Hi-Rez Studios, the people behind Paladins and Smite, have stated that they will be using AI to clone voices and refused to add in any words to contracts that would protect actors from it

This is what happens when everything on the planet is run by suits who are incapable of seeing anything but the bottom line. Exploit the creatives until they can be replaced by shitty robots that don't do the job half as well but are cheaper to use.

Our dumb cyberpunk future is now.

It sucks that I can't boycott their garbage anymore than I already do.

So sad these guys own the Tribes IP

Never forget the guys who founded hi rez come from ncr a cash register company. They believe in money first.

I loved tribes and they killed it for smite. I actually loved smite a ton and played it a lot.

They already refuse to fix their EAC so that the game can run on Linux so I can't not play their game any more than I already do. I played Paladins briefly when Overwatch was having its China drama and enjoyed it, but I'm done booting Windows to play games.

ah man. I kind of liked paladin's hussle as the overwatch lunch-stealers. Now who am I supposed to root for? TF2 again? Is that game even still alive?

Ugh. I used to love what Hi-Rez put out. Global Agenda was probably my favorite game by them. From my home state as well. They've always made terrible business decisions though. This, of course, is no exception

I will happily continue to not pay for games that do this and I won’t be missing out on anything.

This is on par with restaurants that microwave garbage food. They’re phoning it in to squeeze as much profit as possible out of the product. That tells me you don’t want to make games people enjoy, you want to make games that do nothing but maximize profit. I ain’t here for that shit. I’m willing to pay money for companies that respect art and trades, not ones that worship capitalism and exist to appease assholes in suits.

Fuck Hi-Rez for making a really good Tribes game and then abandoning it for Smite. I sure hope they merely licensed the name and don't hold rights to the entire IP, cuz I want a good, modern Tribes game so bad.

Fuck them even more for this.

It will be interesting to see how these kind of things develop over the next few years. Of course, it's very enticing for developers to use AI voices, as they can probably save massive amounts of money through it. Will the voice actors have any options to stop this?

I definitely think some sort of residuals or compensation for reusing their voice AI should happen if they are profiting off of it.

That being said, I see a world in the very near future where voice actors don't even act out their lines and just say a number of things for recording to train an AI voiced version of themselves. Then directors/creators and just manipulate and use it as they please to create their product.

Some mods in games are getting this already, voiced Morrowind and the like, and I definitely seeing it as a boon. Voice acting has always been a weak point when it came to stuff like that as you can write/script/design the best you can but can lack decent/any voice acting.

Interested to see how things play out.