AI is proving a major issue in SAG-AFTRA's negotiations with major videogame publishers.
In an interview with Variety, prolific videogame voice actor, Jennifer Hale, whose credits include Mass Effect, Planescape: Torment, and the original Baldur’s Gate, defended SAG-AFTRA drilling down on AI protections for performers in its continued negotiations with major game publishers. Videogame voice actors have been on strike against publishers including EA, Activision, and Disney since July 26.
Hale told Variety that “AI is coming for all of us, because the truth is, AI is just a tool like a hammer. If I take my hammer, I could build you a house. I can also take that same hammer and I can smash your skin and destroy who you are.”
Similar to AI generation of text and images, generated voices are based on a human output, and as with the recent Writer’s Guild strike and visual artists’ continued critiques of generative AI media, voice actors have concerns with proper crediting and compensation for their work. More than with other types of media, the imitation or reproduction of a specific voice is a core concern here, rather than the broader issue of individual creators’ output getting sucked up in a data slurry to train an AI model.
Baldur’s Gate 3 narrator Amelia Tyler called the noncommercial reproduction of voice actors’ work “stealing not just my job, but my identity.” Prolific Elder Scrolls and Fallout voice actor Wes Johnson wrote on X, “The Everything App” that “anyone trying to create a mod using an actor’s voice via AI *without consent* knows they are wrong.” Cheap AI voiceovers are already changing videogame modding—we’d argue for the worse.
Hale’s own summation of SAG-AFTRA’s demands is pretty simple: “If you use something that originated in our body or our voices, can we please get paid? Because now you’re using technology to take away our ability to feed our kids.”
Hale also tied the strike to wider issues of equity in games: She was paid $1200 for her performance as Naomi Hunter in the original Metal Gear Solid, while the game grossed $176 million. “What I wish everyone would do was keep asking the actual question, which is: ‘There’s a lot of money being made here. Where is it going?'” Given the average game developer salary versus what gaming executives make, as well as the latter’s insistence on mass firing the people who make the games we love, Hale’s argument goes well beyond SAG-AFTRA’s current strike.
It’s also a little on the nose that one of Hale’s iconic performances was in the Metal Gear series, which includes themes of reality being gradually overtaken by a digital facsimile as a form of political control, and she now has to speak out in an economic and political battle over the digital facsimiles infiltrating every aspect of our lives. Hale urged fans and supporters to call their congressional representatives in favor of initiatives like the NO FAKES act.
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