#if your union is okay with underpayment as long as its not YOUR sector

[tangibletechnomancy]

The shitty thing about the AI voice acting "agreement", beyond the fact that it was done without the input of the majority of people who would be affected, is that a lot of people have exactly WHY it's such a raw deal exactly backwards. It's not labor being eliminated to cut costs; it's labor being CHEAPENED even when there may very well be more of it involved.

There are lots of claims going around that AI voices are TOTALLY different from other voice synthesis we've had before because they let you just plug in a script and get the perfect read out, and that's just...not true, at all, unless you're really, really lucky. Sure, it's smoother and more intuitive work (generally) and more natural-sounding results than older iterations of voice synthesis, but there's still a LOT of specification and tweaking involved in getting it to consistently sound more like a person than a computer, let alone actually sound like a decent director might want.

In fact, one of the most effective ways to get an affect more dynamic than slightly-better-than-TikTok-TTS, is to.........have an actual human person perform it and use the synthesizer to follow along with it in a different voice!

In other words, in order for this to actually be a thing, you still need a voice actor who can give a convincing performance. And you need them to be willing to work for peanuts because their voice won't be in the final product. You need them to be willing to be denied credit because their voice won't REALLY be in the final product. But you also need them to be competent and give a good performance, because the synthesizer will follow along with them, whether they do it right or wrong. The only thing they can skimp on is things like vocal technique - you know, the way you do action scene after action scene without losing your voice by the time you're 45?

In order for this to be cheaper than just hiring a fucking actor, people in the process necessarily have to be criminally underpaid.

And yet, somehow, it's been given the go-ahead anyway!? Genuinely, fuck that.

#not art #let it be known for all other professions as well: #if your union is okay with underpayment as long as its not YOUR sector #your union is mismanaged and doimg a piss-poor job of standing up for your needs