A month after the actor who provided the French voice of Lara Croft issued a cease-and-desist to Aspyr over its use of AI-generated voice lines in Tomb Raider 4-6 Remastered, the studio has confirmed that the "unauthorized AI generated content" has now been removed.
The change was acknowledged in a message posted on Aspyr's support site (via Time Extension) saying that a hotfix was released on September 19 "to address unauthorized AI generated content."
"We've addressed this issue by removing all AI voiceover content, while retaining the improvements made in the previous update," Aspyr wrote. "We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. Please reach out to our customer support site with any issues."
It's a quiet conclusion to an ugly issue: French actor Françoise Cadol complained in August that a patch for the remasters of The Last Revelation, Chronicles, and Angel of Darkness replaced some lines in the game with AI-generated content, without her permission. Lene Bastos, the Brazilian Portuguese actor for the games, subsequently made a similar claim in a video posted to Instagram; a couple weeks later, Bastos said she'd received an apology from Aspyr, who pinned the blame for the inclusion of AI-generated voices on "an external development partner" and said they'd be removed within a few weeks.
In a message posted to Instagram, Cadol and French voice actor association Les Voix called the removal of the voices "a victory against voice cloning by AI," and "a strong signal sent to the videogame and film industries: Innovation must respect ethics and human creators."
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