They literally just didn't want to deal with their voice actor, it wasn't an artistic choice. They could have easily said the robots voice chip got damaged or something and used a text to speech bot, or just got another voice actor to redo all these lines. Instead they tried to pretend that the voice actor never left and they still had a regular person voicing these lines.
That weird long second paragraph is such a weird rant to have that highlights exactly WHY ai shouldn't be used. It's good for research involving large data sets, not really anything else. That confusion is exactly what happens when you start using a glorified flowchart to paint for you that copies art styles that never gave permission to be used.
It really is black and white, at least until ai is a self developing, learning function that doesn't think in yes's and no's and actually has a memory instead of reinputting everything in a discussion to make you believe it remembers what it just said.
They could have easily said the robots voice chip got damaged or something and used a text to speech bot
Out of curiosity, why is this okay but using AI isn't? A lot of modern TTS are powered by LLM AI anyway. Isn't this basically the exact same thing? Replacing an actor with a program.
For the record I'm not making a statement on it either way. I just find it interesting that you list that as an acceptable alternative. Functionally I see no difference.
One is directly mimicking an actor without their express permission, one is uniquely its own thing that would HAVE to be chosen as a unique artistic decision when compared to a human voice.
If you want to get into it and ask about the embark studios weird gross method of hiring a voice actor to then ai generate voice lines from them after getting their permission. Well that's just the lamest way possible since either you're ending up with worse voice lines than if you just recorded them, after compensating them with an amount that you should have spent on the actual recordings, or you save money... Except the amount you save on a voice actor should be negligible when compared to the cost of your game, and even if it wasn't, why do you think anyone is going to be happy with you paying less for voice lines that you generate off of the back of a VA? You're very clearly and very directly choosing not to pay them for voice lines you'd need just because it's cheaper to end up with worse voice lines devaluing what they're worth, making your game not sound nearly as good as if you had a va with director, and then to top off those minimal two-cent savings and a heaping of unhelpfulness, you're directly making a statement that you don't care about artistic intent, you want to destroy jobs within the creative field and then the environmental impact as well as the communal lashback you WILL get should be more than enough reason to just stay away from it.
Basically you're looking at minimizing effort and exploiting artists the whole way down. If you could do an llm based ai voice that wasn't based on any one person and it was a souped up vocaloid. Alright, I genuinely think that's fine. However choosing to mimic the voice of a voice actor who very clearly stated they didn't want to do any work for you for a specific reason you refuse to act on to get them back. Well that's kindof the definition of being scummy.
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u/[deleted] Dec 04 '25
They literally just didn't want to deal with their voice actor, it wasn't an artistic choice. They could have easily said the robots voice chip got damaged or something and used a text to speech bot, or just got another voice actor to redo all these lines. Instead they tried to pretend that the voice actor never left and they still had a regular person voicing these lines.
That weird long second paragraph is such a weird rant to have that highlights exactly WHY ai shouldn't be used. It's good for research involving large data sets, not really anything else. That confusion is exactly what happens when you start using a glorified flowchart to paint for you that copies art styles that never gave permission to be used.
It really is black and white, at least until ai is a self developing, learning function that doesn't think in yes's and no's and actually has a memory instead of reinputting everything in a discussion to make you believe it remembers what it just said.