Voice actors are worried about modders cloning their voices with AI

gamedeveloper.com:

SAG-AFTRA's ongoing strike has shone a light on how major Hollywood conglomerates are looking to use generative artificial intelligence as an alternative to paying for human labor—but questions about the technology's use are also creeping up on actors in the video game industry.

Though no major studios have committed to using AI voices in lieu of human performers, a new phenomenon is putting stress on the voices behind characters like Evie Fry of Assassin's Creed Syndicate and Long Caster in Ace Combat 7: modders using AI tools to recreate their voices in other games.

In the last year, the modding community has begun using the technology to fully recreate the voices of their favorite actors. Sometimes it's to make original stories set in the world of their favorite game, other times it's to create pornographic content that falls outside the scope of the original performance.

Speaking to Game Developer, actors Victoria Atkin and Tim Friedlander (who is also the head of the National Association of Voice Actors) laid out what they and their colleagues have been experiencing: in the last two years, modders have begun using tools like those from ElevenLabs to synthesize their voices, and it's leaving them feeling vulnerable about the future of their work.

In movies, spies and sci-fi hackers will synthesize voices using just a few sentences from an unwilling subject. In real life, it takes much more audio than that. But voice actors build their profession by producing hours and hours high-quality audio that's then packaged into commercially available games—making it easy to feed their voice into generative AI tools.

Atkin and Friedlander say their development partners haven't done anything to directly contribute to this problem—but