Honestly, this lawsuit is laughable. James Earl Jones himself allowed his voice to be used to train AI before his passing, and his family has given their blessing on this implementation in Fortnite.
Besides, it’s not like this Darth Vader AI is replacing any jobs; it’s a chat bot, capable of giving live responses to players across many live matches ongoing around the world. Unless it is feasible to hire a massive team of Darth Vader voice actors to be able to respond to player requests to “force choke me daddy Vader” live across hundreds of ongoing matches while staying completely in-character 24/7, their argument about Epic Games “replacing voice actors with AI” holds no water.
I am absolutely on the voice actors’ side here, but isn’t this a less than ideal argument? It seems to presume a right to be employed. If epic don’t want to use voice actors, why would they have to? I’m genuinely asking because isn’t this just a form of automation? Again, on the side of real voice actors, anti gen AI, I’m trying to understand.
This is the point of collective bargaining contracts. A union negotiates the rules by which their members and companies interact, sign a contract, and then both are bound by that contract for the term.
The union is claiming the contract they have in place prevents the automation of voice by the bound company unless they get agreement from the union first.
Oh I know how unions work, they’re quite important and do mostly very good work where I live. I just always assume any unions that manage to even exist in the US are little more than begrudgingly tolerated by employers. I didn’t realise they were referring to actual contractual obligations, I see. Thank you for clarifying.
They also can’t physically output the quantity of voucelines either since the tech would demand INFINITE lines.
