“We spent weeks looking, and found a person who sounds exactly like the original, they’re excited to be a part of the team.” Would have been much more encouraging to read.
After a meeting between the two sides confirmed that Rozenek’s voice had grown lower and gruffer due to some combination of the stroke and him simply getting older, the studio made the decision not to recast the actor, but instead let modify Respeecher modify his lines to make them sound closer to those original recordings. Rozenek reportedly gave his blessing for this to go ahead. “The point is that this voice should be as close as possible to my voice from 12 years ago,” he told Game File. “I have great trust…for the creators of this game.”
This isn’t the first time CD Projekt Red have enlisted Respeecher’s services. Back in 2023, it was revealed that the studio had used speech synthesis software to make ripperdoc Viktor Vektor’s lines in the Polish version of Cyberpunk 2077’s Phantom Liberty expansion sound like actor Miłogost Reczek. Reczek died in 2021 before he could reprise his role as Vektor for the DLC, so rather than recasting the character across the whole game to avoid noticeable differences in voice, CD Projekt got another actor to voice Vektor’s new lines for Phantom Liberty, then used the genAI tech to make those lines sound like Reczek was delivering them. CD Projekt Red said at the time that they’d gotten permission from Reczek’s family before going ahead with their plan.
Just saying something is ethical doesn’t make it so
Naaah… there’s no ethical use of AI. Saying it is makes it way worse than if they just said they used it and not pretended they did something good.
The original voice actor wanted to be in the game, but is no longer able to replicate the original voice. As much as I detest the capitalist theft engines that are AI, this is a compassionate and consensual accommodation for someone suffering from a life-changing disability. They are also using a model trained specifically on and for that person. I do not see any ethics problems with this.
Theres not enough training data from one actor to make a useful model, they usually distill existing models.
But it’s not ethical. This entity story is pro AI slop.
sigh
No, I don’t know. When does this then stop being ethical? As long as the original voice actor is alive, agrees and presumably is being paid? We’ve heard plenty of cases now where deceased actors have been revived through AI because their descendants said its ok. Is that ethical too then?
In the case of AI reviving dead people, I’d say that’s never ethical. Death happens. People need to deal with it in healthy ways, not try to keep people’s voices alive artificially. Using their voice without them actually speaking the words means companies can put words in their mouths they’d never actually say, and revise positions/beliefs they may have held in life.
They’re releasing more Witcher 3 slop? Really? Aren’t they releasing Witcher 4 soon?
