When Harrison Ford spoke to the Wall Street Journal last week, praising the performance of voice actor Troy Baker in the recent video game Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, he was doing much more than recognising a great impression of himself. “You don’t need artificial intelligence to steal my soul,” he told the paper. “You can already do it for nickels and dimes with good ideas and talent. [Baker] did a brilliant job, and it didn’t take AI to do it.”
Video game performers in the SAG-AFTRA union have been on strike since July, the major issue being the use of generative AI in the games industry. The union wants members to be compensated when AI performances are generated from their work, and demands consent and transparency around Gen AI technology. Major video game publishers such as Activision Blizzard, Disney, Warner Bros and Electronic Arts are involved in the dispute, and several recent titles including Destiny 2: Heresy and Genshin Impact have been affected, with English-language voice performances missing. AI voice synthesis is being touted as a means of cutting costs in an industry where game budgets are spiralling, but such technologies imperil actors’ livelihoods while relying on their work to seed virtual performances. Plus, the budgetary benefits of the tech are still in question.
Experienced voice actor Sarah Elmaleh, who has appeared in games such as Fortnite, Halo Infinite and Gears 5, is chairing the SAG-AFTRA committee negotiating with the game industry. She sees in Ford’s statement a key underlying message: “What I hear is Mr Ford rightly pointing out that it is both more creatively valuable and more financially viable and efficient, especially for the whole of a major performance like this, to direct a talented human than to wrestle with an AI replica and its interface. The human-to-human interface of creating games performance can already be shockingly fast, when game actor and director are talented and experienced.”
Many video game developers are willing to meet the union’s demands. According to Elmaleh more than 160 video game productions have signed interim or independent agreements with AI protections in place, ensuring that voice and motion capture work cannot be used to seed synthesised AI actors without permission. But major publishers are still holding out: a representative for the companies recently told Polygon that they had put forward a proposal that includes “industry-leading terms of use for AI digital replicas in-game and additional compensation for the use of an actor’s performance in other games”.
However, in a document sent to members, SAG-AFTRA claims that the companies are seeking a variety of loopholes, including the classification of motion capture work as “data” rather than “performance”, and limiting protections only to performance work carried out after a new deal has been ratified. “It turns out the employers would like to be able to use all past game performances, and any external material, without consent or compensation,” says Elmaleh. “That means anything else you’ve performed in, TV or film-wise, anything you’ve put on social media, any interviews, anything they can ingest that’s already out there on the internet – all of that could be fair game. This fight certainly affects all actors, no matter the category …
“If we don’t right now reject the assertion that performance as a concept can be flattened and dissolved into ‘data’, then the environment will be all the richer for abuse and exploitation across the board. Can you imagine telling Charlie Chaplin he wasn’t giving a performance – that he was just [creating] film, the material he was captured on? It sounds absurd in that context, but because digital tools and language are novel and abstract and often mysterious to people, bosses will say such things with an absolutely straight face.”
Ford’s intervention has at least put the spotlight on the actors who aren’t household names, but whose onscreen video game characters definitely are. “No company in their right mind would tangle with Mr Ford’s team, or the bad optics of replicating him without any consent or compensation,” says Elmaleh. “But that’s what the bargaining group is trying to get away with for workaday actors.”
