There are uses of AI that are proving to be more than black and white. While voice actors, have protested their performances being fed into AI against their will, we are now seeing an example of this being done, with permission, in a very unique case.
How very cyberpunk, except for the fact that permission was given.
Im absolutely sure I need GlaDOS (Ellen McLain) to voice my LLM digital assistant including her iconic unending font of bitter sarcasm.
It’s just common sense. No rational viewer would challenge this necessity.
No, McLain is not dead, but I expect she is busy.
Should McLain get paid for it? Should McLain get a say in how her voice is used? That is the real issue with this stuff. The answers are not clear cut.
Yes and yes imo. A person’s voice is part of their likeness, and people should get to decide how their likeness is used and get paid for such usage.
Here’s a bigger challenge for you: Should Humphrey Bogart’s voice, likeness and mannerisms be public domain or controlled by his kin as part of his legacy? Do we have to wait as long as Disney forces us to for other IP materials?
That is a trickier question. My gut feeling is that while it makes sense for a person’s likeness to enter the public domain after they die, it feels a bit morbid and disrespectful for it to become possible to start running AI generated ads of a celebrity the day that they die. I hate how long copyright lasts now, but I feel like there should be at least some period after someone dies before their likeness enters the public domain. I don’t know how long that should be, but definitely shorter than copyright currently is (which should also be much shorter).
My other concern is that if studios can freely recreate dead celebrities then new talent won’t get a chance to make a name for themselves. Hollywood would much rather milk existing celebrities for every cent possible with AI (which is part of the reason for the SAG/AFTRA strike I guess). I don’t have an answer for this right now.
Because we live in a capitalist system in which everyone who is not a studio mogul has to scrimp and save to eat, yes, McLain shouldn’t have to beg on the street to stay fed and clothed. But then again the rest of us should not, and as I am incapable of earning money (in that I do a thing and someone compensates me for it) the capitalist system we live in would have me starve or succumb to the elements while I try to sleep on hostile architecture.
And while I don’t expect any concern for my personal welfare, it does mean my (economic) demand for a GlaDOS Digital Assistant comes to an early and tragic end, as does the demand for many other things, since the only way to earn money is by obligations to work for rich people. (And they hate most of us.)
So, while the system we have might allow for McLain to live, I won’t get to enjoy her work, or really anything, because it’s all about giving our resources to those who already hold the majority of them.
Once we have social systems that allow us all to have comfortable lives, McLain might be happy doing the work for the good of the community, and for the glory of fame, and not to be richer than the rest of us.
During the COVID-19 Lockdown of 2020, a lot of people were furloughed and didn’t get paychecks rather had to live on social benefits, many of whom took up hobbies that they really liked and could find a way to monetize, leading to the great resignation of 2021, which is one of the reasons we’re taking unions seriously right now, so I know that some people will do art for art’s sake when they don’t have to spend all their time slaving to someone else for their next meal.
With advances in AI, Reczek’s performance could be recreated, but CDPR made sure they got permission from his family. His sons were “very supportive” of the idea, according to a Bloomberg report.
I am pretty sure his sons are fans of CP2077 too. I would give permission too if I were in their shoes - getting a new character, or a different voice for the old character is annoyingly weird when you get used to it…
I was just thinking earlier today, games could probably use AI to seamlessly work the player’s name into dialog. They would still hire voice actors, but insert whatever name the player chooses into the lines where it is mentioned. I feel like this isn’t too far away.
I look forward to the expansion from this, even. Real dialogue between the players and the game. Writers and designers set parameters for each character, backstory, motives, personality, current goals, etc. And then instead of a simple 4-5 choices of pre-canned dialog, with pre-canned responses, the player can type (or even say) whatever they want, and the game can return a customized response appropriate for the character.
I like the idea a lot. I can think of two problems that need to be solved for this:
- How do you pronounce the player’s name correctly?
- How do you prohibit abuse?
- Have them type it a second time phonetically, and let them test it
- If single-player? Don’t. If multiplayer? Yeah… that’d be a nightmare lmao
Multiplayer doesn’t make a difference, at least not noticeably, as all those shenanigans can already be done by text. You’ll get reported and named “player345133” whether you misspell e.g. a forbidden slur or use a misspelling to get the slur’s pronunciation.
But it’s harder to detect spoken slang when people make it talk in mixed accents and more, you would have to run a talk to text engine too many different times with different filters and parameters against many different languages’ lists of slang words with multiple recognizable pronunciations.
And then somebody names themselves ChatGPT and the French will laugh because that sounds like “cat farted” in their language
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my man got fuckin RELIC’d
Imagine now, the Joker 2 movie where Heath Ledger, as Joker, jokes all his jokes about living in the society.
I mean, sure, but that should be negotiated. If they’re using my likeness for free I would not be ok with that. If they’re paying me (or my family) for the use, I would give permission for that.
Right…and they did. Isn’t that one of the main poinst of the article…?
Yes. This time, although it was permission from the family, not the actor. Should that be allowed?
Why not?
Your likeness is basically IP, if it’s worth anything you can put it in your estate, if its worth a lot you can set up a trust to manage it, and I’m sure there’s some sort of legal shenanigans you can do to make it thorny to use
I mean you’re dead. If your family sucks and you’re worried they’ll use your voice or face for something evil, you could make it public domain to trash the value, if you care about your legacy, well… Look upon my works and despair and all that. You can burn your estate to protect it for a lifetime or two, or set up a trust to fund itself by selling use of the license according to certain standards… Eventually it’ll either warp into something very different than your body of work (for better or worse), or you’ll fade into obesity before the lawyer money runs out - so it’ll just stop
A lot of people say “AI is bad” when what they really mean is “AI is powerful; corporations are bad; I don’t want the evil artificial intelligence made by lawyers to misuse the artificial intelligence made by math and human media”
And kind of like AI, corporations are a tool. They suffer an alignment problem way worse than AI, so trusting them with digital technology like networking has been mostly disastrous, sometimes quite good, but mostly neutral.
This use of AI to use a dead person’s likeness isn’t good or bad… It’s just neutral. There’s no greater issue here than the media industry getting alternatives to human talent - the people are dead, some legacies might corrode faster, but there’s no legal hack or big moral peril here.
There are people who lived in the small window of good enough recording/storage to be useful for this tech to be useful, died before it was inevitable, but were still recognizable before it “disrupts” media entirely in a year.
With another year, the consumer grade abilities will go from currently “uncanny similar voices with a short sample” to “indistinguishable from the original voice”… We’re very close to the point where the likeness debate becomes moot because hobbyists can deepfake 4k video for shitposts
Because, as you said, some people don’t get along with their families and it could be used maliciously.
I suppose that could be solved in a will though.
