Video game voice actors are fearing that the ability for generative AI to replicate their voices may cost them work and, more fundamentally, control of their own voice.
Video game voice actors are fearing that the ability for generative AI to replicate their voices may cost them work and, more fundamentally, control of their own voice.
That’s just not true, no matter how often clueless artists repeat that. What’s not copyrightable is completely AI generated simple stuff, like type “car” into StableDiffusion and copyright that image of a car. That’s not eligible for copyright and rightfully so, since that would turn AI generation into a minefield if people could copyright sections of it in bulk. But nobody does that anyway.
People want full books and games and stuff, not singular images of a car. For the time being at least, any full game or book will still be full of human input, it’s not something the AI will spit out without effort. You still need numerous different AI systems, custom training and a whole lot of manual back and forth before you get something to your liking. And the result of all that effort will still be copyrightable.
There might come a day in the not so distance future when AI can do it all by itself and make the whole game or movie from start to finish with no human input. But at that point you aren’t just replacing the actor, you are making Disney obsolete, as you no longer need static content, you can just generate it dynamic on the fly like you are on the Star Trek Holodeck. But at that point the fate of the voice actor will be the least of your problems, as you just made a whole lot of other human jobs obsolete too.
No, this isn’t really correct. The US Copyright Office has released policy that pretty clearly states where the line falls and it’s certainly beyond super simple prompts. In fact, by the reasoning in the policy document, I’d say it’s any time where if the AI were replaced with a human and you’d want a work for hire agreement to assign copyright, then that is likely non-copyrightable subject matter.
I’ll add, how this works with modern AI art flows, still remains to be seen, but I think probably on the side of no copyright. Currently, works use very elaborate prompts, some edits, bashes, and masks in an editor and then img2img and inpainting to really get your work where it needs to be. However, under the current rubric, the sort of nexus of creativity is still happening in the model so unlikely to be granted copyright.
What’s their definition of AI then? Seems like games that feature heavy procedurally generated content (for example) could fit many common definitions, and that is clearly not in the spirit of what they’re trying to do here.
For a lot of procgen content, i believe the individual assets or comprising components are still handcrafted, it’s just the placement of them that is done procedurally. But video game copyright is actually pretty complex (in theory; somewhat in practice, too, but much more answerable) so I’m not sure, assuming a fully genAI set of assets and their placement, how this would pan out. I suppose those components would need to be identified for limitations on the copyright under current filing guidelines, but there is still a whole lot in the game that is protected.