Epic Games CEO and founder Tim Sweeney has butted into the debate around AI in Arc Raiders by arguing that the tech could, somehow, create more opportunities for actors rather than replacing jobs.
To quickly catch you up, the extraction shooter's developer Embark Studios freely admitted to using text-to-speech tech in both Arc Raiders and The Finals with the consent of some human voice actors, which drew backlash from a subset of players who'd prefer to get their voice lines read by, well, real voices.
Responding to a Eurogamer review that called out the disconnect between the game's reliance on "human sociability" and its AI-infused development, Sweeney says "political opinions should go into op eds, folks" in an online post. He then argues that opinions on AI are political because "this technology increases human productivity in some areas by integer multiples, and views on whether this is a net good and should be rewarded, or bad and should be fought against, are speculative and generally distributed along political lines."
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I'm not totally in agreement with Fortnite's billionaire boss for, err, a number of reasons, mainly because Eurogamer's review speaks about Arc Raiders' AI use within the context of the game itself (as in, the AI voices are jarring for a shooter that's so much about human interaction... and fighting big bad robots.)
"Since the author states the pessimistic case, I'll put the optimistic one here," Sweeney continued in a follow-up tweet. "Game developers compete to build the best games in order to attract gamers. When tech increases productivity, competition leads to building better games rather than employing fewer people."
Sweeney then said he thinks there's "an even bigger opportunity for in-game voice and voice actors" with AI tech, as he suggests a hypothetical scenario. "Instead of games having a few dozen or hundred lines of pre-recorded dialog, how about infinite, context-sensitive, personality-reflecting dialog based on and tuned by human voice actors?"
The executive also called "pre-written lines of fixed dialog super limiting" and argued "AI dialog generation + human personality and tuning could totally transform gaming." It would be a very dark future for games, I think, if humans weren't writing the stories we've all fallen in love with like they have over the last few decades.
While execs like Sweeney and EA's Andrew Wilson gush about AI tech - the latter after laying off hundreds of employees - voice actors have been more trepidatious about it. The Last of Us Part 2's Ashly Burch recently expressed concern that studios would use AI to replace minor roles – the sort of acting jobs that Burch and performers of her calibre cut their teeth on.
"We would rather cut off our own arms": Indie devs react to Arc Raiders CEO saying people should assume everyone's using generative AI these days
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