Video game voice actors set to strike as they fight AI for their jobs

By Jon Swartz

A strike looms as more jobs are given to AI: “It’s scary,” says a voiceover actor.

Hollywood is preparing for another actors' strike, this time against the video game industry.

“We are currently in negotiations with all the major game studios, and the main sticking point is AI,” Duncan Crabtree-Ireland, national executive director of SAG-AFTRA, said Thursday. “Stakeholders at all levels are at risk of digital replication. We have strike authorization on this contract and, at this point, we may end up striking.”

Voice actor Sarah Elmaleh chairs the union's interactive media deal negotiating committee. “I haven’t seen anything like this in technology to impact our jobs,” she said. “A replicated voice cannot yet display a spectrum of emotions. For now, it is a technology based on average and best questions. It lacks nuance.”

The union, which successfully won a new film and television contract after a 118-day strike against Hollywood studios last year, is returning its focus to regulating artificial intelligence and its impact on businesses. wages and employment. “This will be a recurring problem with each successive contract” every three years, Crabtree-Ireland said.

The companies facing a possible strike include Microsoft Corp.'s Activision Publishing. (MSFT), Blindlight LLC, Disney Character Voices International Inc. (DIS), Electronic Arts Inc. (EA), Epic Games Inc., Formosa Interactive LLC, Insomniac Games Inc., Take 2 Productions, VoiceWorks Productions Inc. and Warner Bros. Games (WBD).

“Actors and actresses should be very scared,” Chris Mattmann, an assistant research professor in the computer science department at the University of Southern California, said in an interview. “In three seconds, the AI ​​generation can effectively clone a voice.”

Video game studios pay professional actors to play the aliens, detectives, elves and monsters that inhabit virtual worlds. But increasingly, some are using realistic AI-generated voices to save money. And this reduced the work of the actors.

It's been over a year since the Interactive Media Agreement, the guild's video game contract, was extended beyond its original expiration date. The last SAG-AFTRA strike against gaming companies, in 2016-2017, lasted about six months.

In September, members overwhelmingly approved strike authorization on the current contract. The national council has the power to call a strike at any time if negotiations fail.

A spokesperson representing the 10 video game companies said they were optimistic that a resolution could be reached.

“We continue to negotiate in good faith and have made enormous progress. We have reached agreements in principle on the vast majority of the proposals and remain optimistic that an agreement can be reached soon,” the spokesperson said. word in a statement to MarketWatch.

AI horror stories abound

When it comes to AI, Hollywood is as fraught with tension as any other industry, even technology, media or customer service.

A flashpoint came in 2014, when Baidu Inc.'s (BIDU) DeepSpeech technology first converted speech to text. Fast forward to today, and dialect, inflection, and connotation have been refined thanks to voice clones.

“It was the number one topic of discussion during a [voice-over] conference in Atlanta this month,” Joe Davis, a board member of the World Voices Organization, the international trade association for voice actors, said in an interview. “Everyone is concerned about the AI. It seems that the low end of the market is disappearing. So where will people start in the industry? Over the past six months, the majority of these jobs have been dedicated to AI.”

Also read: Tennessee becomes first state to protect musicians and other artists from AI

A-list actors like Bradley Cooper – the voice of Rocket Raccoon in Marvel's “Guardians of the Galaxy” – needn't worry, but many cartoon and video game actors are considering pay cuts and the number of jobs.

Most at risk are the thousands of working actors who earn anywhere from $100 per gig to tens of thousands of dollars per year on a project. Increasingly, many are finding their roles devalued or losing their jobs altogether because of digitally reproduced voices similar to their own.

“It's scary. We don't know where things are going. In the last year alone, the progression has been insane,” said Rebecca Davis, a video game voice actor who plays a time weaver in “Asgard's Wrath 2 ” from Oculus and member of SAG-AFTRA. “As far as I know, my voice hasn't been reproduced, but things come up with video games. Sometimes we don't really know until someone tells you. The company doesn't don't tell you.”

Diana Birdsall, a non-union voice actor for about 20 years, was abruptly replaced by AI on a telephone messaging service a year ago. The contract paid between $17,000 and $20,000 a year. As she recovered from the shock of losing her job, she learned last week that she may have lost a $25,000-a-year job making medical explainer videos for another “voice” of AI.

“There is no compensation for this” loss of revenue, Birdsall said in an interview. “I need to work harder, and I've been told I need to look more authentic. Are you kidding me?”

In 2021, Bev Standing, a non-union voice actress, successfully sued TikTok owner ByteDance Ltd. for using her voice without her consent.

During her more than 20 years of acting experience, including as a voice-over actress, Laurie Burke has performed thousands of voice-overs for companies like Facebook (META), LinkedIn, Apple Inc. ( AAPL) and Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN). She started as an original voice of Google Voice and later played an AI voice in the movie “Jexi”.

“AI can’t replicate the emotion of a voice,” Burke said in an interview. “It’s a bit like the drum machine. Drums can’t be improvised.”

-Jon Swartz

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03-23-24 0911ET

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