"SAG-AFTRA is standing up to tyranny on behalf of its members,” stated president Fran Drescher.
Good
We already have strong indications of companies like Ubi using AI models based on past performers. And stuff like Tomb Raider/Lara Croft is downright famous for how much they model her appearance off actresses (sometimes the mocap actress, sometimes just a random attractive one). And its worth remembering that the big attempt at “a virtual actress” was from a Final Fantasy movie. Hell, the rumor has been that most of Martinet’s Mario lines were recorded decades ago.
Plus, as much as I love Warframe and DE, it has always been more than a bit sketch how many characters are voiced by non-union employees of the company (and, bottom dollar, Space Mom going out for a pack of smokes for a few years was worries that Reb would leave). And they are not at all out of the ordinary in that.
So yeah. Video games should fucking respect the unions.
Does Troy Baker suck? I know he voices he a ton of characters but I’ve never heard of anything about him personally.
And ya, this is a great step forward. Like movies and tv, the video game industry is rife with the money taking advantage of people. Maybe even more, because there’s less union backing in video games.
From the lede of his Wikipedia article:
In early 2022, Baker was the subject of controversy due to his partnership with an NFT company that had been revealed to have plagiarized voice lines generated from 15.ai, an artificial intelligence text-to-speech project developed by an MIT student, as part of their marketing campaign.
So yeah, seems like he might well suck.
There have been some fan stories of Troy Baker that make him seem like a real douche bag. But mostly, just watch basically any time he does a big stage interview. It is almost a meme that he will find a way to talk about how amazing of an actor he is and cut off any woman in sight.
He could very well end up being insanely pro-SAG and the like. But he shows every sign of being a Stephen Amell level of “Fuck you for not letting me promote my products”
