Some video game actors are allowing AI to replicate their voices, but they are wary of being replaced.

Actor Andy Magee may be the voice behind a video game goblin with a Cockney accent or a gruff Scottish blacksmith forging a virtual sword.

Except it’s not exactly Magee’s voice. It is a synthetic voice clone created by artificial intelligence.

As video game worlds expand, some game studios are experimenting with artificial intelligence tools to voice a potentially limitless number of characters and conversations. It also saves time and money on “vocal scratch” recordings, which game developers use as placeholders for testing scenes and Scripts.

Feedback from professional actors has been mixed. Some fear that AI voices could replace all but the most well-known human actors if major studios get their way. Others, like Magee, have been willing to give it a try if they are fairly compensated and their voices are not abused.

“I didn’t really expect AI voices to break into the industry, but unfortunately I was offered a paid voice job and I was grateful for all the experience I got at the time,” said Magee, who grew up in Northern Ireland and has previously worked as a craft brewery manager, driver and farmer.

He now specializes in portraying a wide variety of characters from the British Isles, turning what he once considered a party trick into a rewarding career.

Artificial intelligence clones don’t have the best reputation, in part because they’ve been misused to create convincing real people — from US President Joe Biden to the late Anthony Bourdain — saying things they never said. Some early attempts by independent developers to add them to video games have also been poorly received by both players and actors – not all of whom agreed to have their voices used in this way.

Most major studios have yet to make visible use of AI voices, and are still negotiating their use with the Hollywood Screen Actors Guild, which also represents the game’s performers. Concerns about movie studios’ use of artificial intelligence fueled strikes by the Screen Actors Guild – the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists – last year, but when it comes to game studios, the union is showing signs that a deal is likely.

Sarah Elmaleh, who has played the Cube Queen in Fortnite and numerous other high-profile roles in blockbuster and indie games, said she has “always been one of the more conservative voices” on AI-generated voices, but now considers herself more agnostic.

“We’ve seen some uses where (the game developer’s) interest was a shortcut that was exploitative and not done in collaboration with the actor,” said Elmaleh, who chairs SAG-AFTRA’s Interactive Media Negotiating Committee.

But in other cases, the AI voice’s role is often invisible, he said, and is used to clean up a recording in later stages of production or to make a character sound older or younger at a different point in their virtual life.

“There are use cases that I would consider with a real developer, or that I just feel like the developer should have the right to offer to the actor, and then the actor should have the right to think that it can be done safely and fairly without exploiting them,” Elmaleh said.

SAG-AFTRA already has a deal with one AI audio company, Replica Studios, which was announced last month at the CES gadget show in Las Vegas. The agreement — which SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher described as “a great example of doing AI right” — allows major studios to work with unionized operators to create and license a digital reproduction of their voice. It sets conditions that also allow performers to opt out of using their voice forever.

“Everyone says they’re doing it with ethics in mind,” but most don’t, and some train their AI systems on voice data pulled from the Internet without the speaker’s permission, said Shreyas Nivas, CEO of Replica Studios.

Nivas said his company licenses the characters for a certain period of time. To clone the voice, it schedules a recording session and asks the actor to recite the script either in his normal voice or in the voice of the character he’s portraying.

“They’re in control of whether they want to continue this,” he said. “It creates new sources of income. We don’t change actors.”

It was Replica Studios that first contacted Magee about a voice clip he had created in which he performed a Scottish accent. Working from a home studio in Vancouver, British Columbia, he has since created several AI simulations and presented his own ideas for them. For each character, he records lines with different emotions—some happy, some sad, some under the compulsion of battle. Each mood contains approximately 7,000 words, and the final audio data contains several hours covering all styles of the character.

After cloning Replica’s text-to-speech tool, a paid subscriber can make the voice say almost anything – following certain instructions.

Magee said the experience has opened doors to a variety of acting experiences that don’t involve AI — including a role in the upcoming strategy game Godsworn.

Voice actor Zeke Alton, who has more than a dozen roles in the Call of Duty action franchise, has yet to agree to lend his voice to an AI clone. But he understands why studios might want them when they’re trying to expand franchises like Baldur’s Gate and Starfield, where players can explore vast, open worlds and encounter elves, wizards or aliens around every corner.

“How do you populate thousands of planets with walking, talking beings and pay each operator for each individual? It becomes unreasonable at some point,” said Alton, who also sits on the SAG-AFTRA negotiating committee for interactive media.

Alton is also open to AI tools that take some of the most physically demanding work out of creating game characters—the grunts, screams, and other sounds of characters in combat, as well as the jumping, dashing, falling, and dying motions required for movement. capture scenes.

“I’m one of those people who’s not that interested in banning AI,” Alton said. “I think there’s a way forward for developers to get their tools and improve their games and bring in performers so we can keep the human artistry.”