Eurogamer spoke to some of the voice actors on the red carpet at the BAFTA Awards for "Baldur's Gate 3" and other big 2023 games, and despite the buoyant mood in the room, all were concerned about AI voiceover tools, especially the unauthorized duplication of their own voices, and They all expressed concern and harsh criticism of AI narration tools, especially the unauthorized reproduction of their own voices.

BG3 narrator Amelia Tyler said she had come across multiple instances of her already iconic performance being replicated through AI, including for unsettling and unseemly purposes: "Someone told me, so I accessed this stream, and I found my own voice reading rape I was reading pornography."

"That's the level of stuff we've had to deal with since this game was released, and frankly it's been awful.

Tyler stated that such use of his voice is "stealing not only my work, but my identity," and that while he likes modded scenes in video games, "I think it should be illegal to actually take my voice and use it to train something without my permission."

Rapha

Raphael actor and Best Supporting Actor winner Andrew Wincott told Eurogamer that he acknowledges the possibility of working 10 hours for 40 hours of output, but still expects to be paid for 40 hours. Both Wincott and Samantha Bair, who played Carrack in "BG3," expressed concern about the potential contractual abuse of AI performance cloning, even before SAG-AFTRA's recent contract.

Actors in other games, such as David Harewood in Alan Wake 2 and Ben Starr and Ralph Ineson in Final Fantasy 16, are similarly wary of the technology; Neil Newbon, who voiced Astarion in BG3, said that AI copies and real actors' The large difference in quality between the performances makes him more optimistic, and he hopes that good taste will prevail: "There are a lot of people in the video game industry who would love to work with actors.

"I don't think you can program a technique; something beyond 0s and 1s, beyond formulas. It's very mysterious."

While it is clear that voice actors do not want their profession to be bogged down by AI tools, both from an artistic perspective and for their own livelihoods, Amelia Tyler brought up a particularly interesting edge case.

I agree wholeheartedly with her and actor Wes Johnson, who has played 'The Elder Scrolls/Fallout' for many years." He tweeted, "Anyone who tries to make a mod with an actor's voice using AI *without* consent knows they are wrong... AI voice cloning is an abuse of trust, cruel or offensive words notwithstanding, to hear something you've never said in your own voice. The surreal horror is not hard to imagine.

Last month, my colleague, PCG news writer Joshua Warrens, wrote an ode to voice acting in the crappy MOD scene, which seems particularly compromised by the proliferation of cheap AI voice tools, and I agree. Bad voice acting by real humans at least has a soul and the potential for "happy accidents," as Neil Newbon called them in his Eurogamer interview.

Still, I was plagued by one of my favorite games last year: South Scrimshaw Part One, a free visual novel that presents a "Planet Earth"-style documentary about alien whales on another planet. The art and writing are all real and by N.O. Marsh, who created "South Scrimshaw" while working a day job at a restaurant. However, Marsh used a generic AI voice generator, like the ones on TikTok, to narrate the game.

Would "South Scrimshaw" have been better performed by a real human? Of course it would have, but the flat, emotionless delivery of the generated voices works surprisingly well in a documentary context, and the use of synthetic voice tools is disclosed in the credits. "South Scrimshaw" is an uncomfortably good example of an artist's limited resources being reinforced The "South Scrimshaw" is an example of where AI generation was successfully implemented to augment the artist's limited resources.