Epic Games Boss Tim Sweeney Wades Into The Arc Raiders AI Voice...

Sweeney says productivity increases driven by technology will lead to better games, not reduced employment.

Epic Games boss Tim Sweeney has waded into the furor over the use of generative AI for videogame voices, saying the technology presents an "opportunity for in-game voice and voice actors," with games that could potentially have "infinite, context-sensitive, personality-reflecting dialog based on and tuned by human voice actors."

The exchange began with a comment on Eurogamer's Arc Raiders review, written by freelancer Rick Lane—also a contributor at PC Gamer—who took issue with the game's "inexcusable" use of AI-generated voices. "Political opinions should go into op eds folks," Sweeney wrote, seemingly overlooking the fact that reviews very much are opinion pieces.

In a follow-up post, Sweeney doubled down: "This technology increases human productivity in some areas by integer multiples, and views on whether this is a net good and should be rewarded, or bad and should be fought against, are speculative and generally distributed along political lines."

I'm not sure that's accurate—my perception is that the divide isn't along political lines so much as it is between billionaires (like Sweeney) who tend to view generative AI as a way to crank out more content with less expense, and pretty much everyone else. But he went on to share some other thoughts on the matter, explaining why he thinks criticism of generative AI is misplaced.

"Since the author [of the review] states the pessimistic case, I’ll put the optimistic one here," Sweeney wrote. "Game developers compete to build the best games in order to attract gamers. When tech increases productivity, competition leads to building better games rather than employing fewer people."

When another user pointed out that the rise of generative AI is in fact depriving voice actors of work, Sweeney said there's "an even bigger opportunity for in-game voice and voice actors" in the future of AI than there is in simply acting.

"Instead of games having a few dozen or hundred lines of pre-recorded dialog, how about infinite, context-sensitive, personality-reflecting dialog based on and tuned by human voice actors?" he wrote.

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"I've always found pre-written lines of fixed dialog super limiting. It was painful to write text dialog in ZZT in 1991 after writing more dynamically-composed text adventure games in the

Source: PC Gamer