SAG-AFTRA voice actors go on strike, as negotiations around AI use go nowhere.
Video game voice actors represented by SAG-AFTRA — one of America’s biggest actors’ unions — are going on strike. After over a year of negotiations with some of the biggest western publishers including Activision Blizzard, EA, and Take Two, negotiations have reached a standstill over one of the more controversial points of debate: AI.
AI has proven to be an industry-shaking technical development within the voice acting space. New AI software is able to train on pre-existing performances, and use this pool of voice acting work to output its own lines. For video game companies this provides an opportunity to own a quick and easy voice-acting solution, but for the actors themselves it’s an extistential threat. One that not only uses their own copyrighted performances as building blocks, but threatens their jobs.
