Video game voice actors represented by SAG-AFTRA – one of America’s biggest actors’ unions – are going on strike. After over a year of negotiations with some of the biggest western publishers including Activision Blizzard, EA, and Take Two, negotiations have reached a standstill over one of the more controversial points of debate: AI.
AI has proven to be an industry-shaking technical development within the voice acting space. New AI software is able to train on pre-existing performances, and use this pool of voice acting work to output its own lines. For video game companies this provides an opportunity to own a quick and easy voice-acting solution, but for the actors themselves it’s an extistential threat. One that not only uses their own copyrighted performances as building blocks, but threatens their jobs.
As for what studios will be affected, you’ve got the following: Take Two (Grand Theft Auto 6), Activision (Call of Duty: Black Ops 6), Insomniac (Marvel’s Spider-Man 2), Electronic Arts (FIFA), and third party voice acting studio Formosa Interactive. The extent of the impact to each company remains unclear, but the facts of the matter is that any union voice actors working with these businesses will no longer do so until SAG-AFTRA says otherwise or a deal is made.
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