Conversations On acting, AI and strikes with actors AJ LoCascio, Ashly Burch, David Menkin, Nick Apostilides and Sarah Elmaleh

*Photo: Private, SAG-AFTRA, Rob Latour/Shutterstock*

Originally written for Gamer.no in Norwegian.

Creating video games is a human activity that technology alone can never replace. Certainly technology is a tool that on its own can create things that objectively exist. But in the hands of a human who has ideas, concepts, knowledge and the ability to make intentional choices based on their lived experiences, that same technology transforms into the art we love.

The interactivity that comes with video games as an artform is unique, where you as the player are transported into a story and the choices you make can change how it plays out. You decide how you want to walk in someone else’s shoes, and the best feeling is when those shoes give that incredible feeling that only games can provide. Like the feeling of parkouring across buildings in Dying Light, or swinging with Kratos’ axe in God of War, or finally landing a trick in Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. Sometimes that feeling comes from interactions we have with characters; whether it’s getting teary-eyed from the opening of The Last of Us, blushing after flirting with a companion in Baldur’s Gate 3, or fearfully running away from Pyramid Head in Silent Hill 2. All these feelings we get from playing games are thanks to the people behind them that breathe life into the gaming sphere.

Now these jobs are threatened by companies that would rather just use artificial intelligence than hire real people.

One of the threatened fields is acting and performing for video games. The threat is not only that AI could replace the voice of an actor, but also that their appearance and movements could be stolen and used without their permission. The guidelines are few, the secrets are many, and a myriad of grim stories can be found behind closed doors, the reasons as to why video game actors in the industry today are fighting for better working conditions.

I chatted with some familiar faces about what it's like to work during this turbulent period of game development here in Los Angeles and in other parts of the world, as well as how AI technology is starting to feel more like a weapon than a tool.

Actors On Strike

*Ashly Burch voices Aloy from Horizon Zero Dawn and Chloe in Life Is Strange. Photo: Sony Interactive Entertainment, Private, Square Enix*

Earlier this year, an internal video from Sony was leaked that featured an AI-version of Aloy from the Horizon Zero Dawn-games. The leak caused a stir, with many people pointing out the irony of creating an AI-version of a character from a game that criticizes the use of such technology. The voice actress behind the character, as well as the voice of characters in games such as The Last Of Us Part II, Life Is Strange, Borderlands 2 and Valorant, Ashly Burch, gave her initial response on Instagram, where she opened up about the incident.

When I later asked her about the video, she said she was not surprised over the video’s existence since companies of course would like to test the AI-technology.

“Guerrilla reached out to me to tell me that this test didn't reflect active development, and that they didn't use any of my performance data for it, and I believe them. But there's not a doubt in my mind that other developers are exploring similar technology. Some have said that they are, outright. Will all of them be conscientious”, she asks rhetorically.

“Will all of them ask for consent or compensate their actors unless they're mandated to through a contract? These are the difficult questions we have to confront as a community. These are the concerns that force us to fight for a fair, protective contract”, she says.

Ashly, like many other voice actors in the U.S., is currently on strike. SAG-AFTRA is the American union that covers actors, stunt performers, dancers, singers and other performers within multiple mediums, with the exception of theater. Voice actors and performers in video games went on strike in the hopes that companies will sign their “Interactive Media Agreement”, which will give performers protections around AI.

“We know that employers want to use this technology, like they would want to use any burgeoning technology. That's why we're on strike -- because we know this is the likely future of game development, and we need protections around the use of this technology”, Ashly says.

*Sarah Elmaleh. Photo: Rob Latour/Shutterstock*

Sarah Elmaleh, whose voice you may have heard in games like Fortnite, Star Wars: Squadrons, Gears 5, Hi-Fi Rush and Helldivers II, and who works directly with SAG in her role as the Negotiating Committee Chair, tells me that SAG-members who work in games have been on strike since July last year. The majority of large game developers have not come to an agreement over the protections that SAG wants in actors’ contracts around the use of AI. Sarah says these protections include that an actor should give companies consent on how and what their voice and acting can be used for, that companies should accept that they need this consent and be open about how they will use an actor’s work, and compensate actors fairly.

“We feel that that's sort of a bare ethical minimum to allow the use of this tool, a tool that is like an existential threat and has the ability to displace workers and kind of violate their artistic autonomy in a way that no other tool in the history of man has ever had before”, she says.

She, like many others, wants actors to have the opportunity to decide whether they want their work to be use in conjunction with AI-technology or not. Even though many, naturally, are critical of the use of AI, many also know that there is no way of completely halting its use.

*AJ LoCascio’s voice can be heard in many popular games and tv-shows. Photo: Private*

AJ LoCascio, known from games like Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga and Back To The Future: The Game, as well as the TV-shows X-Men '97 and Voltron: Legendary Defender, agrees that we are faced with a possible future where he could be replaced by what he refers to as an “unethically sourced aggregate” of his work that he never agreed to, and how the lack of protections around this could become a huge problem.

“We're at a very scary crossroad of ethics and what it is to be human. A big company doesn't want to pay someone a day rate to act when they can just type in prompts and get what they view as being the same thing,” he says.

*Nick Apostolides has been the voice of Leon S. Kennedy in multiple Resident Evil-games. Photo: Capcom, Private*

Nick Apostolides, most known as the voice of Leon S. Kennedy in several of the Resident Evil-games, says he honestly does not know how to feel about the future.

“I live my life both as an optimist and a pragmatist. Those two are sometimes at odds with each other. I sincerely hope the value of the human artist is never lost on society, especially as younger generations become more relevant, though I don't believe we can really stop [technologic] progress. It all may change the industry as we know it. All we can do is support the cause now, and stand up for what we believe in,” he says.

Although the SAG-strike affects American actors, the fight for protections around AI affects everyone worldwide, and many actors have changed what jobs they take since the strike began.

Solidarity In Britain

*David Menkin supports his American colleagues around the AI-issue. Photo: Private*

Norwegian-American David Menkin, known from games like Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, Final Fantasy XVI, Assassin's Creed: Valhalla and Valorant, works in the U.K., where performers are also fighting for the AI-protections they deserve.

He is part of the union Equity, which have shared their support of SAG-AFTRA. David tells me that many British actors have said no to jobs as a form of protest to support actors in the U.S.

“I have received phone calls from friends and acquaintances that were crying because they discovered that after they started recording lines for a large game, that an actor from the U.S. might have been originally meant to have that job. People have withdrawn from projects, while others have continued. The Americans don't want it that way, and we don't want it that way. A job shouldn't be taken from the United States and dumped here, and we don't want to be seen as any less valuable than our American colleagues,” he says.

Because of the restrictive labor laws in Britain, Equity was unable to also take actors out on strike, but the performers hope that companies will agree to SAG’s terms so that their rights may also improve in the future. David knows what it is like to be a victim of AI-cloning without permission, as his voice was previously misused.

“We are trying to make companies put in their contracts that what we do will ONLY be used for the project we are working on here and now, and that what we say will not be used to generate an AI-model that can then be used instead of us, and that if we do agree to let our voices be used or added to some database, we must know what the database is generating or being used for,” he says.

David, like many others, feels that AI will never replace a real person’s acting, and calls it a “parrot”. He points out how the AI we have seen be used in movies and videos can come off as “soulless”. The human feeling in games does not only come from a character’s voice, but also its movements, another part of their jobs that actors want protections around.

Motion Capture Is Acting

*Sarah and other castmates from Anthem. Photo: Private*

“Motion Capture”, or mocap for short, is a technology where the face or body of a performer is digitized and used to animate digital characters. A person puts on a mocap suit, sometimes also a type of camera helmet or dots on their face, and moves around in a room filled with cameras that record this movement. This is of course oversimplifying a technology that continues to evolve, but it’s important to point out that video game actors not only voice characters, but also often give them movements; how a player character strikes a pose as you look through a character gallery, how a face raises its eyebrows in surprise, how a monster lunges at you are all movements that stem from a performer doing something in reality.

Sometimes multiple people do mocap for the same character, other times only one. The game Prince of Persia from 1989 is known as one of the first games that used “rotoscoping”, a technique that was first developed back in 1915, where you drew an animated figure over real filmed footage to create realistic movements. We can also see early uses of mocap in games like Vixen from 1988, Rise of the Robots from 1994 and the Mortal Kombat-series. And then we have the more famous forms of mocap from movies that came later, such as Jar Jar Binks from Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, and Gollum from The Lord Of The Rings, which made the technology more popularized.

Nowadays both AAA- and indie games use this technology. Whether humans or monsters, animating movements based on something that has been done in the real world creates a more believable gaming experience. The popular game Stray from 2022 used real cats during their mocap-sessions, and Dogmeat from Fallout 4 was based on the movements of a real German Shepherd.

*Sarah works with actors for USC Interactive Media and Games Division. Photo: Private*

Sarah tells me that there have been debates around mocap on the employer-side on whether or not mocap should count as “performance” or not, and that some companies consider footage of movements as “data” and not acting.

Actors disagree on this.

“Our argument and our contractual position is that [mocap] is performance because you're hiring a performer to do it. You're asking them to create characters and create emotional realism, you know that's the service that you're asking of people. So there has been a dispute that movement is only ‘reference’, that if you're using your body to to move, that it's just data in the system, which to me feels a bit like telling Charlie Chaplin that he's not a performer,” Sarah says.

David also hopes for better guidelines around mocap.

“We have seen situations where actors have arrived to a job to do stunts without a stunt coordinator present, or where a [mocap] performer showed up to a job and was told they would have to perform an explicit sex-scene without an intimacy coordinator present. It shouldn’t be like that,” he says.

AJ points out that there are many who don’t consider voice acting on the same level as acting for TV and Film, motion capture included.

“Unfortunately most of the industry doesn't view voice acting as ‘real acting’. I far too often hear ‘Oh you do voice acting? Do you do real acting as well!?’ It is seen as less-than and therefore some projects and people don't see actors as a valuable part of the process,” he says.

*Actors on strike in LA. Photo: SAG-AFTRA*

Part Of The Creative Process

Actors are often considered part of the post-production of the game development process. David tells me that where once you would only show up as an actor at the very end of a game’s development cycle, there are now opportunities for actors to come in even earlier than previously for certain titles, and in some cases become part of the creative process.

“It could be that you are called in at the beginning [of the development process] to read lines for a few hours into a database, and then you are asked to come back at the end of the process to read the lines again. What we want is the right to say yes or no if someone wants to use the voices we have recorded, and we need to have the ability to control how our intellectual property is used, for example whether those lines from the database can be harvested and used for something new after the project is finished,” he says.

AJ says he has had experiences while recording games where his acting became a bigger part of a character than he originally expected in a positive way, thanks to the collaboration with other people on set, which in turn made the character feel more human.

“With something like God of War: Ragnarok they said they kind of wrote my character of Skjöldr with me in mind so I kind of inadvertently contributed to him since I was with them on set for 4 years working on Atreus and many other characters. I didn't realize Eric Williams, Matt Sophos and Bruno Velezquez were casually noting my quirks,” he says.

We have heard plenty of stories from the past few years around how motion capture can affect a character in a game. Not only are many characters animated to look like the actor that voices them, but in some cases an actor’s choices become part of their personality.

“I've been lucky enough to work on a few games with my friend Dori Arazi and we are constantly tweaking the script and blocking and interactions to sort out what feels the best for the character or scene; it's why I love working with him or any director like him where we are discovering it together. That is the fun of acting and what A.I. threatens to take away,” AJ says.

200 Games Have Signed The SAG-Agreement

Sarah says she has felt a lot of joy from seeing multiple projects accept SAG’s terms since the start of the strike. According to her, over 200 games have signed the agreement, something she says signals that what they are asking for is not impossible. She herself had the opportunity to voice a character in the game SUPERVIVE.

“You can see actors on social media celebrating these games, and the relief and joy they feel working with developers who honor them and who respect them… We're just asking for what we believe every worker in every industry in every country around the world deserves, the same degree of transparency, consent and compensation is something every worker deserves to have around the use of [AI], or we're all just going to get displaced," she says.

Outside of the 200 games, actors had the choice of continuing to work on a game if they were mid-production at the time the strike began. Sarah says that despite this, many actors (SAG and otherwise) have decided to decline to continue working on these games. Not only do their contracts still lack the AI-protections SAG want, but Sarah also says that actors regardless have the opportunity to say no to jobs because they are “dayplayers”.

“What that means is I have a contract not for the entire project but just for that day of work, so every time you call me in for a session it's a new contract. That's how most of this works. Some bigger celebrities do larger deals that cover the entire project, but for most of us it's just one day at a time.

Outside of certain contracts, actors are therefore not forced to continue jobs, and a way to make the strike work is if everyone comes together, whether you are part of SAG or not.

“We encourage people to look at the consequences, not union punishment, just other consequences of [taking a job]. It is like if we're playing a sport, it might be within the rules for you to sit down on the field, but you're not going to win the game.”

*Actors striking in Los Angeles. Photo: SAG-AFTRA*

Lack Of Compensation

Members of SAG earn on average $1000 for an up to four-hour long session of work for a game. This might sound like a lot, and the sum can vary, but, as Sarah points out, most actors will not have many of these sessions to complete their role on a game.

Sarah tells me she has had jobs on games that only lasted a handful of sessions over multiple years, and some jobs for entire games that she finished in a single day. Stunt performers have different deals, where they might work 40-70 sessions total over multiple years for a game.

“So you’d have to book a huge lead every year to get the median living wage in LA? Or 70 games a year? It’s very difficult to make a living in games and most people don’t,” she says.

David says that not much has changed in Britain since the 90s. The industry is unregulated, and there is no specific amount that everyone must be paid, like what SAG has. He also says that companies can offer actors a “buyout”, which means they will pay you a specific amount to own your work forever, which with AI-technology makes it so that this labor can be taken advantage of in a completely new way.

“We don’t have any contracts that were established between the industry and Equity here, so that makes it hard for us to make sure that we get well paid, and that we get the rights we want.”

The Future Of Actors

It’s hard to figure out what you can do to help. The gaming industry consists of secrets, and it’s hard to know everything that happens behind the scenes of a game production. David says you have to become somewhat of a “detective” to sometimes just get some clarity in what you’re working on since so much is not discussed until a game’s release. And we will probably see a lot of this in the future; waves of games that use AI, where actors may have been replaced, or where the lack of actors will be obvious. We already saw Destiny 2 announce Heresy, which is lacking voice acting due to the strike. As consumers, it’s hard to know what we can do. So I asked the actors what they think.

“I would ask gamers to inform themselves about our fight and what we're asking for, and to support actors that are standing in solidarity with the union. More than that, I'd encourage everyone to understand why unions are important and why collective action is important. Because the threat of AI isn't going to stop with actors and writers - it will affect us all in different ways,” Ashly says.

*Alison Jaye, Kylie Liya Page, Nicole Tompkins and Ashly Burch filming Horizon Forbidden West DLC. Photo: Private*

“Unions are a necessary counterforce to rampant corporate exploitation. Companies are just not interested in protecting the individual sustainability of anyone's career or anyone's life.

It's got to be you that stands up for that, and so anytime you support our workers asking

for what they need, there's hope,” Sarah says.

“If we don’t get the rights we are asking for, it might not be too bad for those of us that are already established and working, but how are the next generations supposed to get into the industry if there is no way to make money? And of course, we have to consider AI,” says David.

The Art of Being Human

Actors want to know that their likeness, voices, acting and other work can’t be used to train AI unless they consent to it. As a writer, this is something that I obviously can relate to, as my profession is also threatened by AI-generated listicles and a growing lack of journalistic work that’s written by real people. As a games journalist it’s been depressing to watch publications fall and talented writers be fired, as we recently saw happen to Polygon. I know that almost everything I write online, whether it’s a simple Google search or a post on social media may one day be fed to an AI that will use my work, my words, my thoughts, without my permission. Unlike actors however, I won’t see my face or hear my voice say something I never would have said, or never got compensated for saying - yet.

Actors are fighting a battle that many of us will eventually face. It's a battle that is, of course, nuanced, with so many intricacies that a book’s length article wouldn’t even be enough to tell every single story and include every single detail. So what can we hope will happen when we look at the bigger picture? I try to be optimistic, because I hope that actors can keep their jobs, get the protections they deserve, and continue to create memorable characters in collaboration with animators, writers, producers, and everyone else who is part of a development team. I will always prefer games where the characters feel real, where the gameplay mechanics feel good, and where I know that skilled, real people are behind the game.

AI-technology will always exist, but hopefully we can create a gaming sphere where AI-generating will be ethical, with permission and compensation behind the use of people’s work, with clear distinctions of what is and isn’t made with the use of AI, and where actors, writers and other artists that do not want to train AI should feel free enough to work without fear.

*AJ LoCascio, Sofia Hariz og Ashly Burch. Poto: Private*

“I want to continue working, I love this job. We have the opportunity to use humans to create art, and yes, some may want to use artificial intelligence as a tool. But don’t let the tool create the art. We understand that most people don’t want to sit and listen to actors yell about being forgotten and left alone. All we want is to just be part of the team, to continue to create quality games, the quality that gamers now expect, but at the same time also get the protections we deserve,” David says.

Nick hopes people like him can continue to share his art with the world, regardless of which shape it may take.

“I am a crafter, a woodworker, a musician, an actor and a graphite artist. As artists, of course we want to advocate for our existence within our mediums - in a time where it can be simulated or replicated with the click of a button. These are our livelihoods. We are humans, with a life's worth of human experience that we use to create, express, imagine and share with others. The results can inspire, evoke emotion, influence, raise awareness, start social movements and the list goes on,” he says.

Or, as AJ says, “What we do now determines how bad this will be for future generations, but there's some good things in the world, Mr. Frodo and it's worth fighting for.”

This article is part of my new column for Gamer.no about things that I care about within the gaming industry in Los Angeles. More articles can be read here.

Gamer.no Feature - Voice Actors talk AI, SAG-strike and more - In English