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Comment by ceejayoz | Hacker News Reader

> Do you think Blizzard is using AI to voice Diablo/Overwatch/Warcraft? Of course not.

Do you think Blizzard won't when the tech gets cheap and good enough?

Probably not, because the voice actors are a community draw. In fact, one of the top threads in the overwatch subreddit right now is pictures of all the voice actors. They go to cons and interact with fans and they don't cost so much that losing that value to save a few bucks is worth it.

Based on the way consumers have behaved over my 30-odd years of life, I seriously doubt they will care enough about the fates of voice actors, developers or any other folks who are mistreated or discarded in the project of creating yet another Call of Duty iteration. We're an atomized society thats being trained all day every day to just purchase things, consequences be damned. I want to believe you are right but I suspect you are not. I suspect you are coping and to be honest, I want to do that too.

There are some cases where that's true, but people connect with actors too, which is why a AAA star will get paid 20+ million dollars to just associate their name with a project.

I think the truth will be in the middle. Nobody's choosing AI over Brad Pitt or Henry Cavill, and in the various niches I think the highest performing humans will still do very well. Overwatch is a good example of that, see https://blizzardwatch.com/2018/01/24/rolling-stone-calls-ove.... AI is going to destroy the bottom of the barrel though, stuff like Fiverr and a lot of mediocre trained voice actors are going to have to get better or change careers.

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