I’m not a large consumer of scripted television or even movies, but the strike was big news so I sorta kept half an eye on it. A big issue was AI, and I sympathized because I could see that becoming a threat and I tend to lean toward unions anyway. However, I thought AI was largely a future threat. It’s NOT! It’s NOW!
I’m an ICU nurse and I recently decided to go back to school after ten years. My last project this semester for my pharmacology class was to record a mock drug commercial for a drug of my choosing. I suck at presentations like that. So I googled “free stock video” and that led me down a rabbit hole of video production with adobe, vimeo, and a number of other services. I also looked for “text to speech”. Oddly, all this eventually led me back to my own native windows 11 and a program hiding in all that bundled chaff you don’t normally look at called “clipchamp”. I liked it and started poking around. The thing has AMAZINGLY convincing text to speech. Pauses here and there, accenting certain words in sentences, and other stuff that humans do, but we are not used to machines doing. The days of the Steven Hawking voice are gone. I used that TTS for the entire mock commercial and it’s almost as if I paid actual voice over actors. (although, as smart as the thing is, it couldn’t pronounce “amiodarone” so I had to spell it “ahmioderown”).
Anyway, it occurred to me while I was putting this thing together that if I, a complete amateur with zero experience, can produce convincing voice overs using free software on a mid priced laptop, AI has most likely already replaced some voice over actors. One of the voices I used was called “Ryan (multilingual)” and I swear I’ve heard it before in actual commercials. Even though the actor’s guild “won” that strike, I’m not sure they can stop stuff like this. The big name actors are probably fine, but the little, work-a-day voice actors? Maybe not so much.
I think I can upload a sample
My whole feeling about the AI thing is “meh.” Who cares, aside from the guild members? Trying to artificially stop progress is only going to benefit anyone in the short run. Can you imagine all of the farriers trying to outlaw cars? Besides, there are other sources of content in other countries, and independent cinema in our country, to make this meaningless in the long run.
Might an AI replace my own job? Sure. Society will deal with it.
Admittedly, the days of the Stephen Hawking voice were gone quite a long time ago. Stephen Hawking only continued using that particular voice for his synthesizer because he had a large media profile and it was the voice most people knew him by. I sometimes kept forgetting that Hawking was British because of that monotone generic American robot voice he used.
I’m pretty sure you’ve heard Ryan and/or his relatives on YouTube, where a lot of the feel-good time-wasting click-bait stories seem to be narrated by a male or female with barely any emotion and a strange inability to slur terms that humans don’t think about when they utter them. For instance, that juxtaposition I used in the first phrase above is one that most readers would pronounce like the name of a colony in the Star Wars universe and the hyphenated terms in that second phrase would tend to give the AI TTS readers a bit of difficulty. Rest assured, though, the programmers are working on it and they’ll smooth over those nuances soon enough.
The AI TTSR might be useful enough in the production of cheap (and even not-so-cheap) TV commercials. That’s quite interesting when juxtaposed with the fact that a lot of our currently-respected actors got their start and paid their dues in the TV commercial business before they became famous (remember F. Murray Abraham, Oscar nominee for Amadeus and former Fruit-of-the-Loom bunch-of-grapes?) and also got paid quite well for between-gigs jobs adding celebrity credibility to products in foreign TV commercials (e.g. Harrison Ford advertising Japanese beer). However, aside from daytime soap operas (e.g. Hayden Panettiere, who became famous in Heroes and continued onward from there) where are novice actors going to get their start in order to hone their skills enough to become believable character-portrayers?
That, I think, is the real threat. If the new generations of actors don’t have venues in which to get their start because AI voice-overs are being used instead, are they going to get a start anywhere? Fewer and fewer people go to stage plays, and even those will be saturated with not-so-great role-players until the humans who actually manage to get in front of cameras are not worth watching anyway.
And then if you mix top-notch AI voice-overs with bleeding-edge CGI…
–G!