Video game voice actors, represented by the SAG-AFTRA labor union, scored a major victory after an 11-month-long strike by which they sought better working conditions and protections against AI. Now that that's done, we should look forward—i.e., to the complete removal of AI from game development.
After being on strike for nearly an entire year, the SAG-AFTRA labor union representing U.S.-based video game voice actors managed to secure a deal with media companies that both increases wages and provides better guardrails against artificial intelligence. Game studios will now require actual consent from voice actors, who will also be able to suspend the use of AI replicas of their voices during a strike.
This lays the groundwork for potential further protections from AI as the technology evolves and becomes ever more present in industries, which I hope excludes video games.
We shouldn't settle for small mercies
While this victory by SAG-AFTRA is a significant one, it applies only to those studios and workers based in the United States or working for a studio or company from the US, meaning that the rest of the world gets almost nothing out of this deal.
The US does have the biggest and most successful tech and gaming studios in the world, that much is true. However, with the rise of eastern and non-American video game studios, particularly from those parts of the globe that aren't all too caring about certain rights, we'll probably continue seeing an uptick in AI use in games as a whole.
Whether this comes in the form of AI replicas of voice actors or as full-on generative content matters little. It is still artificiality paraded as art and used in place of actual human artistry and labor, meaning it is deprived of what makes artistic endeavors like video games special. Humanity exists in each and every part of art, and removing that from the equation renders art soulless and worthless, a utilitarian byproduct of a highly marketized world.
Therefore, it's high time we bade farewell to this technology as a whole. After all, the industry certainly was doing mighty fine before the onset of artificial intelligence, and it's genuinely impossible for gaming to fail so long as passion and skills exist—and they do, now perhaps more than ever.
Games used to come out every week, and there was no AI involved
Recently, one former Rockstar developer, Obbe Vermeij, said that GTA 7 will come out in fewer years than GTA 6 did with the help of AI (and cheaper, because this is corporate gaming we're talking about). This implies that video games take too long to develop these days and that we need computerized artificial intelligence to solve our issues faster, i.e., to help us produce more products, now even more utilitarian than they were before.
This would be true in some universe where we didn't live through the early 2000s and 2010s, where top-of-the-line video games utilizing state-of-the-art technology didn't come out every second. Even Rockstar itself used to print out games of exceptional technological advancement and innovation every year, all of which were of the highest possible quality. Valve, with one of the most advanced engines at the time, managed to put out half a dozen games between 2004 and 2013, and it was significantly smaller a team than 90 percent of the AAA industry today.
To think that we need AI in today's day and age when there are more skilled game developers than there ever were in history is completely absurd. Just check the credits of any given modern AAA title. They run for thirty minutes, sometimes even longer, listing the thousands of folks who worked on the game. And if you tell me that with so many people we cannot put out games, good, high-quality artistic games in a timely manner, you're outright lying.
Because let's face it—we don't need AI. In some instances, perhaps it could be useful, but video game development certainly does not require such a tool. Nor does any form of art, because art is an expression of humanity, which an AI, no matter its advancement, doesn't have.
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