[Osmose]

The lightness with which you treat forcing tens of thousands of people to change their career is absurd. Indie games are hardly suffering for a lack of voice acting, even if you only look at it from a market perspective and ignore that voice acting is a creative interpretation and not simply reading the words the way the director wants.

Yes, we should avoid using it because it will upend the lives of a significant amount of artists for the primary benefit of "some indie games will have more voice acting and big game companies will be able to save money on voice actors". That's not worth it, how could you think it is?

[waterhouse]

Suppose all existing voice actors, and, to be maximally generous, everyone who had spent >1 year training to be a voice actor, was given a pension for some years, paying them the greater of their current income or some average voice actor income. And then there would be no limits on using AI voices to substitute for voice actors.

Would you be happy with that outcome, or do you have another objection?

[ben_w]

> The lightness with which you treat forcing tens of thousands of people to change their career is absurd.

Only tens of thousands? Cute. For most of the 2010s, I was expecting self-driving cars to imminently replace truck drivers, which is a few millions in the US alone and I think around 40-45 million worldwide. I still do expect AI to replace humans for driving, I just don't know how long it will take. (I definitely wasn't expecting "creative artistry" to be an easier problem than "don't crash a car", I didn't appreciate that nobody minds if even 90% of the hands have 6 fingers while everyone minds if a car merely equals humans by failing to stop in 1 of every (3.154e7 seconds per year * 1.4e9 vehicles / 30000 human driving fatalities per year ~= 1.47e+12) seconds of existence).

Almost every nation used to be around 90% farm workers, now it's like 1-5% (similar numbers to truckers) and even those are scared of automation; the immediate change was to factory jobs, but those too have shifted into service roles because of automation of the former, and the rest are scared of automation (and outsourcing).

Those service-sector roles? "Computer" used to be a job; Graphical artists are upset about Stable Diffusion; Anyone working with text, from Hollywood script writers to programmers to lawyers, is having to justify their own wages vs. an LLM (for now, most of us are winning this argument; but for how long?)

We get this wrong, it's going to be a disaster; we get it right, we're all living better the 0.1%.

> Indie games are hardly suffering for a lack of voice acting, even if you only look at it from a market perspective and ignore that voice acting is a creative interpretation and not simply reading the words the way the director wants.

I tried indie game development for a bit. I gave up with something like £1,000 in my best year. (You can probably double that to account for inflation since then).

This is because the indie game sector is also not suffering from a lack of developer talent, meaning there's a lot of competition that drives prices below the cost of living. Result? Hackathons where people compete for the fun of it, not for the end product. Those hackathons are free to say if they do or don't come with rules about GenAI; but in any case, they definitely come with no budget.

> Yes, we should avoid using it because it will upend the lives of a significant amount of artists for the primary benefit of "some indie games will have more voice acting and big game companies will be able to save money on voice actors". That's not worth it, how could you think it is?

A few hours ago I was in the Deutsches Technikmuseum; there's a Jacquard Loom by the cafe: https://technikmuseum.berlin/ausstellungen/dauerausstellunge...

The argument you give here is much the same argument used against that machine, back in the day: https://spectrum.ieee.org/the-jacquard-loom-a-driver-of-the-...

Why do you think those textile workers lost the argument?

And to pre-empt what I think is a really obvious counter, I would also add that the transition we face must be handled with care and courtesy to the economic fears — to all those who read my comment and think "and therefore this will be easy and we should embrace it, just dismiss the nay-sayers as the Luddites they are": why do you think Karl Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto?