The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, the union for voice actors and creatives, recently circulated a video of voice actor Thomas G. Burt describing the impact of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) on his livelihood.
Voice actors have been hit hard by GenAI, particularly those working in the video game sector. Many are contract workers without ongoing employment, and for some game companies already feeling the squeeze, supplementing voice-acting work with GenAI is just too tempting.
Audio work – whether music, sound design or voice acting – already lacks strong protections. Recent research from my colleagues and I on the use of GenAI and automation in producing music for Australian video games reveals a messy picture.
Facing the crunch
A need for greater productivity, increased turnarounds, and budget restraints in the Australian games sector is incentivising the accelerated uptake of automation.
The games sector is already susceptible to “crunch”, or unpaid overtime, to reach a deadline. This crunch demands faster workflows, increasing automation and the adoption of GenAI throughout the sector.
The Australian games industry is also experiencing a period of significant contraction, with many workers facing layoffs. This has constrained resources and increased the prevalence of crunch, which may increase reliance on automation at the expense of re-skilling the workforce.
One participant told us:
the fear that I have going forward for a lot of creative forms is I feel like this is going to be the fast fashion of art and of text.
Mixed emotions and fair compensation
Workers in the Australian games industry have mixed feelings about the impact of GenAI, ranging from hopeful to scared.
Audio workers are generally more pessimistic than non-audio games professionals. Many see GenAI as extractive and potentially exploitative. When asked how they see the future of the sector, one participant responded:
I would say negative, and the general feeling being probably fear and anxiety, specifically around job security.
Others noted it will increase productivity and efficiency:
[when] synthesisers started being made, people were like, ‘oh, it’s going to replace musicians. It’s going to take jobs away’. And maybe it did, but like, it also opened up this whole other world of possibilities for people to be creative.
Peter Albrektsen/Shutterstock
Regardless, most participants expressed concerns about whether a GenAI model was ethically trained and whether licensing can be properly remunerated, concerns echoed by the union.
Those we spoke with believed the authors of any material used to train AI data-sets should be fairly compensated and/or credited.
An “opt-in” licensing model has been proposed by unions as a compromise. This states a creators’ data should only be used for training GenAI under an opt-in basis, and the use of content to train generative AI models should be subject to consent and compensation.
