Depends on the context. Are you copying someone else’s identity in order to make a passable clone? Are you trying to sell that clone?
A duplication of someone’s voice, commercialized by an unauthorized source, is definitely a form of stealing.
Copying information illegally, such as private information held on a private device, is overwhelmingly illegal.
In general, copying information is only as legal as the purpose behind it.
No, they can make money without stealing. They just choose to steal and lie about it either way. It’s the worst kind of justification.
The investors are predominantly made up of the Rationalist Society. It doesn’t matter whether or not AI “makes money”. It matters that the development is steered as quickly as possible towards an end product of producing as much propaganda as possible.
The bottom line barely even matters in the bigger picture. If you’re paying someone to make propaganda, and the best way to do that is to steal from the masses, then they’ll do it regardless of whether or not the business model is “profitable” or not.
The lines drawn for AI are drawn by people who want to use it for misinformation and control. The justifications make it seem like the lines were drawn around a monetary system. No, that’s wrong.
Who cares about profitability when people are paying you under the table to run a mass crime ring.
No, I know what the article is. I’m talking about the conversation of AI voice work in general as tangential to the topic.
Maybe don’t be so presumptive or act like an indecent asshole to people just because they aren’t parroting the same shit you are?
I have sympathy for voice actors, the situation is obviously complex for them. But, and I’ve said this numerous times to numerous people, AI voice work is probably going to end up being cheaper and much more voluminous. That’s exactly what developers need for procedurally generated games where they want to see “all” of the characters voiced.
I’m not saying anyone should try to use AI to voice main characters in standard video games. However, this isn’t about standard video games.
The fact is, mass voice work in procedurally generated games is something that can only ever be accomplished with AI.
The whole Rogue-like genre is constantly evolving. And yeah, a lot of the development is bad. If you’re in that scene, you probably know what I’m talking about - lots of dead end projects, lots of pointless feature sets, lots of pointless busywork being disguised as game mechanics, slot machine nonsense, etc, ad nauseam. Nonetheless, AI generated voice work is obviously going to be used there at some point.
I have a hard time believing that a lot of people are going to lose their jobs to AI voice work. The voice work generated through AI is not comparable to what people can do. Again, that isn’t the issue. The economy is in the dumps, and AI is the only way to afford voice work for games that are designed around procedurally generated voice work.
You can be upset at losing your job. But, throwing a wrench at a wrench because you think the wrench is screwing you, is just stupid. Corporations might screw you. But, the technology itself is just technology.
Linux is the future.
Failing company? Invest into a propaganda program. People will definitely see the value in these shit brands going forward.
Edit: I’m sorry for the lack of tl; dr. There’s a general drop off of quality, weird social media garbage, a lot of systemic problems, etc. What I’m trying to say here is hard to summarize
Aside from the fact that it’s mass produced garbage, I can actually say that I’m old enough to have experienced a period of anime where the production values, writing, and dialogue weren’t exactly terrible.
I think a good example of my gripe with anime today is watching something like Fate Zero and then following that up with Heaven’s Feel. The distinct drop in quality between those 2 adaptations is pretty stark.
The original Yu-Gi-Oh anime was absolutely wild. It’s dumb in a uniquely entertaining fashion. There were so many sequels that were produced for Yu-Gi-Oh and every single one of them was completely terrible.
Watching Tenchi Muyo’s OVA part 1 and part 2 was fairly enjoyable. Part 3 is so much worse for seemingly no good reason.
The third Tenchi Muyo film was abjectly terrible. It’s quite possibly one of the worst films that has ever been made.
FLCL season 1 was legendary. Season 2 and 3 were substantially worse.
The new Evangelion films weren’t exactly great.
Even as far back as Pokemon season 1, that season was pretty okay. Almost everything past the first 2 seasons were… really bad…
There have been some bad adaptions for Berserk that have been mentioned from time to time.
Dragonball Super is weird. Nobody really seems to like Super. Even people who watch Super regularly treat it as some kind of Frankenstein monster.
Gundam has been pretty consistently not good for well over a decade. Gundam Wing was pretty insane. It started off with some super questionable writing and poor voice acting, and then it ended off being probably the best thing Gundam has ever been. And everything that followed was… not very good…
Naruto was followed by Boruto. It’s pretty bad. A large chunk of the 2nd half of Naruto was just not good.
I’ve seen people defend Hunter X Hunter’s Chimera Ant arc so brazenly. And still, it’s genuinely not good. Which is amazing, because almost everything prior to that arc was crazy good.
To be fair, a lot of these problems stem from the fact that the work being adapted is also consistently worse. It’s not just anime. A lot of this coincides with the same drop in quality in the manga industry as well.
The nearly universal drop in quality across the anime and manga industries has been… frustrating…
Even more frustrating is the overwhelming number of fake reviews, shilling, bot spam, etc that are meant to hide negative reviews about anime and pretty much anything involving Japanese media.
The amount of weird shit that gets posted to review sites and social media in order to hide the general negativity towards the anime industry is just gross and weird.
Another poster, Ace T’Ken, brought up a lot of specifics about the problems with anime in general. It’s a pretty good write-up, imo.
My take is, I think that these problems are more “noticeable” in modern anime. But, almost all anime have these kinds of problems to one degree or another, new and old.
It’s pretty systemic. I still think that these issues became a lot more noticeable coinciding with a general drop in quality across the whole industry.
I would like to say, it’s not like I dislike anime “inherently”. But, there’s just so much bad anime.