...... Isn't sag the one that was just up in arms over AI? Wasn't that a huge part of the fucking protests?
this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2024
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Hah, clever and depressing remix of that classic quote.
Yes, but somehow this deal will be okay even though it looks like some pretty big names in the VO/A community were never asked for their opinion or approval.
When it says "SAG-AFTRA Approves" - doesn't that imply that all union members were given a vote?
In fact, yes, yes it does...
"The agreement between the leading AI voice company and the world's largest performers’ union will enable Replica to engage SAG-AFTRA members under a fair, ethical agreement to safely create and license a digital replica of their voice. Licensed voices can be used in video game development and other interactive media projects from pre-production to final release.
Approved by affected members of the union’s voiceover performer community, this contract marks an important step towards the ethical use of AI voices..."
I see a lot of union voice actors speaking out on social media that they weren't even asked about this.
"Approved by affected members" is the critical part of the quote. So no it absolutely wasn't "all union members", they evidently cherry picked who voted on this.
Yes, keyword affected members... other members weren't affected. They didn't need the whole union vote.
This definitely sounds like a case of the old union saying "Brother brother in the hall. In the field fuck 'em all".
The SAG protests were pretty transparently about protecting old money. Actors with hundreds to thousands of hours of footage already out there that can be easily turned into AI models.
You only need like an hour of clear voice samples to train an AI VA. More is better, but even a half hour can be enough to be passable.
So much for labor unions establishing worker's rights.
What should SAG-AFTRA have done differently do you mean?
Represented everyone. When animators were adequately represented yet the CGI techs weren't, Disney just stopped making drawn animated films and resorted to CGI, which is all we get now.
Essentially, however unions fail to provide for the working class gets exploited by the owning class.
And it's fair if labor unions can't fix everything, but then let us admit that our capitalist system is broken beyond what labor can do to fix it. Let's stop pushing unions as a solution, except as a short-term one that is going to leave some people cold and hungry.
I can't speak for how unions work in the US but over here in Sweden they work because of member engagement. Of course, the opposite is true too: they doesn't work when there is no engagement shown by the members.
If unionmembers don't show up on the meetings, especially the annual one, where the board election take place each year, the board doesn't know what the members want. Furthermore, if members do hint show up on election day they are getting the board they deserve. (The same goes for government and elections)
My experience is that most of the people complaining about the union not representing them, being corrupt and/or being toothless, are people who never visited an annual meeting. They never participated in the election of representatives and they most often think of the union like it's their personal legal team.
Unions are positive and bring good things, not only to workers/members but also to the "area of business", when the members are active in the discussions and understand the issues. Unions are bad, almost cancerous, when members just pay the monthly fee and aren't really engaged...
I don't know if the persons complaining are super engaged in the union work but tweets like "you don't represent me but happily take my money" smell a little bit of "you're the worst legal team I've ever had".
When it comes to the issue here I wonder what the alternative would be? SAG-AFTRA saying no to AI voice overs? Going out on strike?
In what way would that not end up in the companies just use more AI VO AI is an investment and a recurring cost you can calculate. Human labor is not. There is all sorts of unknowns connected to human labor and AI never make threats about going out on strike (yet!?)
So, a little more in detail, what do you think will be the result of what they did here? What should they have done differently and what result would they have gotten then?
This is a very unusual union, though. It's more like a chamber of commerce. A normal union represents employees who expect to work for years and decades in the same job and mainly rely on an hourly wage, right? IDK how many employees like that are in SAG-AFTRA.
Many people represented here function more like independent trade people. They take on specific jobs for a negotiated pay. The big names, mainly screen actors, function more like capital owners. They have fame and fans, which they rent out for money. By licensing their voices they can do exactly that. It gives them an additional source of income, without having to do extra work.
Basically, I want to say that you can't judge what's happening here in terms of Swedish union politics.
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When animators were adequately represented yet the CGI techs weren’t, Disney just stopped making drawn animated films and resorted to CGI, which is all we get now.
Weren't the old school animation movies all outsourced to low wage countries anyway?
According to the granddaughter of a (late) disgruntled Disney animator they found plenty of low-wage animators here in the states. That was the fist age of Disney animation. The second age began with The Little Mermaid and unionization efforts began around The Lion King
Hollywood is notorious for short-changing talent and crew, which has been cause to disregard its grievances about piracy. The studios also routinely pirate media, themselves when they have a mind to.
Regardless, there really isn't room to negotiate, especially if striking is the only bullet the unions have chambered.
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Here I go again, playing devil's advocate...
So, this is an opt-in situation. That means that actors still have to give their permission to have their voice used. Furthermore, they must still give their consent on a per-project basis. Further-furthermore, they still get paid when their voice is used this way.
That being said, this seems like a smart move on the side of SAG-AFTRA if for no other reason other than it's going to happen one way or the other, though it would have been better to do this a decade ago and have more control, but more on that later. AI is a boulder rolling down the mountain, and creatives are the house at the bottom of the mountain. The boulder is going to destroy the house, and there is no stopping it. SAG-AFTRA is taking actions to save what they can from the house and at least make sure that there are protections in place for future houses. This is what happens when no one wants to keep up with tech and has to be reactive instead of pro-active.
We rolled the corpse of TUPAC on stage at Coachella in 2012, 11 years ago. That's 11 years to sort all of this shit out and set up some protections for using likenesses with the prospect of new tech. That's 11 years to get your shit together for the future. But everyone was like, "Ha ha, truck drivers, fast food workers, and the rest of the poors will be the first to suffer under the boot of advanced automation. AI won't come to Hollywood. No one can replicate such masterpieces as Catwoman and Bee Movie. We are invincible." Well, here we are, and Hollywood and other creatives are caught with their pants down. None of this shit is new. Hell, Hollywood has been making movies about this kind of shit for decades, they were just too busy sniffing their own farts to realize they were the ones in trouble.
So, now, SAG-AFTRA are having to make concessions to stay relevant in an emerging system, instead of making the rules themselves like they should have been doing a decade ago. Is anything going to change? Is anyone going to be looking forward? Or can we expect another strike in 10 years because the policies put in place today were merely stop-gaps and did nothing to shore up for the next boulder the rolls down the mountain?
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Race to the bottom, race to the bottom, race to the bottom again
When I get to the bottom I go back to the top of the slide
Where I stop and I turn and I go for a ride
'Til I get to the bottom and I see you again
Yeah, yeah, yeah, ha-ha-ha!
Opt-in until all the work contracts include the AI permission clause and you sign in or don't get any contract.
It's a race to the bottom.
Yes, you can decline to opt in, but the guy next to you (or the guy next to him) will opt in and sell his AI voice package for less than it costs to employ a real person. And unlike a real person, the AI voice package can work 24/7 on 10,000 productions at the same time.
If anyone can opt in, then no one can really opt out.
Is this a good thing? For the bottom line of the people making the games, sure. And maybe 3% of that savings will trickle down to the consumer.
But it's pretty bad for the voice actors.
I 100% agree with you. That is why SAG-AFTRA needs to step in and make good policies now instead of just plugging the hole in the dam.
I absolutely agree with this take. This isn't something that will just go away. Especially for something like video games it just makes too much sense. The best time to address this topic might have been a long time ago, but they are still in a position where they can shape how things will play out. In the short term it might be better to not do so, but eventually someone else will take the opportunity if they don't.
This is going to be the future of gaming, AI is going to be heavily involved in many parts of game dev going forward. AI voices aren't perfect yet, but when they are companies are naturally going to use them.
This is a tough subject, because I agree with you.
I'm not sure what a good agreement would look like in this circumstance. I think, even if this sounds outlandish, we need to start preparing for a post-work world.
I don't mean post-work in the sense that no one will work, just that the assumption that everyone should find a job is breaking down. Surplus labor is growing, and it's going to grow more and more, faster and faster, in different industries before others. And it's going to be disruptive.
Currently, I think that labor unions are a critical part of securing worker rights, but this is another example that they're not going to be enough to respond to shifts on the order we're witnessing. We need strong unions, but we need a broad social movement towards guaranteed services as well.
And I'm going to hate it.
Oh great AAA games are going to get even worse... I hope indie devs have better sense to not use AI voices at least.
Well, indie studios aren't known for huge budgets - they generally don't include voice acting at all. Between no voice acting and AI voice acting, which is better?
None. Bad voice acting is worse than none for sure. Like for example Morrowind had a pretty good story and writing but Oblivion's voice acting has been a joke for over a decade now.
Compared to anything nowadays, yes - Oblivion was awful. But let me tell you, I played that game as a kid and it wouldn't have been even half as interesting with no VA. When you're a stealth archer and someone gets close to you and you think you're safely hidden, but then you hear "you're not supposed to be here", it scared the hell out of 15-yo me and made me run away sooo fast. I tried morrowind just after that and couldn't stomach playing it - no VA? At all? It was awful.
Maybe we sometimes forget, games are also for kids. Kids don't need the best acting. And while adult me can't take oblivion VA seriously - it is still one of the best games I've ever played as a child, while Morrowind never even made it into the list because I was spoiled by playing Oblivion first, with its VA, bad as it is.
Morrowind had voice acting for lines like detecting you and greetings when you got close, plus a few lines in story, most notably Dagoth Ur and Vivec.
For the majority of the story there was none while oblivion had like 11 people voice the entire thing and poorly. The voice acting of Oblivion was also accompanied by the way worse writing. I grew up on Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 and later Morrowind and those were only partially voice acted and I definitely liked that as a kid as well, at least more than I did Oblivion.
Also having voice acting limits roleplaying. That's why in Baldurs Gate 3 even though everything else is voiced, you the player keep silent. That way they can write 6 different ways you pick what and how you would like your character to say something, even if the end result from the NPC is the same for all of them, because it doesn't increase the VA workload at all.
...which, granted, would be something using AI would solve...
It's a thorny issue. In the position of an indie dev/studio i get using cheap (or free) art, be it voice, textures, whatever. In a way a properly licensed ai trained voice is no different from using assets from an asset store.
On the other hand, the current crop of ai are less than fair about where they source the data, so good luck getting a morally neutral voice right now, leaving aside the legal aspect.
A big issue beyond that is how it'll completely wreck the industry. If Alice licensed her voice for cheap, and I can get it to say whatever I need with minimal hassle why wouldn't I use that over paying more for a voice actor, where I have to wait on them to actually record and rerecord her lines? I'd be paying more for slower results and more work.
Then you realize this is true not just for me but for most groups needing voice lines. This means that even if an individual voice seems ethically sound, considering the wider context and impact on other voice actors it becomes far less simple.
It is.
Personally, I'm not against it. Acting means by default imitating something. Pretending you are something you are not. If AI can do it as well or better than actors, I'm okay with that.
Maybe we're at a stage where the voice actors of tomorrow will be simply those who can configure the AI to output the voice most fitting the role, rather than those who can reproduce it with their own vocal chords. They're different skillets - I see no reason why one should be more important and worth saving than the other.
This is progress. The only bad thing about progress is that it won't benefit the many, but the few that can capitalize on it. This, I do regret. But on the other hand - I'm sure all the horse ranchers were very much against cars when they first appeared, and not for environmental reasons, but for more selfish ones. And while it might've been sad for so many of them to have to start working in a different field, it's also undeniable that cars have made a huge economic impact on the world and that living conditions as a whole have improved since their invention.
Idk. It's a whole thing. I really hope these people can find a way to ride the wave. Because right now it looks like they'll just be crushed by it instead, and I for one can't justify impeding progress for the love of the few people stuck in the past.
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Sounds like a union leadership shakeup is gonna happen at SAG-AFTRA in the very near future
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I'm hoping all jobs are taken by AI and we get UBI.
And yes, I've heard all the AI fear mongering talking points. Not interested in the AI will kill us all conversation.
And intelligent debate would be fine.
If UBI isn't implemented first then we're fucked. Companies will just use AI to cut costs and discard labor.
No; without unions putting a stop to corporations that idealistic future will never arrive. And that's pretty simple to prove. Why do corporations do the shitty stuff that they do? Because they can.
That's the real problem. UBI is often brought up in these discussions as a "maybe someday hopefully" while AI is here, now.
The longer it's delayed for UBI to be established (if it's even going to be), the more people will suffer being driven into more precarious jobs or left to misery. It's already depressing to think of artists being automated out of art to go work on amazon warehouse or something, but it's not going to stop at that. A lot of service and intellectual work could be automated just as easily, maybe even more so.
If UBI isn't already here, then opposing AI is the only sane option labor movements have.
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If voice actors are represented by the same union as all the film and TV actors then they never had a chance. United Airlines had a similar situation in the 90's where flight dispatchers were represented by the same union as the mechanics - but were outnumbered probably 10 to 1. So dispatch pay and working conditions were an afterthought to the union and even if every dispatcher voted no, if a contract was good to the mechanics it would still pass.
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