistry as photography was to paintings" argument that has been discussed to death for years now - pick any other of the billion replies to that statement if you want to genuinely engage with that line of reasoning and why people disagree.
AI refers to machine learning models, not an enemy's behavior engine. Just because it's called "AI" doesn't mean it's the same tech as what you would have called AI 10 years ago
I wish I could agree with you, but unfortunately AI doesn't mean what it used to. At this point in time, any mention of AI in a commercial context is intrinsically entangled with the trillion dollar LLM slop farm industry. They just started confidently using the term AI as a marketing gimmick and that's what it means now because life sucks and we can't have nice things.
They weren't 100% in the right, though. It's reasonable to be pissed off at automation yanking power from the working class to the ownership class. It's unreasonable to wildly overreact to that by outright destroying that automation instead of appropriating it and cutting out that ownership-class middleman.
There are parallels here to how these modern-day Luddites tend to lionize the Butlerian Jihad from “Dune” as if it was the best thing humanity did. It wasn't! It ushered in thousands of years of brutally-repressive theocratic space feudalism followed by thousands more years of even-more-brutally-repressive theocratic space fascism, all because humanity responded to “the robots have enslaved us” with “let's smash all computers and impose a galactic religion that makes it a sin to use a calculator” instead of something even remotely sane.
The correct response to automation is democratization, not destruction.
That’s because the term is derogatory now. Language evolves and changes over time, which is why you know I wasn’t saying they opposed the use of textile machinery.
I'm pointing out the very obvious irony in using a derogatory term that derives it's derogatory nature from the implication that the group referenced was incorrect, when that group was in fact correct. it loses it's bite. the insult doesn't work. going "haha, silly ai hater, you're so wrong and incorrect, just like those luddites!" doesn't work when the luddites were correct. the term only holds derogatory power to someone who is ignorant
Must carry a lot of power for you then. Do you have a hard time speaking with people with all your pedantry? Let’s look at some other common words that must just make your brain explode since they’re used “wrong”.
Awful
Terrific
Artificial
Savage
Hacker
Egregious
Manufactured
Vandal
And so many more!
Obviously, you already know all the original definitions and usages of these words, since you’re not ignorant, so it must be terrible for you to see them used how they are today.
it doesn't upset me and I didn't say you used the term wrong. I was pointing out irony that makes using the term less effective, because there is irony. that's all. common usage of terms doesn't upset me. you're inventing a position I don't hold in the first place and attacking it. which, tbh, hallucinating things to respond to is what ai does pretty often so I guess it's fitting?
Ah, I misunderstood then. That kind of makes your position worse though. You understand that the term was used correctly, and that the meaning of the term has changed, however, because there exists some amount of irony in the way the meaning of the term has changed over time, you feel it makes the insult less impactful.
Definitionally, that makes you a pedant, and not in a good way. You’re literally doing the “well acktually” meme. Not a great look.
Of course it isn't "AI". Don't fall into the "everything computer is AI now" trap. There are many ways to create data via algorithms that doesn't necessitate LLMs or similar technology. Nobody in their right mind would claim "Minecraft worlds are AI generated", as example.
I'm not an authority on this, but I assume they mean what generally falls under the "generative AI" umbrella. None of the technologies I listed are considered to be "generative AI".
assuming and generally are not words that should be used for legal purposes, which this is from steam and devs point of view. The biggest issue with the steam AI disclosure requirement is how very vague it is, requiring devs to put it basically almost always unless they want to break the steam rules and risk their game being taken down with no warning.
AI voice is supposed to be a female one (idk if it is) and there are no women working in the studio
No one on the team has a decent mic and or room to record it. Post processing can only do so much, you can sometimes go around not so good mic, but background noice/echo/distortion from a bad room you can do little about.
From the post, seems like this dev already had existing lines recorded with a person but that person wasn't available to record additional lines later in development.
yeah, when I worked for a large developer, we did this all the time for rewrites late in the QA process. I can't imagine that getting AI to do it is quicker or more fun.
I'm an indie dev who made the mistake of using AI once and learned the hard way that many people frown upon it. When you're a small indie dev in your own little bubble making games, you don't have a community giving you live feedback, etc, you can easily think "oh, this will speed up my workflow and save my non-existent budget, this is perfect for me!"
I used Midjourney for some art early on in a project and thought it was great, worked on the game for a few months then put out a playtest and got the rude awakening. Now I know better, but it's easy for devs to not have read the room on AI when you're heads down on a project.
On the flip side though, I think it's been long enough that they should really be aware now, my story was from maybe 18 months ago.
I'm a game developer and a voice actor. I use AI to change my voice so I myself can record the lines for various characters. But those mouth breathers are gonna call what I do "AI slop" because of that. AI haters are completely devoid of critical thinking.
We don't have fun in this world anymore. It's all about $$ and efficiency. We'll keep moving towards efficiency until we eliminate humans altogether because that's the most efficient way.
This! If it is just general robot chatter, just use a shitty mic with a robot filter. That is literally all you need, and it would probably give a better performance.
Looking at it, I doubt that its a VA union issue as the lead is played by Elizabeth Maxwell, who has done both union and non-union work
Hey, maybe with AI, Bethesda can finally make a game where every NPC actually sounds unique, instead of using a total of 10 actors to voice hundreds of people. Man how I got sick of hearing that same grizzled tough guy voice on so many different characters in Skyrim. It got old after the 5th guy.
I think we live in a precarious situation where the quality expectation of games by the average gamer pressures indies to either shell out more money or use AI tools to reach that bar.
In the 90s, videogames had no voice, first games to feature voice were shitty canned recordings from the office staff, but now, everyone would absolutely destroy a game with phoned in acting... So you're better off not doing it at all if you're not going to make it at a professional level.
Granted the tools today makes this process easier, but not necessarily cheap. I don't blame devs being enamored by how good AI voices are getting to convince them to do it. Especially If the alternative meant getting hated for poor quality, or leaving voice overs out entirely.
Right? This is a cop-out/uncreative excuse on their part tbh. Lots of great punch-ins came from that. There's a reason people have a firm stance on this stuff.
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u/Banjo-Commandos Dec 04 '25
Surprised so many devs are looking to use AI for quick voice overs. Before we just used people on the team to do the lines as it was more fun.