Hollywood’s video game performers voted to go on strike Thursday, throwing part of the entertainment industry into another work stoppage after talks for a new contract with major game studios broke down over artificial intelligence protections.
The strike — the second for video game voice actors and motion capture performers under the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists — will begin at 12:01 a.m. Friday. The move comes after nearly two years of negotiations with gaming giants, including divisions of Activision, Warner Bros. and Walt Disney Co., over a new interactive media agreement.
SAG-AFTRA negotiators say gains have been made over wages and job safety in the video game contract, but that the studios will not make a deal over the regulation of generative AI. Without guardrails, game companies could train AI to replicate an actor’s voice, or create a digital replica of their likeness without consent or fair compensation, the union said.
Ugh. I get ai is bad but what about the small indie developers who are just using it to make modeling references instead of paying for modeling references? The prices of a lot of that stuff are absolutely criminal. What about using it to generate model textures instead of buying overpriced bloatware from the unity store that’s probably stolen anyway? Surely there is at least some acceptable use case for ai. Fuck large corporations and everything they’ve done to destroy the economy and the job market, don’t get me wrong. Absolutely fuck them.
It’s not like indie devs can afford to pay for Hollywood actors. If this is to become a conflict of “professional actors vs small developers” then shit. This is a shitty conflict with no clear winner at best. For now these strikes may not effect indie developers but a future Clarence Thomas Signature Shitpost ™ of a supreme court decision sure will.
They should probably either learn to texture, use free public domain textures, purchase some ready made texture packs from an artist, or pay a texture artist who doesn’t deserve to be out of a job because of a techbro plagiarism machine.
Generative AI is some seriously cool tech but the fact that it’s built off of plagiarised content and that it’s being used to undercut workers is not a vibe.