The beginning of a new Era or the final defiliment - The project to give voice all Morrowind's dialogues with AI has begun

[Serus]

The question is however: is it a good thing?

In my opinion, there cannot be a thing that is good in an absolute sense....

It is a tool

I agree. AI is just another tool in the dev's toolbox. I don't believe it'll allow devs to "build a game at the press of a button" or be "completely unusable."

As the technology advances, it's importance as a tool will grow. As for whether it's a good thing or not... I'm equally optimistic and pessimistic, both for gamedev and wider implications.

AI is a black box. We have no way of predicting its consequences... and perhaps unfortunately, no way of stopping it either.

Predicting with 100% certainty? No, of curse not. But i'm not talking of some major consequences for the human society as a whole but something a lot smaller. What it can potentially change in game industry, all of it and in CRPG genre made on PCs specifically. In that case i think we can attempt to make educated guesses.
I'm actually "predicting" one of the consequences of AI-made voice acting for modders. Hundreds of mod creators will start to do it for all kinds of older games in the next decade. And not making other kind of mods, obviously. Which is not a big deal for me personally, i don't care for neither voice acting nor such kind modders. How is that as far as predictions go?

 

[Serus]

TES3 was a classic. Now it's a zombie.

Zombies however, are fun.

Spoiler

 

[Jarmaro]

On topic, just yesterday someone uploaded a mod voicing the main character for Skyrim (female only so far). Apparently, the author managed to automate it, which resulted in staggering 5000 of voiced lines so far. He claims there are around 8-10k lines spoken by the main character, so the work is almost done, in its raw form. Hoewever, from myself I must say that the voice is...off. Spoken like a person asking question in a tense, direct conversation, rather than casual tone that would be more appropriate for the game. Maybe that's because it's the voice of Fallout 4's protagonist. Still, it's something.



Of course, the porn modders have also jumped onto AI, naturally. Their efforts seem...inferior. Probably porn-brain is incapable of proper quality control.

First porn mod example

Second porn mod example

This one, however, is jokingly named but appears to be a honest attempt at a follower with a serious questline. The quality of the voice is surprisingly good.

Falmer follower mod

A very popular mod Penitus Oculatos (allows for joining the faction after destroying the Dark Brotherhood) is also now using AI.

 

[Lemming42]

The voice does sound terse and standoffish but in a way that doesn't sound wholly inappropriate for an action game protagonist. It suits a Nord player character relatively well - depending on how effective this automation process is, maybe we could not only cover both sexes and all the races, but even have different personality types and tones so players can pick exactly how they want to sound.

 

[dreughjiggers]

TES3 was a classic. Now it's a zombie.

A zombie with more replay value than your posts, so what's your point?

I used up 20k of my 100k quota for the month tweaking Divayth Fyr's lines to sound passable, and I've still got 2/3s of his dialogue to go. So all these niggers just recording dialogue without giving any ear to their handiwork are full of shit. There's no way it sounds good, in game.

 

[Jarmaro]

I used up 20k of my 100k quota for the month tweaking Divayth Fyr's lines to sound passable, and I've still got 2/3s of his dialogue to go. So all these niggers just recording dialogue without giving any ear to their handiwork are full of shit. There's no way it sounds good, in game.

If you actually have a working Divayth Fyr's package, consider sending it to this mod author. He's already included Dagoth Ur and Almalexia from other authors, I'm sure he'd love to see Divayth.

 

[Luzur]

 

[Jarmaro]

 

[Jvegi]

Will it make the game finally not suck?

 

[Serus]

Will it make the game finally not suck?

No, it won't. It will make it suck with a voice.

Spoiler

 

[Jarmaro]

It's the third night in a row where I don't sleep and instead fall into the rabbit hole of AI Dagoth Ur videos. Send help.

 

[HoboForEternity]

I watched the dagorh video. Sure, it's emotionless, and lack the high-and-mighty arrogant tone of the actual dagoth ur voice, but it’s still very natural compared to something ancient like text to voice apps.

 

[Riddler]

I had little sympathy for the likes of Greg Rutkowski when he complained about his art being used to train SD, because the way SD "learns" from its training data means that even including "art by Greg Rutkowski" in your prompt will give, at best, a vague approximation that makes passing references to some of Rutkowski's actual pictures. It's not tangibly different from me just looking at one of his pictures and trying to replicate his general style by hand, which is very obviously not illegal nor could reasonably be called plagiarism.

I actually have more sympathy for voice actors with this new tech since it replicates real voices so precisely. I was playing around with Oblivion voices on Elevenlabs and, putting myself in the place of those voice actors, I might be pissed off if people started using "my" voice for commercial projects. To take one example, Linda Kenyon, who voices all the female Dunmer in Morrowind and all female Mer in Oblivion, has a very unique smooth, charismatic, distinctive voice. Elevenlabs replicated her voice precisely, indistinguishable from reality. If you can get Linda Kenyon's voice for free, right down to the intonations, and get it to read out anything you need... then why would you hire the real Linda Kenyon? It's definitely a tangible threat to voice actors in a way that SD isn't to artists.

It's probably possible to introduce certain laws about using AI mimicry of real people's voices for commercial projects. The challenge will be determining whether or not you've deliberately used something that's close enough to a real person's voice to violate the law, but as far as I know we already have this in the case of using people's physical likenesses for various things (I don't think you could legally get away with putting a photograph of, I dunno, Patrick Stewart or Whitney Houston on your shop sign or whatever, even if you did a photoshop disaster botch-job to try and make them surreally different from the originals).

Imagine you had an impersonator though, would that be illegal?

What if you had an impersonator that provided sufficient samples to create an AI model of someone?

I'd imagine that there be some regulation but that it'll quickly be circumvented by the market. One way i can see it happening is that you won't need as good actors to provide a few samples to create models from as when you are recording every line and someone will jump on providing these kind of samples for essentially nothing (the developers themselves if no-one else) and this will rapidly collapse the price of voice acting.

There probably still be a market for high end VA, especially when the primary value of the voice actor is to provide marketing, but I can't see regulation stopping voice ai from being used to the mass produced stuff.

 

[thesecret1]

I had little sympathy for the likes of Greg Rutkowski when he complained about his art being used to train SD, because the way SD "learns" from its training data means that even including "art by Greg Rutkowski" in your prompt will give, at best, a vague approximation that makes passing references to some of Rutkowski's actual pictures. It's not tangibly different from me just looking at one of his pictures and trying to replicate his general style by hand, which is very obviously not illegal nor could reasonably be called plagiarism.

I actually have more sympathy for voice actors with this new tech since it replicates real voices so precisely. I was playing around with Oblivion voices on Elevenlabs and, putting myself in the place of those voice actors, I might be pissed off if people started using "my" voice for commercial projects. To take one example, Linda Kenyon, who voices all the female Dunmer in Morrowind and all female Mer in Oblivion, has a very unique smooth, charismatic, distinctive voice. Elevenlabs replicated her voice precisely, indistinguishable from reality. If you can get Linda Kenyon's voice for free, right down to the intonations, and get it to read out anything you need... then why would you hire the real Linda Kenyon? It's definitely a tangible threat to voice actors in a way that SD isn't to artists.

It's probably possible to introduce certain laws about using AI mimicry of real people's voices for commercial projects. The challenge will be determining whether or not you've deliberately used something that's close enough to a real person's voice to violate the law, but as far as I know we already have this in the case of using people's physical likenesses for various things (I don't think you could legally get away with putting a photograph of, I dunno, Patrick Stewart or Whitney Houston on your shop sign or whatever, even if you did a photoshop disaster botch-job to try and make them surreally different from the originals).

I'm sure they'll decide your voice cannot be used without your permission. Where to go from that will probably be that a VA sells his voice samples online for cheap(-er) so that you can use them for an AI model, while doing full voice acting himself for various AAA titles that can afford him (as the emotions and inflections will probably still be better than those from an AI, not to mention the marketing value). That way, the VA actually makes more money. Wouldn't you include Kenyon's voice in your game, if you could get it for a hundred dollars from her own site, fully legal? Of course you would. Lots of people would – the quantity sold thus easily making up for the lower price. If the pricing policy is sane, bothering with potentially cheaper impersonators wouldn't be worth the effort anyway, thus sidestepping that whole issue.

The way I see it, it just allows for different business models in voice acting.

 

[Jarmaro]

I'm 100% sure soon enough many VA, popular or niche, are going to allow for their voices to be replicated by AI, if only for non-commercial and respectable purposes. People will do it for the sheer sake of being the most used voice, msot of them are not even being paid for hobby of voice acting. It's going to be a big shitshow in VA community as these people will be shunned and harassed for destroying the bussiness. Only a few voices are required for any sort of noticable diversity. Movies and animations are already voiced by the same few dozen actors, I don't think people would mind the same happening in other media.

 

[zool]

This mod is much better than Kezyma's. Only greeting lines for some select NPCs, a la Baldur's Gate 2. This is voicing done right.

From the author (VonDjango aka vonwolfe) description:

From what I understand, Kezyma is making all the written text voiced, rather than adding lots of new greetings.

The scope of my mod is much smaller - it's basically carefully curated greeting lines for about 30 npcs in all of Morrowind. Kezyma is getting every single NPC voiced in the whole game - every single topic you question them on!

 

[Elwro]

But, great as the game is for a variety of reasons, Morrowind's dialogues are just crap. What's the point?

 

[Lemming42]

Novelty value, a display of the technology's capabilities, investigating how viable it is to create and implement hundreds/thousands of voice files into the game, and laying the groundwork for mods that could have a more substantially transformative effect on the game (combining this voicing method with Less Generic NPCs or Tamriel Rebuilt, for example).

 

[Dexter]

I'm 100% sure soon enough many VA, popular or niche, are going to allow for their voices to be replicated by AI, if only for non-commercial and respectable purposes.

What does it matter whether they'll "allow" it or not regarding Mods or other non-commercial purposes? It's literally "people of the Internets uploads thing to Website"-tier. Once someone does the work and uploads it Online, how do you plan to stop it other than outlawing the tools themselves? And even then just until someone makes an acceptable Open Source alternative of said.

For commercial purposes I can imagine low-budget/hobbyist voice actors uploading voice samples on Fiverr or similar platforms for people to use for $5-10 and competing with professional ones, since it's basically free money. What I'm more curious about is if it'll ever be possible to use famous voices like Patrick Stewart, Morgan Freeman, David Attenborough or similar in commercial projects as say narrator and how that could be facilitated. And what about dead people?

I could imagine cheapskate Russian/Chinese/African/Arab/South American/Eastern European studios possibly getting away with making and uploading voice packs as Anonymous Modders for their unvoiced games just not distributed on the Store if they give enough of a shit to bother, because who's going to find out or sue them for it? *winkwink* For all anybody knows RandomUsername making and uploading Voicepacks to the Nexus or whatever other prospective Modding site could actually be a company employee.

 

[Jarmaro]

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/84329?tab=files
Called it, someone has already lent his voice for male Dragonborn voice lines:

hello! excited to announce i have lent my voice as a free and open perms asset for the male version. i trained an ai from scratch and recorded 7k lines, all of which are free to use, and if youd like to use those to cover other projects, you are more than welcome to. of course, i am also explicitly stating that the mod author here has permission to use my voice as well. i hope you like it

Will check tomorrow or later how it sounds.

 

[Arthandas]

Great mod but I'd rather have a combat overhaul that eliminates the braindead left mouse button click spam.

 

[deuxhero]

 

[Nifft Batuff]

Whats the advantage of listening intead of reading?

 

[dreughjiggers]

I used up 20k of my 100k quota for the month tweaking Divayth Fyr's lines to sound passable, and I've still got 2/3s of his dialogue to go. So all these niggers just recording dialogue without giving any ear to their handiwork are full of shit. There's no way it sounds good, in game.

If you actually have a working Divayth Fyr's package, consider sending it to this mod author. He's already included Dagoth Ur and Almalexia from other authors, I'm sure he'd love to see Divayth.

Might as well. I have a lot of his dialogue ready, and Tony Jay as Caius Cosades: https://voca.ro/12OLEpbfQIzg

Whats the advantage of listening intead of reading?

Grow three inches? idk

 

[dreughjiggers]

But, great as the game is for a variety of reasons, Morrowind's dialogues are just crap. What's the point?

A fair point, sense it was written by the same people who wrote the in-game books, which are like bad fan fiction even compared to what some of those fans wrote for Tamriel Rebuilt, so bland dialogue can be elevated by very close mockeries of Mel Gibson, Steve Buscemi, Adam West, Brian Murray, and Katharine Hepburn.