Video game voice actors are fearing that the ability for generative AI to replicate their voices may cost them work and, more fundamentally, control of their own voice.
Video game voice actors are fearing that the ability for generative AI to replicate their voices may cost them work and, more fundamentally, control of their own voice.
No, this isn’t really correct. The US Copyright Office has released policy that pretty clearly states where the line falls and it’s certainly beyond super simple prompts. In fact, by the reasoning in the policy document, I’d say it’s any time where if the AI were replaced with a human and you’d want a work for hire agreement to assign copyright, then that is likely non-copyrightable subject matter.
I’ll add, how this works with modern AI art flows, still remains to be seen, but I think probably on the side of no copyright. Currently, works use very elaborate prompts, some edits, bashes, and masks in an editor and then img2img and inpainting to really get your work where it needs to be. However, under the current rubric, the sort of nexus of creativity is still happening in the model so unlikely to be granted copyright.
What’s their definition of AI then? Seems like games that feature heavy procedurally generated content (for example) could fit many common definitions, and that is clearly not in the spirit of what they’re trying to do here.
For a lot of procgen content, i believe the individual assets or comprising components are still handcrafted, it’s just the placement of them that is done procedurally. But video game copyright is actually pretty complex (in theory; somewhat in practice, too, but much more answerable) so I’m not sure, assuming a fully genAI set of assets and their placement, how this would pan out. I suppose those components would need to be identified for limitations on the copyright under current filing guidelines, but there is still a whole lot in the game that is protected.