Dispatch‘s creative director Nick Herman and executive producer Michael Choung have spoken out about the use of AI voices in games. The episodic superhero adventure game uses well-known actors to voice its characters, including Jeffrey Wright from Westworld and Aaron Paul from Breaking Bad.
Arc Raiders has come under fire for the use of AI voices via text-to-speech, though Embark Studios co-founder Stefan Strandberg justifies the decision saying, “there’s no end goal in replacing any actors.” In an interview with GI.biz, when asked for his opinion on the use of AI voices, Herman says, “AI feels like a production solution, not a creative one. Maybe it’s a creative one if you aren’t creative.”
Herman isn’t just dunking on AI because it’s the current trendy thing to do. He explains why he thinks using voice actors is so important. “No AI is going to do what [Jeffrey Wright] did,” says Herman. “He brought something to that character that we weren’t expecting.”
He further praises the whole cast for “elevating the material in a way that you’re just not going to get [with AI],” explaining that you’ll “only hear something you’ve heard before if you go the AI route.” Choung adds that the studio is “monitoring the stuff that AI is doing”, but says the technology struggles to reach “good enough,” adding further that “‘good enough’ for us is the enemy.”
Choung even hits back at studios that are trying to reduce the number of people it needs to hire in order to make its games. “We’re not getting up every morning and talking to ourselves like, ‘hey, what if we did this with less people? What’s the lowest number of people we can use to make this thing?’ This is like not anything that we’re too concerned with,” he says.
Despite this, he doesn’t want to “sit here and judge” Embark for the decision it has made. “For us… [using AI voices] just doesn’t make a ton of sense.”
Most gamers aren’t actually bothered by gen AI in games, says former Square Enix exec: “Many studios I know” are relying on it, and art or voices like Arc Raiders’ are “the tip of the spear”
