It's started again: video game voice and motion capture actors affiliated with the SAG-AFTRA union are going on strike, with more than 160,000 performers refusing to appear in new games that many major developers, including Activision, Disney, and EA, are working on for their members because of “significant AI protection” They will refuse to appear in new games in production until they agree to a contract that includes The strike officially begins on July 26.

The voice actors, who approved the strike with a 98.32% “yes” vote, want the union to notify major game makers if they plan to use generative AI in ways that could replace actors' work and to negotiate compensation if they want to generate material based on actors' voices or likenesses. The union is required to.

According to Duncan Crabtree-Ireland National Secretary of SAG-AFTRA, the actors are striking for “fair compensation and the right to informed consent for AI use of their faces, voices and bodies.”

Game makers negotiating with the union say they already offer “meaningful AI protections,” including requiring consent and fair compensation, under “the strongest” terms in the entertainment industry, but the union disagrees.

“Despite reaching agreement on many issues important to SAG-AFTRA members, the employer refuses to explicitly confirm in clear and enforceable language that all performers covered by this contract will be protected by AI language,” the union's strike announcement states. [Eighteen months of negotiations have shown that the employers are not interested in fair and reasonable AI protections, but rather in exploitation,” said actor and union negotiator Sara Elmaleh. We reject this paradigm.” We will not leave any union member behind, and we will not wait any longer for adequate protection.”

“We are disappointed that the union has chosen to walk away when we are so close to a deal and remain ready to reopen negotiations,” Audrey Cooling, a spokesperson for the game producers, said in a statement sent to PC Gamer.

While generative AI voices will definitely not be able to perform as convincingly as real actors, there are already examples of actors being replaced by AI voice synthesis or generative AI being used to mimic voices. For example, in Stellaris, AI-generated voices based on real actors' voices are used, but Paradox pays royalties to the actors who provided the AI training data.

This new frontier of generative AI use is troubling: in one notable case, OpenAI used a voice that closely resembled Scarlett Johansson's voice to mimic the Hollywood star's performance as the AI companion to the film “her/one of a kind in the world” AI s use of voice reproduction has been used by non-professionals, in some cases to create material that actors would vehemently object to, such as pornography. While it is difficult to stop hobbyists, at least contractual protections would prevent gaming companies from exploiting the likenesses of hired actors for work they have not agreed to do.

AI is also one of the issues that motivated SAG-AFTRA and the Writers Guild of America to strike Hollywood studios in 2023.

In particular, the last strike by SAG-AFTRA video game actors was over residual pay in 2016. This strike, which targeted the same game makers, lasted nearly a year. It's not clear how severely the strike disrupted games in development at the time, but one notable result was that actor Ashley Burch did not reprise her role as Chloe in Life is Strange, as the major developer would not have publicly disclosed the delays caused by the strike: Before the Storm”.

This article has been updated to include a statement from the game's producer.