For those who play enough games, a voice actor’s every sound and inflection is like hearing the banter of a forgotten friend, sending off firecrackers of recognition in the brain. In video games, despite the recent obsession of graphical fidelity down to each and every facial pore, players get to know their favorite characters through their intonations, their sighs, their joy—their voices. Voiceover work has become an intrinsic part of gaming, yet for an industry that already fails to credit the actors who light the fire the behind these animated characters’ eyes, things may be getting even worse, thanks to the proliferation of generative AI systems.
Jennifer Hale is one of the gaming industry’s most prolific actors. She’s a multi-decade veteran in video games and beyond, and while she’s stuck out in roles like Ashe from Overwatch 2 and Kronika in Mortal Kombat 11, it’s the Mass Effect series that cemented her in the minds of millions of English-speaking players worldwide. In a phone call with Gizmodo, Hale channeled her years as Commander Shepard when she said voiceover actors need to stand together against the threat of artificial intelligence.
“We’re all on the chopping block, and we have to get up, come together, and fight back, or we’re going down,” she said. “As actors, when we are hired, we have a certain shelf life in any given year, in any given decade. And when we are exposed, when our voice is out there and on the market without our consent, they’re taking a piece of our shelf life without compensating us. That’s stealing. That is theft.”
Some industry insiders are considering ways to modify voice actors’ tones and use AI voice synthesizers. Amateur modders have tested these kinds of on-the-fly AI systems in games like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim as a kind of proof of concept. Internal emails seen by The New York Times indicate Activision Blizzard, one of the biggest game publishers in the world, is working on tools for AI-assisted “voice cloning.” During a wave of layoffs throughout the video game industry and the tech sphere, voice actors are concerned this push for AI is a means of cutting back on their labor as well. Actors have found their syllables drifting through the internet on YouTube, Reddit, and elsewhere. Most of the time, these are fans replicating voices on a lark, but there have been much more nefarious use-cases. Tools like ElevenLabs have allowed malicious actors to deepfake celebrity voices saying racist and obscene things, while others have used voice actors’ own characters to attack and threaten them online.
Video game voice actor Cissy Jones has been in leading roles for high-grossing games like Destiny 2 as well as indie hits like Firewatch, where she played the central role as over-the-radio deuteragonist Delilah. It’s not as if synthetic, generative voice technology is entirely new, but for folks who regularly work in the video game industry, the most concerning thing has been companies’ willingness to immediately start talking about replacing them with synthetic voices.
“It takes less and less source material to create a very believable, synthetic version of any person’s voice,” Jones said.
Carin Gilfry has done work in games like Warframe, the recent Saints Row reboot, and voiced the gamemaster narrator in indie RPG/deckbuilder Voice of Cards: The Beasts of Burden. Both Jones and Gilfry are officers at the National Association of Voice Actors, and they said their fellow voice actors started meeting regularly about two years ago to force their way into the conversation. Since then, they’ve talked with hundreds of actors across the world who all share similar fears. For years, people have uploaded clips of characters’ voices to sites used to recreate voices, but the voiceover actors rarely, if ever, give their consent for their voices to be used in this way. They understand that, currently, it’s mostly fans making fan content. Still, synthetically generating their voices cheapens their work. When the models get better at replicating voices, the possibilities for abuse grow.
“I’m not being paid, and voiceover is how I feed my family,” Gilfry said.
Even the most prominent voice actors in the field share little of the same limelight that major actors receive—even less so in the video game industry. Some voiceover actors prefer it that way. They’re not necessarily looking for fame, just credit for their work. Even having voiced major characters in video games that made billions of dollars in sales, many of those lending their voices to characters still go out to casting calls still take small roles in independent titles. Credit is how they create buzz, leading to more gigs.
In effect, their voices are the only things giving them any sense of job security. Stephanie Sheh, an established voiceover actor with credits in games like WarioWare and Devil May Cry: 5, said the biggest problem with the voice industry is simply that it has yet to catch up to where the technology currently stands, let alone where things could be headed. She’s also worked as a casting director on several anime dubs and TV series, and so has seen both sides of voiceover work, and she know how hard it is for actors to find work. Even Hale, with her veteran status, said she still has to go out and hit pavement for the vast majority of jobs she gets.
“I know that it may seem that [voiceover actors] are some form of celebrity, but we’re working for every job. Many of us are still auditioning for every job—it’s gig by gig,” Sheh told Gizmodo in a phone interview. “The longer it doesn’t get regulated, the longer that companies think that what they’re doing is okay.”
Every kind of voiceover job is different. Some contracts involve the actors union SAG-AFTRA, some don’t, and some actors dip their toes into each. Things get even more complicated from there. Voiceover work in a commercial might pay an actor to license their voice as the spokesperson for a product in a certain timeframe. Meanwhile, video games pay on a studio hour basis or a day rate. There is usually a cap on the total hours in a studio, and union contracts mandate a four-hour session. Voiceover actors in the video game space don’t make residuals on sales. Their take home pay could be as low as $1,000 for their time and work if a game makes $50,000 $50 million.
There is no apparatus or standard for what a contract could pay for a voice that’s been synthesized from a few simple voice lines via AI. “Now when we’re dealing with AI and synthetic voices, you don’t need a session at all,” Jones said. “So you’re not even paid a day rate. You’re not paid an hourly rate. You would have to be paid in a different way. And so far, there is no structure set up for that right now.”
Often, a potentially harmful contract could use verbiage such as a “digital double” or a “synthetic version” of the actor’s voice, but most contracts don’t point out plans to use AI-synthesized voices at all. The National Association of Voice Actors has created its own riders for voiceover contracts expressly mandating that actors’ recordings aren’t used to copy their voices or likenesses. Union contracts are mandated to include no language about replicating voices, but these riders could be especially important for any non-union contract where, as Gilfry said, “there are no guardrails.”
“In part, it’s being aware and looking out for changing language because as we become hip to what the current language does, it changes,” the actor said.
For how necessary their voices have been for the rise in video game production values, little attention gets paid to the actors who drive those characters. Voiceover artists are now expected more and more to create their own followings on social media to get those higher-paying and higher-profile jobs, according to actors who spoke to Gizmodo. Sheh said she worries about what would happen if somebody decided to use a deepfake of her voice to say something offensive, leading to online blowback.
Sheh has done a lot of work in anime, describing her voice as slightly younger sounding, and her deeper range is somewhere around mid-range for female voiceover. She does many background non-playable characters (NPCs), and she and others like her make a living from consistent, minor roles—the kind that are most-susceptible for AI replacement. But more than that, she’s concerned for the artists who are just getting started, actors who will struggle for any new gig when they’re all taken up by easy AI generation.
Though synthetic voices might make voicing legions of NPCs free, AI voices might cheapen the quality of games as well, actors warned. While a game like Red Dead: Redemption 2 requires hundreds of voice actors doing over 500,000 lines of dialogue, the background chatter was an integral part of making players feel like they inhabit the world.
“[Publishers] are making hundreds of millions of dollars in profits,” Jones said. “So is that really a place where they want to cut corners?”
“This is not a genie that we can stuff back into the bottle,” Gilfry said. Actors are concerned the video game industry will try to cut them out of the conversation and further limit how much they can make from their craft. Speech-to-speech AI models may create opportunities for voiceover actors to play with characters and ranges they normally can’t. A double could even be licensed to impossible tasks like reading the weather forecast continuously 24 hours a day.
AI could also automate some of the worst drudgery work, like voiceover lines for customer service calls or sexual harassment training videos. Still, those jobs are oft Source: Gizmodo