Wherever you go, it’s there: AI voice tools for New Vegas, AI voices for better dungeons in Olivian, Tucker Carlson interviews Dagoth Ur. More and more, AI voice acting is changing for all my favorite games, using digital tricks to give voices to the voiceless. There’s even a project to fully voice my favorite game of all time—The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind—using machine learning.
How should I feel about it? In general, my stance on AI voice acting is easy to explain: it’s useless. While I don’t think AI in general is inherently a bad thing — it just needs to be a manageable tool in the hands of well-managed devs, rather than an alternative to them — I’ve never heard such an artificial voice. More than a faint resemblance of the genuine article that sounded: Sucralose voice acting. Just a cheaper alternative to avoid spending money by greedy companies and damaging the resulting game globally. It’s bad for games and bad for voice actors. End of argument.
But you can’t say the same for mods, which are (usually) fan efforts by people with no money motivated purely by the love of the game they’re working on. For games like Morrowind, New Vegas and Oblivion, it’s a love I share and empathize with. I just can’t get it As Annoying about it when it evolves on Nexus Mods like I do when it comes to Finals.
But does that mean it’s okay? No, it just makes it a different kind of bad. More than anything else, of course, it’s a strange form of identity theft: twisting a real person’s voice to say things they’ve never said and might not feel comfortable saying. It’s not without reason that Wes Johnson – the original, real “Stop! You broke the law!” The guy called AIevil“And wrote that “any AI trying to create a mood using an actor’s voice *without consent* knows they’re wrong.”
But as someone who grew up playing, following, and loving all kinds of mods, I have an additional, particularly selfish fear. AI threatens to overturn the best, healthiest, most storied traditions of voice acting. the scene: An amateur voice actor is recording his lines into a headset microphone.
Do you want to know one of my favorite games? Anonymous mode. A great review of the original Deus Ex that tells a humorous story of users on the dearly departed Planet Deus Ex forums. It’s a genuinely great immersive sim that takes all the lessons from the first Deus Ex and uses them to make a game that’s—if I’m honest—a better sequel than Invisible War.
Also, he enlisted almost his entire voice cast from the PDX Forums user base. Most of them sound like they recorded their lines by placing a microphone at one end of the warehouse and shouting from the other. That’s not a criticism and it’s not a compliment ironically, I really like that aspect of the mod. It’s a symbol of love and dedication: a joint effort of pure amateurs motivated by their passion for the project and the game it’s based on.
Most of them sound like they recorded their lines by placing a microphone at one end of the barn and shouting from the other.
Imagine replacing them all with the clipped tones of a synthesized AI voice pack. No buzz, no hiss, no soul. I won’t remember a single one of these characters the way I do British fascinators. I can’t remember a single line the way I remember Ryan asking me if I’d lost my fucking (damn is important) mind. It will all be one strange quagmire. Proof of performance rather than love.
I have similar memories of a pre-TSLRCM mod for KOTOR 2, which recovered the lost Jedi Padawan Kaevee in the ruins of Dantooine Academy. Kiwi chimed in, well, I have no idea. Either Modular himself or someone else who Shanghaied in to record some lines. His voice was aggressively loud, enough to blow out your speakers, and it’s been in my head rent-free since I was 14 or so. Are there any modern teenagers using the Morrowind AI voice pack (hey, there must be a Zoomer out there who has the same tastes as me) carrying similar memories back to their 30s? I doubt it.
This is not an alarm. I don’t think AI voices will kill the amateur voice actor. Projects like Skywind, for example, are making considerable use of volunteer actors to voice over reams of written material. But its presence as a cheap and easy alternative will, I think, turn a few modders to the dark side over the years. This is not a future I want to be a part of.