AI! It's the new big thing. It's the foundation of the 21st-century digital economy. It's going to feed the hungry and clothe the naked. It will punish the wicked and reward the righteous. It'll bring about the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. And you're going to lose your job if you don't learn how to use it.
That's what I hear from people whose multi-trillion dollar market caps ride on AI continuing to be the next big thing, anyway, but down here in the muck? Opinions vary. Take Neil Newbon, who you almost certainly know as the actor for Astarion in Baldur's Gate 3, for instance. In a recent chat with Radio Times Gaming, Newbon spoke some hot truth about just how useful AI could be for actors like him: "It's shit."
"You know, I spoke to a lot of devs, I know a lot of devs, and they don't want to use AI because it's shit," says Newbon. "It doesn't work very well. It takes a lot of effort to get something that's half decent."
He's not wrong. Videogame experiments with voice acting have been many and iffy. The stilted delivery of The Finals' commentators? The "rancid" AI-powered Aloy that wasn't meant for public consumption? Modders replacing the time-honoured tradition of the amateur enthusiast speaking into a crappy headset mic with artificial voices? All these crimes and more can be laid at the feet of AI.
"Even with the modern things that I've seen recently, it's like, 'Yeah, okay, great. You can make AI, and what?' Where's the joy in it? … You can always tell that something's slightly off. It's not right," says Newbon.
Which is correct, so far as I'm concerned, but the obvious rejoinder is, 'Well, it won't always be slightly off.' AI acting will, I suspect, someday improve to the point where you can't tell the difference between it and a real actor. But Newbon, being a rather clever sort with a lot of experience in his field, has a great rebuttal to that: "It's synthetic, it's not real. It doesn't have the happy accident possibility and capability that are those great moments in film, TV, theatre, games, where nobody can predict [it]—it just happened. It was magical."
By way of example, Newbon points to Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy. "You know, Dustin Hoffman banging the car—'I'm walking here!'—because he almost got run over but stayed in character, is iconic. And it was a complete accident. Most of the most famous things in film and TV you can quote are those happy accidents. So yeah, AI sucks."
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