Baldur's Gate 3 actors reveal the darker side of success fuelled by AI voice cloning

eurogamer.net:

Larian's Baldur's Gate 3 has been celebrated for the performances of its voice cast, who received several performance nominations for this year's BAFTA awards and which last night won the coveted Best Game award.

However, on the red carpet, the game's actors detailed the darker side of their success thanks to the rise in AI and voice cloning.

Amelia Tyler, who was nominated for best performance for her portrayal of the Baldur's Gate 3 narrator, spoke candidly to Eurogamer about a particularly harrowing stream.

«People have been recreating my voice off the back of this game in AI without my permission, and several other actors from the game,» she said. «Just so everyone is aware, none of us have given permission for that to ever happen. Unless I have signed something saying you're allowed to do that, that is stealing not just my job but my identity.

»I've had some really bad experiences like going into somebody's stream where they've put up text-to-speech and given their chat control of it," she continued. «I went on to this stream because somebody gave me a heads up and I went on and heard my own voice reading rape porn. That's the level of stuff we've had to deal with since this game came out and it's been horrible, honestly.»

Tyler added she would love to see players recording their own versions of the narrator's lines — «I absolutely love mods in games,» she said — but said «to actually take my voice and use it to train something without my permission, I think that should be illegal».

Andrew Wincott, who won the best supporting performance award for playing Raphael, understood some of the benefits of using AI such as recording for 10 hours to create 40 hours of product. «And I thought that's great,» he said, «as long as you pay me for 40!»

Wincott said he «commends» unions such as Equity