Comment by petcat
12 hours ago
I heard a radio spot recently and I wondered if the voice was a real person or AI. It makes we wonder how such industries are dealing with this gen-AI revolution. We spend a lot of time here thinking about how it affects software developers, but I hardly ever see any commentary on how it is affecting screen and voice actors.
Many screen and voice actors are unionized, and the unions have been striking and bargaining specifcially over these points.
For example: https://sites.suffolk.edu/jhtl/2025/10/30/game-over-for-unau...
Software developers, unfortunately, have been convinced that they don't need to unionize, so have no collective bargaining power for dealing with situations like this.
Personally, I just can’t find it in me to be that self-interested. It’s how other people oppose buildings near them because it blocks their view. I really don’t want to stop other people from writing software. If they want to use AI to do it so be it.
That’ll be somewhat detrimental to me perhaps (which isn’t certain), but that’s okay. I’d rather attempt to adapt to a changing world.
I'm unsure how you reach the conclusion of "self-interest". Unions are about collective bargaining power, reaching (ideally) what's best for most of the people it represents, even if it's detrimental to you specifically.
I don't know that unions would necessarily negotiate for no use of AI. The SAG-AFRA deals don't preclude all use of AI; they just requre consent and negotiation in certain cases.
A union doesn't give you unilateral power; it just gives you a better seat at the bargaining table. Capital pools its resources to negotiate better as a single bloc; why shouldn't labor as well?
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Has it occurred to you that it isn't only self-interest but concern for others that drives collective bargaining? It's essentialy a way for the little guys to stand up to the 1% to fight against the unending series of abuses and diminishment of the average person's ability to earn a livable wage and work under fair conditions.
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This is the first time I've heard someone argue that unionizing is a self-interested pursuit. It's called "collective bargaining" for a reason; workers who cooperate in negotiations with their employers have more leverage than those who negotiate individually. The entire point is to work together for the betterment of the group!
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>Personally, I just can’t find it in me to be that self-interested
Caring about your ability to pay your bills, and support your family is "self-interested" in the same way that choosing to not drive into oncoming traffic is "self-interested".
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> Personally, I just can’t find it in me to be that self-interested.
Yes, exactly. Do not advocate for yourself and your colleagues by joining them in a united front. Your voice does not matter. You will continue to adapt to widening wage disparities.
You will accept a pay cut and increased productivity goals and be happy to continue adapting as your cost of living keeps on climbing.
You may be surprised to know that residential areas in San Francisco are height limited, sometimes as short as 4 stories. They're not exactly anti-progress.
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Thats great, although understand that unionizing protects the more vulnerable of also the software engineered. You not advocating for your rights also means weakening others. Is it still self interested to unionized from that perspective?
>The union demanded clear protections to ensure that recordings of actors’ performances could not be copied without consent and compensation.
>California’s legislation passed AB 2602 and AB 1836 in September 2024, prohibiting media companies from using AI to replicate actors’ performances without their consent.
it's a very reasonable law, but it is not the win you seem to believe it to be. the actors who refuse to consent will simply be passed over in favor of those who don't. no law will ever be passed to force companies to employ humans over machines, and if it were, the industry would move elsewhere. this is not without precedent :)
speech models have got so good so quickly that you can already replace a VA -- even an AAA prima donna -- with a teenager from Fiverr, who will simply bruteforce the right inflection.
I don't think software developers need to unionize - but to form French style co-ops.
e.g a lot of video game studios even the AAA ones could be co-ops. same as a lot of SAAS software companies. Linear - just announced a tender offer. I don't see a reason - why linear couldn't work as a co-op.
Are the employees supposed to front the capital themselves?
it's hilarious to see some people here go on about how they're proud to work so that they can be replaced
I think too many just expect that they can get by like before because they're a 10x engineer or whatever
I think I sit somewhere between these two descriptions. I've always supported unions and other "for the common good" type machinery. At the same time, I desperately also don't want to end up doing something the equivalent of barring the use of calculators just so I can toil away at a 9-5 crunching numbers more slowly instead. If AI really does replace all of the meaningful jobs we can do... great - I'd rather we make sure the spoils of that production are distributed than try to cling to preventing the technology from being used.
Inexplicably for the current moment, AI has so far actually meant I have even more to do instead of less. I expect that to change eventually... but man, is it a bit of whiplash to go from wondering if my job will be around in 10 years to starting the work day and being more backed up than ever. Doubly so since the rate of change does not seem to be very evenly distributed by tech role.
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> it's hilarious to see some people here go on about how they're proud to work so that they can be replaced
To be fair, most of us spent our entire career trying our best to automate ourselves away one way or another, and always seen that as our job description.
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Much of computing history has been about replacing humans. If they were proud of their work pre-LLMs, then at least they're being consistent!
It's kind of hypocritical to change just because it's now a different industry being impacted.
I agree with your point, but I don't think it's funny at all. The whole field is changing because of this. The career, except for those ones lucky enough to have jobs where they're valued and they can decide how to use AI tools, is turning into shit because of this and software engineers have become a lot less valuable as management is trying to turn them into reverse centaurs.
What options do you have? If you're the 10x engineer you'll be a 100x one and do just fine. Otherwise what can you do besides holding on as long as you can or start searching for a new career.
It won't happen to me is what I used to think
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Many people who promoted DEI when their corporations demanded it were fired later.
Useful idiots always go first after the goal is accomplished.
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My objection has always been that advocates either can't or don't care to explain how such a thing would actually work from the perspective of a unionized engineer.
And thus the developers remain, until this very moment, ionized.
I appreciate.
No one has offered a union to join at any workplace Ive been at
Yeah, the problem is, someone has to start the union. It takes work. You have to get the whole workforce to vote on it. A lot of software engineers believe (or believed) that they were too smart and professional to need a union. And of course, if management gets wind of it while you are working on setting up the vote, they may do all kinds of trickery, legal or illegal, to block it.
It is possible. But it's quite uncommon in this industry in the US.
And given the current administration, it is hard to trust you'd get fair enforcement of labor laws if the company did illegal things to block unionization.
Because software developers enjoyed scarcity for most of the fields existence and could barter themselves better conditions instead of falling back to unionized fixed incomes.
In any case, the overwhelming majority of jobs is non-unionized and I don't think that software developers can stop technological changes by unionizing.
That is an american take.
Sweden just has an "office worker" union.
https://www.unionen.se/in-english/this-is-unionen
Now, they cannot prevent offshoring or AI use or replacements. Very very rarely if ever.
But they can negotiate a large layoff and give better pay/conditions during work etc. This view that unions can prevent anything... when so many jobs have gone to east EU (all amazing and good at what they do but lets face it, it is due to pay) so yea there wont be any union preventing AI...
Half of them are from India or China. Racial diversity is known to be detrimental to unionization. In fact, Amazon used this exact strategy to bust nascent Somali unions.
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252481961/Amazons-Whole-...
Here is the obligatory scientific paper for those who cannot observe simple facts without a statistical analysis:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01762...
It'll come quickly for audio books. I've been working on a locally hosted, fully containerized web application to narrate my sci-fi novel using a full cast of characters and a few distinct narrators:
* https://i.ibb.co/ccqKZ71L/keenlore.png
* https://i.ibb.co/1t3W0JqZ/keenlore-02.png
* https://i.ibb.co/LdBqHwKB/keenlore-03.png
This is very interesting! Imagine Silly Tavern, with dialog tagging and coloring of some sort, auto-generated talking heads. Almost a game engine.
I would pay a few actors (mostly Star Trek TNG cast) money for a license to their voice.
I don't know how the next generation of beloved actors comes about and how we don't descend into a pit of neverending photocopies of things people once loved in the 1990s/2000s.
From reddit:
* $250 per finished hour for the narrator (lowest professional rate).
* 200k to 270k words.
* 22 hours, 20 hours, and 25 hours.
* Books 1 to 3 cost $5,500, $5,000, and $6,250, respectively.
My novel has 8 major characters, including the 3 narrators, and 25+ minor characters. That price tag is daunting, presumably in USD. This would mean investing $7,750 CAD in crafting an audiobook, which may not even sell, much less recoup the investment.
In contrast, a locally hosted solution has a wallet cost of pennies for electricity plus my time to develop the system.
> I don't know how the next generation of beloved actors comes about
To me it's been obvious for a while now: there won't be one
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Work that doesn’t have a personal brand involved is basically dead. Arbitrary voice acting? Dead.
It’s brutal for these people. The creative industry was always hard, but this is just plain brutal.
Everyone will probably go through the 5 stages of grief w.r.t AI adoption in their field and the gatekeepers will (rightfully) hold onto hallucination and errors as reasons to delay incorporation or to incorporate it with more human handholding.
I'm really sad about how little creative control these tools have. They seem great for creating slop, but pretty useless for creating content that someone would love. I love the potential but text isn't really a great medium for describing artistic vision.
All these demos are focused on how easy it makes everything. Easy is great, but if everyone is able to make instant cute cat videos or whatever it just devalues it. I want to see turning a photo into a rigged 3d model, letting the artist animate and then generate the video. This technology could be used to increase creative expression, but instead it's being used to squeeze out creative expression
Text is not the only input. You can provide 3d block outs with rudimentary animation, annotated images with arrows etc, voice recordings of one person acting out some emotion then mapping that to a different character's voice, other uses of video to video, etc.
There could easily be at least some time period of low skilled ugly people acting in approximate but shitty ways in cheap sets just to give an input reference to a model and then describing the differences in text, yielding gorgeous people speaking with prestigious accents doing stuff in fancy locations in the output.
A lot of it will get automated the same way very many industries got automated. A lot of physical labour got automated once a primitive for it was created. Similarly, we have now a primitive for automating knowledge work. In the next few years to a decade, as all the right training data and runtime environments are slowly consolidated for various fields, a lot will be automated. There is no inherent reason a voice actor must be an eternal job, the same way there was no inherent reason for a draftsman or stage musician to be an eternal job.
It has nothing to do with skill. Both were very skilled jobs. Draftsman as well despite many people going to it straight from school. But computers and CAD mean that it is now necessary for someone to do a STEM degree to be a draftsman. Recorded audio made many stage musicians redundant. It is cheaper to do it this way and gets superior results, that is all, there is no further agenda.
Now too, the next generation of voice actors and many other knowledge workers will have to go up the value chain one step and operate or potentially build these tools (in whatever form they mature to in a decades time).
The current generation of voice actors will face the same situation as many before in the performance industry - stage musicians/performers for example that were made redundant by recorded audio. The reality is that most of them just left and dispersed into the economy doing completely unrelated jobs.
For software and generally computer engineers, this new primitive happens to itself be software, so it's less of a transition and an easier upskilling path to learn to build it. And building it is one step higher in the value chain than simply using it. That is a structural advantage.
I don't really like comparing the way automation of the past displaced jobs to the way AI is/will displace jobs. The timeline is just faster and, more importantly, there were still plenty of other fields of work for people to go to.
But now that we are automating white collar work... where will people go? I'm a 36 year-old veteran who has returned to college and so many of the younger students seem to be filled with despair.
I have hope for the future, but I think there will be an uncomfortable period of time.
I think people are overestimating the speed at which the transition will happen. I think it will happen much slower than is often portrayed online.
This slow transition period will also help answer the "where will they go" questions. We can't answer them right now.
Ultimately, everything we do is in service of social political and personal human incentives, and I think the effect of that is discounted when people make these takeoff predictions for AI and "AGI"
recently I encountered several youtubers in the uncanny valley of "is it Ai or really repetitive intonation pattern"
one youtuber used irl footage, with hands and stuff - so I know there's human behind the camera
the other was a letsplay that reacted to events just fine emotionally
and yet the uncanny valley of the sound is in full force. Maybe youtube has done something with the codecs?
I feel sad
it effects software develpoers because ai has compliers , tests , ci and bought tons of data in mercor.
it always sucks at everything else.
Sounds like a perfect application of AI. Some jobs should be automated.
I would rather hear human voices than synthesized ones. I don't care how realistic they sound. I'm not alone, and the sentiment will certainly grow.
As long as there are enough people than there will be a market. I think there are a lot of people that prefer human but don't want the human cost.
Ok, let's go the other way round. Which jobs do you think should not be automated?