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Modders have been hiring sound-alikes for the original Skyrim voice actors since forever. For example, male Khajiits in "Interesting NPCs" sound particularly co

Modders have been hiring sound-alikes for the original Skyrim voice actors since forever. For example, male Khajiits in "Interesting NPCs" sound particularly convincing, this is clearly a work of another professional voice actor closely mimicking Andre Sogliuzzo's original work. As far as I'm aware, no one had any issues with that; using someone's voice without consent was and is an accepted practice. What has changed? It's the same with other game assets - textures, models, animation etc. In a mod, you just have to match the original game style closely, there's no other way. The common view in the game industry is that it's fine to do because modders usually don't make money. (at least they didn't before Bethesda and alikes let them...)

joe-collins 3y ago
It's the same ethical gap that dogs virtually any AI art project. In your example, some other actor did work in exchange for some satisfactory payment (possibly free). In the case of AI synthesis, actors' work is plagiarized without even compensation.
- orbital-decay 3y ago
  > In your example, some other actor did work in exchange for some satisfactory payment (possibly free). In that example, someone else was paid instead of the original actor while using their voice, doing the job that neither the original voice actor nor copyright holder approved (in the context of NSFW mods the article is talking about). What makes it more ethical all of a sudden? What makes it less of a plagiarism? It seems to me that the actors in the article don't want their names to be associated with NSFW mods in particular (which is understandable), and the AI part is a red herring.
  - GalahiSimtam 3y ago
    This isn't a new debate in the modding community. There were all kind of opinions voiced. Robbie is not fond of AI voices, but he tracks NSFW mods because they are a natural concern. Anyways, it is the custom there that Nexusmods moderation reacts to suspected mod asset stealing and such an issue can be raised by any website user (as mod authors often leave and are no more around). However, for the voice cloning/impersonating, it requires a notification from the original VA, or some other credible confirmation that the particular VA is against this.
  - justinclift 3y ago
    The actors statements seem to be about their voices being used without permission in any context (AI, etc). Someone or some group on a crusade against NSFW material seems to be trying to use those actors in their witch hunt.
- JCharante 3y ago
  The work is plagiarized? They already got paid and it isn’t even work for the actor because it’s a deepfake. This is like hating libraries because they buy a book once and let everyone read it.
  - onetokeoverthe 3y ago
    [dead]
  - rcarr 3y ago
    The library doesn’t have the potential to end the career of every author in existence. If anything it assists their career.
  - haswell 3y ago
    If we want to compare this to libraries, it’s necessary to redefine the role of libraries. For the analogy to work, libraries now provide the service of generating new books/stories based on works under the library’s care. As a library patron, you’ll give the librarian a prompt, and they’ll generate a book for you. This book will be intrinsically dependent on the authors of all of the books in the library, but those authors will not be credited or paid for the new work. “Librarian, please generate a fantasy novel in the style of George R. R. Martin that continues where A Dance with Dragons left off”. If this is what libraries did, authors would not want their books there. This is not what libraries do, and the analogy does not hold up.
  - stuckinhell 3y ago
    brilliantly put!
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- cyanydeez 3y ago
  It's worse then that, LOnce that's legal, AI will have no need for fresh input. It'll takeover the business, surround the talent in sheer volume so even if someone wants "real" there's no metric to easily find it without huge effort. It plagiarizes then effectively puts them out of business.
  - imiric 3y ago
    > It plagiarizes then effectively puts them out of business. Isn't that a concern for any artist? We've had this discussion with digital art and photography, and decades ago with electronic music, remixes and sampling. AI is just enabling this on a larger scale, which will disrupt many fields, but copyright law will broaden, and artists will find ways to adapt or change careers.
    - haswell 3y ago
      > We've had this discussion with digital art and photography, and decades ago with electronic music, remixes and sampling We had very different discussions about all of those things. There is a certain structural similarity between AI and these past advanced in the form of: new thing disrupts old thing. But I think it’s deeply problematic to take that analogy much further. Take digital art. I don’t think it’s fair to compare the impact of the advent of digital painting tools with the advent of tools that systematically ingest all paintings and the remove the need for the original artist entirely. If removing the artist entirely was part of that discussion, I suspect the tooling and legal landscape would look rather different today. > AI is just enabling this on a larger scale, which will disrupt many fields “This” and “larger scale” are doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Nuclear weapons just enable this (blowing things up) at a larger scale. But these weapons also show us that scale introduces risks and factors not present in any prior iteration of the profession of blowing things up. My point is not that AI art tools are as dangerous as nuclear weapons, obviously, but that “it’s just x at larger scale” breaks down when the shift in scale is large enough. The result is something entirely new, for which the past rules of engagement no longer apply.
      - imiric 3y ago
deafpolygon 3y ago
> What has changed? The ability to monetize the original voice (in the case of voice actors) now that AI can re-create it with convincing effect.
- galleywest200 3y ago
  Impersonators have been doing this for stage shows for decades.
  - deafpolygon 3y ago
    Still had to hire them.
hiccuphippo 3y ago
It's easier to demonize AI than other people doing the work.
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  I guess we will have to see if you feel similar once your industry is completely gutted ?
nmfisher 3y ago
Devil's advocate - in this scenario you're still paying a second voice actor, so at least the "industry" still benefits. Take the humans out of the equation and it's no wonder the VAs get snarky.
- cyanydeez 3y ago
  Right, if you let this slide, AI closes the door for any human labor. Sure, inbreeding is a problem but once it patterns enough diversity, there simply won't be need of human voices paid for anything.
  - stuckinhell 3y ago
    Most anime dubs and videogames all sound extremely samey, at least with digital voices engine we can retune them easily without the gatekeeping of the dubbing industry which is extremely toxic.
scrps 3y ago
I would argue scale and ease. Modders going out of their way to find voice actors who can accurately reproduce an out of budget voice actor sounds like a labor of love that would not scale without serious money. Having a gaming pc with a modern-ish nvidia GPU (not hating on AMD, rocm is just painful right now) scales very nicely when you apply ML to the problem. Scales to the budget of bored tinkering teenagers with a lot of compute from chasing gaming framerates, gaming put mini ML workstations in a lot of kid's bedrooms if you think about it. As of right now it is pretty much turnkey as it is.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- hhh 3y ago
  So it should be restricted to someone who has money to blow on a labor like this?
  - haswell 3y ago
    The trouble with this framing is that it obscures the other factors involved. This isn’t just about who has enough money, but about the ethics of using an actor’s likeness at scale without their permission and without paying them. I think the fact that other VAs have been hired by mod teams in the past is only relevant if you believe that using AI is somehow equivalent.
    - thrill 3y ago
      A voice is not a "likeness" - voices are not copyrightable.
      - haswell 3y ago
        The definition of likeness extends beyond visual imagery. Regarding copyright, it was previously not practical to copy a voice, so while it may be true that it is not copyright-able today, this is not a sufficient argument for the ethics of such copies, which may or may not be in sync with current laws. If copying voices was possible when copyright laws were established, the legal landscape would probably look different than it does today, which hints at the necessity of changes going forward. AI is breaking new ground, and at this stage of the conversation, precedent is interesting in terms of how it reveals the gaps in current legal frameworks, but this should not be mistaken for such gaps being acceptable. Many of these new conversations will reveal two things: 1) The things happening right now are legal 2) There are legitimate questions about whether or not they should be

joe-collins 3y ago

It's the same ethical gap that dogs virtually any AI art project. In your example, some other actor did work in exchange for some satisfactory payment (possibly free). In the case of AI synthesis, actors' work is plagiarized without even compensation.

orbital-decay 3y ago
> In your example, some other actor did work in exchange for some satisfactory payment (possibly free). In that example, someone else was paid instead of the original actor while using their voice, doing the job that neither the original voice actor nor copyright holder approved (in the context of NSFW mods the article is talking about). What makes it more ethical all of a sudden? What makes it less of a plagiarism? It seems to me that the actors in the article don't want their names to be associated with NSFW mods in particular (which is understandable), and the AI part is a red herring.
- GalahiSimtam 3y ago
  This isn't a new debate in the modding community. There were all kind of opinions voiced. Robbie is not fond of AI voices, but he tracks NSFW mods because they are a natural concern. Anyways, it is the custom there that Nexusmods moderation reacts to suspected mod asset stealing and such an issue can be raised by any website user (as mod authors often leave and are no more around). However, for the voice cloning/impersonating, it requires a notification from the original VA, or some other credible confirmation that the particular VA is against this.
- justinclift 3y ago
  The actors statements seem to be about their voices being used without permission in any context (AI, etc). Someone or some group on a crusade against NSFW material seems to be trying to use those actors in their witch hunt.
JCharante 3y ago
The work is plagiarized? They already got paid and it isn’t even work for the actor because it’s a deepfake. This is like hating libraries because they buy a book once and let everyone read it.
- onetokeoverthe 3y ago
  [dead]
- rcarr 3y ago
  The library doesn’t have the potential to end the career of every author in existence. If anything it assists their career.
- haswell 3y ago
  If we want to compare this to libraries, it’s necessary to redefine the role of libraries. For the analogy to work, libraries now provide the service of generating new books/stories based on works under the library’s care. As a library patron, you’ll give the librarian a prompt, and they’ll generate a book for you. This book will be intrinsically dependent on the authors of all of the books in the library, but those authors will not be credited or paid for the new work. “Librarian, please generate a fantasy novel in the style of George R. R. Martin that continues where A Dance with Dragons left off”. If this is what libraries did, authors would not want their books there. This is not what libraries do, and the analogy does not hold up.
- stuckinhell 3y ago
  brilliantly put!
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
cyanydeez 3y ago
It's worse then that, LOnce that's legal, AI will have no need for fresh input. It'll takeover the business, surround the talent in sheer volume so even if someone wants "real" there's no metric to easily find it without huge effort. It plagiarizes then effectively puts them out of business.
- imiric 3y ago
  > It plagiarizes then effectively puts them out of business. Isn't that a concern for any artist? We've had this discussion with digital art and photography, and decades ago with electronic music, remixes and sampling. AI is just enabling this on a larger scale, which will disrupt many fields, but copyright law will broaden, and artists will find ways to adapt or change careers.
  - haswell 3y ago
    > We've had this discussion with digital art and photography, and decades ago with electronic music, remixes and sampling We had very different discussions about all of those things. There is a certain structural similarity between AI and these past advanced in the form of: new thing disrupts old thing. But I think it’s deeply problematic to take that analogy much further. Take digital art. I don’t think it’s fair to compare the impact of the advent of digital painting tools with the advent of tools that systematically ingest all paintings and the remove the need for the original artist entirely. If removing the artist entirely was part of that discussion, I suspect the tooling and legal landscape would look rather different today. > AI is just enabling this on a larger scale, which will disrupt many fields “This” and “larger scale” are doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Nuclear weapons just enable this (blowing things up) at a larger scale. But these weapons also show us that scale introduces risks and factors not present in any prior iteration of the profession of blowing things up. My point is not that AI art tools are as dangerous as nuclear weapons, obviously, but that “it’s just x at larger scale” breaks down when the shift in scale is large enough. The result is something entirely new, for which the past rules of engagement no longer apply.
    - imiric 3y ago

deafpolygon 3y ago

> What has changed? The ability to monetize the original voice (in the case of voice actors) now that AI can re-create it with convincing effect.

galleywest200 3y ago
Impersonators have been doing this for stage shows for decades.
- deafpolygon 3y ago
  Still had to hire them.

hiccuphippo 3y ago

It's easier to demonize AI than other people doing the work.

ChatGTP 3y ago
I guess we will have to see if you feel similar once your industry is completely gutted ?

nmfisher 3y ago

Devil's advocate - in this scenario you're still paying a second voice actor, so at least the "industry" still benefits. Take the humans out of the equation and it's no wonder the VAs get snarky.

cyanydeez 3y ago
Right, if you let this slide, AI closes the door for any human labor. Sure, inbreeding is a problem but once it patterns enough diversity, there simply won't be need of human voices paid for anything.
- stuckinhell 3y ago
  Most anime dubs and videogames all sound extremely samey, at least with digital voices engine we can retune them easily without the gatekeeping of the dubbing industry which is extremely toxic.

scrps 3y ago

I would argue scale and ease. Modders going out of their way to find voice actors who can accurately reproduce an out of budget voice actor sounds like a labor of love that would not scale without serious money. Having a gaming pc with a modern-ish nvidia GPU (not hating on AMD, rocm is just painful right now) scales very nicely when you apply ML to the problem. Scales to the budget of bored tinkering teenagers with a lot of compute from chasing gaming framerates, gaming put mini ML workstations in a lot of kid's bedrooms if you think about it. As of right now it is pretty much turnkey as it is.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
hhh 3y ago
So it should be restricted to someone who has money to blow on a labor like this?
- haswell 3y ago
  The trouble with this framing is that it obscures the other factors involved. This isn’t just about who has enough money, but about the ethics of using an actor’s likeness at scale without their permission and without paying them. I think the fact that other VAs have been hired by mod teams in the past is only relevant if you believe that using AI is somehow equivalent.
  - thrill 3y ago
    A voice is not a "likeness" - voices are not copyrightable.
    - haswell 3y ago
      The definition of likeness extends beyond visual imagery. Regarding copyright, it was previously not practical to copy a voice, so while it may be true that it is not copyright-able today, this is not a sufficient argument for the ethics of such copies, which may or may not be in sync with current laws. If copying voices was possible when copyright laws were established, the legal landscape would probably look different than it does today, which hints at the necessity of changes going forward. AI is breaking new ground, and at this stage of the conversation, precedent is interesting in terms of how it reveals the gaps in current legal frameworks, but this should not be mistaken for such gaps being acceptable. Many of these new conversations will reveal two things: 1) The things happening right now are legal 2) There are legitimate questions about whether or not they should be