Amazon Games Boss Says That They Will Keep Using AI For Their Games Instead Of Voice Actors
Image Source: Game Developer
… because according to the boss, their games do not have acting in them. According to Amazon Games CEO Christoph Hartmann, the company wants more A.I. involved in the process of making games to speed it up. He hopes that artificial intelligence will “help us to streamline processes so hand-done work will go fast. Ideally, we can get it down to three years so we can iterate more, which then will bring the budgets down a little bit.”
It appears he may be focused more on the programming side of making games, but he did comment on the acting side as well. When asked about the current SAG-AFTRA video game strike, Hartmann had this to say:
"I mean, I got to be careful what is here because we are a big company and have to deal with all those organizations, so I don't really want to get in the middle of it…But when we talk about AI, first of all, hopefully, it will help us to have new gameplay ideas, which has nothing to do with taking work away from anyone. And especially for games, we don't really have acting... The majority of the team sits in programming and that's not going to go away because that's all about innovation. If it takes something, it will be really the boring parts."
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The part of this statement that caused quite a stir in the acting community was the insinuation that games do not have acting in them. This is clearly not true, as video games lately have incorporated not only impressive voice-over performances but also impressive motion capture performances. Several actors involved with video games gave their input on the statement, particularly those who have been involved with Amazon Games, such as voice actress Allegra Clark and voice actor Kyle McCarley.
Hartmann also wants AI to assist in localization, stating, "Right now, we're localizing our game into a certain set of languages. Basically, does it commercially make sense to have it in a language, yes or no? Having AI actually will help us. That's why I'm thinking it's not going to make it cheap, it's just going to make us translate our games into more languages. Which is great for gamers, because there's countries which maybe not everyone speaks perfect English and they would love to have in a local language, but they're half the size."
It is unknown if this would extend to dubbing into these languages with A.I., but it does appear that Hartmann recognizes that the “creative spark” behind games is uniquely human, but this, at least according to him, only extends to ideas. Hartmann, at least according to this statement, does not view the execution behind the acting and translation of a game as uniquely human.
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Sources: Games Radar, X [1], [2]
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