There are uses of AI that are proving to be more than black and white. While voice actors, have protested their performances being fed into AI against their will, we are now seeing an example of this being done, with permission, in a very unique case.
How very cyberpunk, except for the fact that permission was given.
Permission from the family, not the person who died. Is it okay for ai actors if the actors are dead and the family wants to get paid?
CDPR originally thought they may replace him in the expansion and then go back and actually re-record his lines in the original for consistency’s sake but…no one really liked that idea, as it did not seem fair to his memory and his great performance.
I really don’t like the idea of doing it for entirely new performances but it doesn’t seem about the money in this case.
Well, that’s where we are going.
The reaction this is getting is simply going to fuel execs who now see that people are okay with it. And if they are okay with dead actors, they will be okay with live actors in a few years after they are used to that.
The correct answer to all of this was the same answer we have had for as long as humans have performed, everyone acknowledges that the character won’t continue and the media pays respect in some way for the performance the actor actually gave.
This resurrects the actor without the permission of the actor just of their family who may or may not have understood what was happening. Which is likely going to be the norm from here on out.
I don’t want an AI ressurectiin of Lance Riddick in the next Horizon game either. Do you want that?
The reaction this is getting is simply going to fuel execs who now see that people are okay with it. And if they are okay with dead actors, they will be okay with live actors in a few years after they are used to that.
This is nothing new. Let’s not forget Wagons East or that Pink Panther movie from the 70s.
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To be fair it is notoriously difficult to get permission from someone who has died.
If we can’t have necromancy in real life, then this will be the best we can get to bringing the dead back to life.
Do you have a problem with the family of a deceased writer who inherited the rights to their work given the writer’s will deciding on the publishing agreements for that writer’s work?
Should we have to resort to necromancy in order to even touch any new agreements regarding the work of the deceased?
This isn’t the creators work. This is using ai to create new things. This is akin to having an ai write a new lord of the rings sequel.
Oh, so you’d take issue with something like writing Lord of the Rings scripts based on the books, and then making movies based on the scripts?
Or maybe you have a problem with something like the family agreeing to the creation of a TV series covering time periods outside the author’s original scope of work?
What a horrid world we might end up living in if things like that were allowed to happen…
I likely lead you astray by being short on my phone, let me alter my statement to say
This isn’t the creators work. This is using ai to create new things. This is akin to having an ai write a new lord of the rings sequel under the guise of the original author.
which is more directly comparable to this situation. “J.R.R Tolkens new book, The Lord of the Rings: 2 electric boogaloo”
No, it really isn’t.
The actor agreed to voice the character in the base game. As far as I’m aware there is no evidence of a soured relationship with the developers, no reason to deduce he would have refused to continue voicing the character were he still alive.
It would be unethical to use a dead actor’s voice in a way they would have a good reason to object to if they could, but this doesn’t seem to be the case here.
I disagree with this entirely. You can not say"well they worked with them in the past so they must have been totally okay with an ai resurrection post death"
That’s not what I’m saying at all.
This is not an AI resurrection.
This is an advanced voice changer.
They are hiring another actor to play the character, and then using a voice changer to make the new actor sound like the previous one. Were it not for the permission of the family, they would have re-cast the part, and re-recorded all of Reczek’s lines from the base game to be consistent with the re-casting. The decision is between scrubbing his previous work, or using a voice changer.
In 2016 Disney released Rogue One, a film which featured a digital recreation of Peter Cushing, who had been dead for 22 years prior to the film’s release. Do you consider that more or less unethical than Miłogost Reczek’s voice being redone in the Cyberpunk DLC?
I reject your statement about it not being ai resurrection, it absolutely is. 100%. you can try and weasel out of it by saying “Oh but they had another actor provide the base that the ai model ran against”, it doesn’t change a single thing.
In 2016 Disney released Rogue One, a film which featured a digital recreation of Peter Cushing, who had been dead for 22 years prior to the film’s release. Do you consider that more or less unethical than Miłogost Reczek’s voice being redone in the Cyberpunk DLC?
It’s the same exact problem.
I reject your assumption that he is against this. So many people have spent their lives creating art in a vein attempt to be remembered beyond their own lifetime. You are disrespecting the dead by assuming, without evidence, that he must have been against this, simply because you find it distasteful.
Peter Cushing died in 1994. He died well before any of this technology was possible. He couldn’t possibly foresee the advances of technology in the two decades beyond his death. Cushing couldn’t make his opinion on this subject known during his life because this technology wasn’t even close to existing. However, Reczek could.
Reczek died in 2021. Technology to re-create dead actors was around for many years of his life. This was a well known fact, and a matter of public debate. Discussions on the ethics of this have been going for years before his death. He had every reasonable opportunity to make an informed opinion on this subject, and make that view known.
I have found no evidence that Reczek objected to this sort of thing. I have seen no evidence that the family or the studio are violating any stated or implied objection, nor are they doing this in a disrespectful way.
Similar situations come all the time for deceased musicians and writers. that get work released after they die. You can also see the family being proud of the legacy. It’s always a mix of greed and pride, some cases go more to one side that other.
This article lacks some context. Miłogost Reczek was the voice actor for the Polish language of the game. If you played the English version of the game you would have heard the very much alive Michael Gregory as Victor Vektor.
Many commenters here are discussing the writer’s and actors strikes that are in the news. Those are American unions, they have no bearing on the work of Polish voice actors who do localization work.
He also voiced Vesemir from Witcher. He was also very popular voice actor in animated movies localizations. Genuinely he was one of the few voice actors I knew by name, and the news that he died really struck me.
Technically, wouldn’t he be the standard voice actor in a CDPR game and the English actor be the localisation?
I assumed the English version is the primary version. The game is set in the US, it’s based on an American tabletop game. The plurality of the game’s players will be playing the English version. Also the Bloomberg article features quotes from “CD Projekt localization director Mikołaj Szwed.”
I don’t know specifics of CDPRs development, but it’s a reasonable assumption to make that English is the primary language, despite the studio’s location.
Also the game has Kianu Reeves, his character is pretty clearly based on the actor. You wouldn’t spend hollywood money to hire a hollywood film actor just to have them there to do dubbing work to replace a polish actor’s performance.
Aren’t all languages localizations in a game? Unless the characters’ movements and voice would be motion captured and recorded together…
In the early days, localization was often done by the publisher, independent of the original developer. Which is the reason why you only get English language on some older games on Steam, despite localization existing. The rights to those localization aren’t with the developer or publisher that is handling the Steam version. Small disc sizes also meant that you would only get one language on the disc, not a choice between multiple.
With bigger discs and online downloads a lot of that went away and games ship with multiple languages, which also means the developers are handling it themselves. But there will still be a main language that the game is actually written and developed in, while everything else is an afterthought, this can result in lip movements not matching, textures containing English or text on UI buttons having trouble fitting foreign text. Few localisations receive as much attention as the main language.
This is mostly wrong.
Localization are usually handled by external teams. Cybepunk 2077 has 11 spoken language options, and 18 text languages. No development studio has writing staff fluent in that many languages in house. The only practical way is to outsource to a different team for localization. Major publishers will usually have their own localization teams, but many developers hire external contractors to localize.
CDPR was in the news recently when their Ukranian localization team went rogue, adding commentary on the ongoing war in Ukraine. They were clear to point out that this wasn’t the work of CDPR, but decisions made by the external studio they hired.
The reason for the change has much more to do with the fact that international trade and communications have become easier. Games are sold by international stores like Steam, and the builtin store on consoles. Releasing your game to an international audience is basically trivial.
In the age of physical media, releasing internationally was a major expense. Selling media in physical stores requires local knowledge and local capital and warehouses. Most companies didn’t have that, so they would sell the distribution rights to a local company. The distributor would do the localization and would own those rights. This wasn’t just games. This is the reason for weird international availability on streaming platforms, because some local companies still own the exclusive distribution rights of films and shows in certain countries.
That makes sense.
CDPR uses game dev studios all over the place for supplemental work, so their business language has to be English.
They’re all localisation. It just happens that the polish work is localising for their home country.
I was just thinking earlier today, games could probably use AI to seamlessly work the player’s name into dialog. They would still hire voice actors, but insert whatever name the player chooses into the lines where it is mentioned. I feel like this isn’t too far away.
World of Warcraft would benefit from this. Local processing power is quite up to the task these days, and it’s jarring to see your name on the screen but the audio says “champion” or something similar.
Maybe in 11.0…
Star field does this and it caught me complete off guard became I had used my real name.
Fallout 4 did as well, but it worked with a list of names that Codsworth could say. I’m assuming Starfield does something similar? Or is it a ton of NPCs that use the name?
Idk I didn’t pick a name, I just entered my name for my character. Then I was playing and Vasco just said my name. I literally stopped in my tracks and was like “what did you just say?”
Yeah, he called me Assface.
To be fair, Vasco is a robot with a robotic / computer generated sounding voice. It’s still cool, but it wouldn’t take modern AI / neural network based processing to do that, any old text to speech engine could reproduce Vasco’s voice.
He’s voiced by Jake Green https://m.imdb.com/name/nm2482007/?ref_=tt_cl_t_4
I just saw another link farther down saying that its not actually auto generated at all. Jake Green just had to record 1011 different names…
I thought they actually just recorded a ton of names for Fallout 4? I seem to recall hearing that they did something like 900+ different name recordings.
They did the same thing. Probably using the same list with additions. Both games have a robot be the only character who says your name. I suppose that makes it less unbelievable if you notice the splices where they add your name to an otherwise unaltered line.
That’s what I meant :) I just assumed they did the same thing for Starfield
Dang, the future is here.
I like the idea a lot. I can think of two problems that need to be solved for this:
- How do you pronounce the player’s name correctly?
- How do you prohibit abuse?
- Have them type it a second time phonetically, and let them test it
- If single-player? Don’t. If multiplayer? Yeah… that’d be a nightmare lmao
Multiplayer doesn’t make a difference, at least not noticeably, as all those shenanigans can already be done by text. You’ll get reported and named “player345133” whether you misspell e.g. a forbidden slur or use a misspelling to get the slur’s pronunciation.
But it’s harder to detect spoken slang when people make it talk in mixed accents and more, you would have to run a talk to text engine too many different times with different filters and parameters against many different languages’ lists of slang words with multiple recognizable pronunciations.
And then somebody names themselves ChatGPT and the French will laugh because that sounds like “cat farted” in their language
I recently had this in a game. Just couldn’t say which one sadly… I was really suprised it said my (character’s) name. Damn…which game was it?
Starfield does this to some degree: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/starfield-names-list
It does it if you have an anglo-sounding name, which is the problem with brute forcing this.
Generative AI would be a fun solution, but it currently seems like it’d trigger a lot of controversy, sadly.
I use a piece of software called crew chief for sim racing, and it has what seems like infinite names for all different languages and regions.
I don’t use that, but from what I see it seems to have a drop-down for name selection, just like any other instance of this. Certainly not “infinite names”. A quick Google even shows a forum thread in their official forums to request specific names to be added.
So good for them on crowdsourcing the name list, I suppose, but for games that have a set release instead of being an ongoing, live database service the lists tend to be very limited and more often than not anglocentric. Even in sports games like NBA or FIFA where they just let you pick any existing name in the commentary database.
Oh right. This nasty bugger was it.
I look forward to the expansion from this, even. Real dialogue between the players and the game. Writers and designers set parameters for each character, backstory, motives, personality, current goals, etc. And then instead of a simple 4-5 choices of pre-canned dialog, with pre-canned responses, the player can type (or even say) whatever they want, and the game can return a customized response appropriate for the character.
With advances in AI, Reczek’s performance could be recreated, but CDPR made sure they got permission from his family. His sons were “very supportive” of the idea, according to a Bloomberg report.
I am pretty sure his sons are fans of CP2077 too. I would give permission too if I were in their shoes - getting a new character, or a different voice for the old character is annoyingly weird when you get used to it…
Im absolutely sure I need GlaDOS (Ellen McLain) to voice my LLM digital assistant including her iconic unending font of bitter sarcasm.
It’s just common sense. No rational viewer would challenge this necessity.
No, McLain is not dead, but I expect she is busy.
Should McLain get paid for it? Should McLain get a say in how her voice is used? That is the real issue with this stuff. The answers are not clear cut.
Yes and yes imo. A person’s voice is part of their likeness, and people should get to decide how their likeness is used and get paid for such usage.
Here’s a bigger challenge for you: Should Humphrey Bogart’s voice, likeness and mannerisms be public domain or controlled by his kin as part of his legacy? Do we have to wait as long as Disney forces us to for other IP materials?
That is a trickier question. My gut feeling is that while it makes sense for a person’s likeness to enter the public domain after they die, it feels a bit morbid and disrespectful for it to become possible to start running AI generated ads of a celebrity the day that they die. I hate how long copyright lasts now, but I feel like there should be at least some period after someone dies before their likeness enters the public domain. I don’t know how long that should be, but definitely shorter than copyright currently is (which should also be much shorter).
My other concern is that if studios can freely recreate dead celebrities then new talent won’t get a chance to make a name for themselves. Hollywood would much rather milk existing celebrities for every cent possible with AI (which is part of the reason for the SAG/AFTRA strike I guess). I don’t have an answer for this right now.
Yes and yes. It can get complicated but not in this case.
Think of it this way: make a televisión ad with any big movie star that’s still alive. Can you do it with them acting without paying? Nope. Can you do it with ai for either their voice, face or body instead of acting and not paying them, even if the movie studio owns a certain famous character? Nope, because the character + actor face belong to both the studio and the actor.
Because we live in a capitalist system in which everyone who is not a studio mogul has to scrimp and save to eat, yes, McLain shouldn’t have to beg on the street to stay fed and clothed. But then again the rest of us should not, and as I am incapable of earning money (in that I do a thing and someone compensates me for it) the capitalist system we live in would have me starve or succumb to the elements while I try to sleep on hostile architecture.
And while I don’t expect any concern for my personal welfare, it does mean my (economic) demand for a GlaDOS Digital Assistant comes to an early and tragic end, as does the demand for many other things, since the only way to earn money is by obligations to work for rich people. (And they hate most of us.)
So, while the system we have might allow for McLain to live, I won’t get to enjoy her work, or really anything, because it’s all about giving our resources to those who already hold the majority of them.
Once we have social systems that allow us all to have comfortable lives, McLain might be happy doing the work for the good of the community, and for the glory of fame, and not to be richer than the rest of us.
During the COVID-19 Lockdown of 2020, a lot of people were furloughed and didn’t get paychecks rather had to live on social benefits, many of whom took up hobbies that they really liked and could find a way to monetize, leading to the great resignation of 2021, which is one of the reasons we’re taking unions seriously right now, so I know that some people will do art for art’s sake when they don’t have to spend all their time slaving to someone else for their next meal.
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Imagine now, the Joker 2 movie where Heath Ledger, as Joker, jokes all his jokes about living in the society.
I mean, sure, but that should be negotiated. If they’re using my likeness for free I would not be ok with that. If they’re paying me (or my family) for the use, I would give permission for that.
Right…and they did. Isn’t that one of the main poinst of the article…?
Yes. This time, although it was permission from the family, not the actor. Should that be allowed?
He’s dead, I don’t think he protested too much
his silence is deafening
Is it? Or is it that I have other things to do? 🙄
I haven’t fully formed an opinion on this topic, but to me it seems wrong to use someone’s likeness without their permission. I understand that the family gave permission, which is legally ok, but is it morally ok?
I’m not sure. I think it should be something negotiated before their death.
chill, it’s a joke
Depends on whether a voice is considered a copyrightable asset. If it is it would have transfered to the family when he died so they could give permission. If not CDPR legally wouldn’t be required to get consent anyway. New regulation is probably going to be written to clarify issues like this.
Depends on whether a voice is considered a copyrightable asset.
It isn’t, a voice is not an expression and hardly tangible, you can copyright a voice as much as you can copyright a violin, or a style of play: You can’t. But as we’re talking about a person and not an object it is use of someone’s likeness, which is part of personality rights.
Once somebody is dead, their estate because their representative. It’s up to the estate to make the call at that point.
Why not?
Your likeness is basically IP, if it’s worth anything you can put it in your estate, if its worth a lot you can set up a trust to manage it, and I’m sure there’s some sort of legal shenanigans you can do to make it thorny to use
I mean you’re dead. If your family sucks and you’re worried they’ll use your voice or face for something evil, you could make it public domain to trash the value, if you care about your legacy, well… Look upon my works and despair and all that. You can burn your estate to protect it for a lifetime or two, or set up a trust to fund itself by selling use of the license according to certain standards… Eventually it’ll either warp into something very different than your body of work (for better or worse), or you’ll fade into obesity before the lawyer money runs out - so it’ll just stop
A lot of people say “AI is bad” when what they really mean is “AI is powerful; corporations are bad; I don’t want the evil artificial intelligence made by lawyers to misuse the artificial intelligence made by math and human media”
And kind of like AI, corporations are a tool. They suffer an alignment problem way worse than AI, so trusting them with digital technology like networking has been mostly disastrous, sometimes quite good, but mostly neutral.
This use of AI to use a dead person’s likeness isn’t good or bad… It’s just neutral. There’s no greater issue here than the media industry getting alternatives to human talent - the people are dead, some legacies might corrode faster, but there’s no legal hack or big moral peril here.
There are people who lived in the small window of good enough recording/storage to be useful for this tech to be useful, died before it was inevitable, but were still recognizable before it “disrupts” media entirely in a year.
With another year, the consumer grade abilities will go from currently “uncanny similar voices with a short sample” to “indistinguishable from the original voice”… We’re very close to the point where the likeness debate becomes moot because hobbyists can deepfake 4k video for shitposts
Because, as you said, some people don’t get along with their families and it could be used maliciously.
I suppose that could be solved in a will though.
In general lay audiences have a very weird relationship to AI as a topic, likely in large part to decades of effectively propaganda from SciFi anthropomorphizing it as an effective ‘other’ to have as a threat for human protagonists.
The reality of how this all is going to play out is that low skill work like walla walla filler for audioscapes will be AI generated instead of library sourced, which is going to sound better and not really make much difference to labor markets.
Middle range performances like NPCs will be AI generated from libraries where the actual voice actors creating that voice will be paid out residuals for the duration of voice generation, and you’ll likely have better performances than most side quest NPCs by the next generation of consoles.
High end performance for key characters will still be custom hires directed for the specific role, likely with additional contract terms for extended generation for things like Bethesda’s radiant questlines.
The latter is going to be the thing that’s going to be the biggest hurdle to figure out terms for, as what would be ideal for the player would be having a near infinite variety of branching questlines in an open world that would be fully voiced, but if each branch was considered its own X hours of generation under contract that wouldn’t be feasible and would ultimately price human actors out of the market down the road in favor of fully artificial alternatives. So it will probably be something like X hours of parallel generation (i.e. infinite variety but maybe only an additional 200 hours worth in a playthrough priced at 200 hours of generation).
But as can be seen in the article, it’s not as simple as waving a hand and having AI voice lines - this was work done on top of a different actor’s performance to bring the voice in line with the original performer.
And given there’s still going to be a few years as the tech improves with significant overlap of needing to work with actors to get performances right, this is all going to get managed in acceptable ways.
You don’t see people losing their minds over improved facial animation rigs taking away mocap sessions from actors, even though that’s a reality of improved tech. But it doesn’t have the scary ‘AI’ in the name (even though the tech is generally going to lean more and more on machine learning), so it flies under the radar.
Ultimately, being able to take a static voice performance into dynamic extended content is going to be one of the best things to ever happen to video games, and given how much of that is going to rely on human performance and union buy in, I wouldn’t even be surprised if the eventual leading product offering ends owned and operated by the trade unions or a number of the actors themselves.
the actual voice actors creating that voice will be paid out residuals for the duration of voice generation
In a perfect world, sure. In reality, we’ve seen that paying residuals is something companies won’t do if they can possibly help it. It’s one of the very issues being fought over in the strike negotiations right now.
And given there’s still going to be a few years as the tech improves with significant overlap of needing to work with actors to get performances right, this is all going to get managed in acceptable ways.
I admire your optimism, but I can’t share it. We’re so poorly prepared to deal with job losses associated with AI and automation in general, and I don’t see any movement on that front. If you’re relying on unions to get it done, know that they already have an uphill battle getting things they should’ve had years ago, let alone future protections against a rapidly changing market.
The thing is, for the next 3-5 years, talent holds all the cards here.
It will eventually flip such that the 20 of the 80/20 of a key character performance can be fully automated, but that’s years away.
Until then, studios that want high quality AI generated performances are going to need to be working intimately with the talent that can produce the baseline to scale out from.
And the whole job loss thing is honestly overblown. Of course there’s going to be companies chasing short term profits in exchange for long term consequences, but the vast majority of those are going to continue to blow up in their faces.
In reality, rather than labor demand staying constant as supply increases with synthetic labor, what’s going to happen is that labor demand spikes rapidly as supply increases.
You won’t see a game with a 40 person writing team reducing staff to 4 people to produce the same scope of game, you’ll see a 40 person writing team working to create a generative AI pipeline that enables an order of magnitude increase in world detail and scope.
It’s almost painful playing games these days seeing the gap between what’s here today and what’s right around the bend. Things like Cyberpunk 2077 having incredibly detailed world assets, dialogue, and interiors in the places the main and side quests take you, but NPCs on the sidewalk that all say the same things in voices that don’t even match the models, and most buildings off the beaten path being inaccessible.
Think of just how much work went into RDR2 having each NPC have unique-ish responses to a single round of dialogue from the PC, and how much of a difference that made to immersion but still only surface deep.
Rather than “let’s fire everyone and keep making games the same way we did before” staffing is going to continue to be around the same, but you’ll see indie teams able to produce games closer to bigger studios today and big studios making games that would be unthinkable just a few years ago.
The bar adjusts as technology advances. It doesn’t remain the same.
Yes, large companies are always going to try to pinch every penny. But the difference between a full voice synthesis performance over the next few years that skirts unions and a performer-integrated generation platform that’s tailored to the specific characters being represented is going to be night and day, and audiences/reviewers aren’t going to react well to cut corners as long as flagship examples of it being done right are being released too.
The fearmongering is being blown out of proportion, and at a certain point it actually becomes counterproductive, as if too many within a given sector buy into the BS such that they simply become obtusely contrarian to progress rather than adaptive, you’ll see the same shooting themselves in the foot as the RIAA/MPAA years ago fighting tooth and nail to prevent digital distribution, leaving the door open to 3rd parties to seize the future, rather than building and adapting into the future themselves (which would have been the most profitable approach in retrospect).
Ai is really just a tool. How it is used,good or bad, and whether the person’s likeness is used with permission is controlled by people who make decisions.
my man got fuckin RELIC’d
