I heard a radio spot recently and I wondered if the voice was a real person or AI. It makes we wonder how such industries are dealing with this gen-AI revolution. We spend a lot of time here thinking about how it affects software developers, but I hardly ever see any commentary on how it is affecting screen and voice actors.
It'll come quickly for audio books. I've been working on a locally hosted, fully containerized web application to narrate my sci-fi novel using a full cast of characters and three distinct narrators:
Software developers, unfortunately, have been convinced that they don't need to unionize, so have no collective bargaining power for dealing with situations like this.
Personally, I just can’t find it in me to be that self-interested. It’s how other people oppose buildings near them because it blocks their view. I really don’t want to stop other people from writing software. If they want to use AI to do it so be it.
That’ll be somewhat detrimental to me perhaps (which isn’t certain), but that’s okay. I’d rather attempt to adapt to a changing world.
I don't know that unions would necessarily negotiate for no use of AI. The SAG-AFRA deals don't preclude all use of AI; they just requre consent and negotiation in certain cases.
A union doesn't give you unilateral power; it just gives you a better seat at the bargaining table. Capital pools its resources to negotiate better as a single bloc; why shouldn't labor as well?
Thats great, although understand that unionizing protects the more vulnerable of also the software engineered. You not advocating for your rights also means weakening others. Is it still self interested to unionized from that perspective?
You may be surprised to know that residential areas in San Francisco are height limited, sometimes as short as 4 stories. They're not exactly anti-progress.
Ok SF needs somewhat higher-density housing. But wanting something good for yourself and your peers isn't anti-progress. If the benefits accrue to only a few people, it's not progress.
>The union demanded clear protections to ensure that recordings of actors’ performances could not be copied without consent and compensation.
>California’s legislation passed AB 2602 and AB 1836 in September 2024, prohibiting media companies from using AI to replicate actors’ performances without their consent.
it's a very reasonable law, but it is not the win you seem to believe it to be. the actors who refuse to consent will simply be passed over in favor of those who don't. no law will ever be passed to force companies to employ humans over machines, and if they were, the industry would move elsewhere. this is not without precedent :)
speech models have got so good so quickly that you can already replace a VA -- even an AAA prima donna -- with a teenager from Fiverr, who will simply bruteforce the right inflection.
I think I sit somewhere between these two descriptions. I've always supported unions and other "for the common good" type machinery. At the same time, I desperately also don't want to end up doing something the equivalent of barring the use of calculators just so I can toil away at a 9-5 crunching numbers more slowly instead. If AI really does replace all of the meaningful jobs we can do... great - I'd rather we make sure the spoils of that production are distributed than try to cling to preventing the technology from being used.
Inexplicably for the current moment, AI has so far actually meant I have even more to do instead of less. I expect that to change eventually... but man, is it a bit of whiplash to go from wondering if my job will be around in 10 years to starting the work day and being more backed up than ever. Doubly so since the rate of change does not seem to be very evenly distributed by tech role.
> it's hilarious to see some people here go on about how they're proud to work so that they can be replaced
To be fair, most of us spent our entire career trying our best to automate ourselves away one way or another, and always seen that as our job description.
No, that is just nerd heroism lore that indeed has always shown up in comments, that part is definitely true.
Some people dislike automation altogether and like the computational aspect. Most people seem to enjoy constructing virtual worlds and Rube Goldberg machines.
In my experience this is what almost everyone thinks, right up to the point where it starts happening to them.
And it isn't just an individual blind spot, organizations suffer from the same thing in the sense that many companies will be happy to automate away all their labor to avoid paying the "human tax" without giving much thought to the fact that the need for the company itself will also be automated away soon after.
If you can replace nearly all of your workers with some cheap tokens and prompts, everyone else who previously would have been a customer can replace your whole company with the same thing.
Half of them are from India or China. Racial diversity is known to be detrimental to unionization. In fact, Amazon used this exact strategy to bust nascent Somali unions.
Everyone will probably go through the 5 stages of grief w.r.t AI adoption in their field and the gatekeepers will (rightfully) hold onto hallucination and errors as reasons to delay incorporation or to incorporate it with more human handholding.
I'm really sad about how little creative control these tools have. They seem great for creating slop, but pretty useless for creating content that someone would love. I love the potential but text isn't really a great medium for describing artistic vision.
All these demos are focused on how easy it makes everything. Easy is great, but if everyone is able to make instant cute cat videos or whatever it just devalues it. I want to see turning a photo into a rigged 3d model, letting the artist animate and then generate the video. This technology could be used to increase creative expression, but instead it's being used to squeeze out creative expression
A lot of it will get automated the same way very many industries got automated. A lot of physical labour got automated once a primitive for it was created. Similarly, we have now a primitive for automating knowledge work. In the next few years to a decade, as all the right training data and runtime environments are slowly consolidated for various fields, a lot will be automated. There is no inherent reason a voice actor must be an eternal job, the same way there was no inherent reason for a draftsman or stage musician to be an eternal job.
It has nothing to do with skill. Both were very skilled jobs. Draftsman as well despite many people going to it straight from school. But computers and CAD mean that it is now necessary for someone to do a STEM degree to be a draftsman. Recorded audio made many stage musicians redundant. It is cheaper to do it this way and gets superior results, that is all, there is no further agenda.
Now too, the next generation of voice actors and many other knowledge workers will have to go up the value chain one step and operate or potentially build these tools (in whatever form they mature to in a decades time).
The current generation of voice actors will face the same situation as many before in the performance industry - stage musicians/performers for example that were made redundant by recorded audio. The reality is that most of them just left and dispersed into the economy doing completely unrelated jobs.
For software and generally computer engineers, this new primitive happens to itself be software, so it's less of a transition and an easier upskilling path to learn to build it. And building it is one step higher in the value chain than simply using it. That is a structural advantage.
I don't really like comparing the way automation of the past displaced jobs to the way AI is/will displace jobs. The timeline is just faster and, more importantly, there were still plenty of other fields of work for people to go to.
But now that we are automating white collar work... where will people go? I'm a 36 year-old veteran who has returned to college and so many of the younger students seem to be filled with despair.
I have hope for the future, but I think there will be an uncomfortable period of time.
>Firefox makes up about 90 percent of Mozilla’s revenue, according to Muhlheim, the finance chief for the organization’s for-profit arm — which in turn helps fund the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation. About 85 percent of that revenue comes from its deal with Google, he added.
Hot take: Google keeps Mozilla/Firefox alive through the default search engine placement (which makes Mozilla millions each year) so they don't get designated as a monopoly with their browser.
Firefox really struggle with demo pages of text-to-video models because of the large numbers of videos in the page in my experience, this page seems to work quite fine for me tho.
Just because Anthropic and OpenAI really want there to be an arms race justifying the outsized investment, doesn't mean the optimal play is to build larger, more expensive, models.
The capital infusion the frontier labs have received has gotten to a size where many believe it may not be possible to recoup this investment without some very unrealistic things happening.
I think it's reasonable to not completely drain one's cash reserves trying to stay ahead in a race where participants may very clearly be about to run straight off of a cliff.
And it doesn't have to be either/or. They could make larger, more expensive models, just at a slower cadence.
Sure downside would be not learning from people using your model for coding, if we're on the cusp of huge leaps in self-improvement. But there is a reasonable case for avoiding desperate scramble, especially if other parts of the business can also create value with the compute.
If the Chinese labs can compete on a shoestring budget with access to much less powerful hardware, Google should be able to compete as well. They're becoming almost irrelevant for agentic coding right now.
I think they also have the problem of having given away their pro subscription to 10s or 100s of millions of students worldwide. They're tightening down on that now, and I have a feeling that this goes into them not releasing a larger model.
They blew up my interest when the stole my money by cutting me off from Gemini CLI with no explanation or recourse. I did not violate the terms of service and my only crime seemed to be not wanting to use Antigravity. They still took my money for the rest of that month and gave me nothing for it.
So Seedance is good primarily because of TikTok and this because of YouTube. I wonder what portion of all recorded video is privately held in hard drives at people’s homes or Apple photos. Of course there is data labeling and cleaning but is the next evolution just a question of access? Same goes for LLMs. Would people be willing to sell their data? Kind of a messed up way to make yourself obsolete. Or there is a limit to scaling?
I'm still getting major uncanny valley from any of the videos featuring humans, something about them disgusts me. I guess I should be glad I'm still able to distinguish them.
I don't think I can see the difference. I just have my skin crawl because I'm expecting to see something off and generally have a bad feeling about it.
Something in their eyes. Looks very robotic / lifeless for me. And the sound-mixing is very off. Clearly feels like the voice was layered on top of whatever sound is in the background and not blended.
The AI brand fragmentation at Google is not yet a problem because everyone is pretending:
x There are so-called “SOTA” or “frontier” models that are more effective than the other ones (independent of harnessing and routing)
x OpenAI and Anthropic have all the SOTA models and lead all the innovation
x Google’s moat is its search bread/butter (it’s the only reason they’re relevant)
All 3 operating assumptions are - I think - false.
What Google has done that the “cuter products” (Claude, ChatGPT) haven’t is connected relatively standard LLMs to an externally valuable live service.
As more companies realize that is where all the value is (the service) and not in the AI capability, then products (and humans) become important again.
Google should just be Google again, and Gemini should be Gemini, off to the side. Omni confuses everyone (and angers some iykyk), they should resolve “AI mode”, rename Gemma? and consolidate the brand overall so it’s clear what Google is.
Google is search.
It helps people on all sides of the market find what they’re looking for.
I don’t really see how repeatedly reinventing and rebranding the same AI chat UX is accomplishing anything toward that goal.
* https://i.ibb.co/ccqKZ71L/keenlore.png
* https://i.ibb.co/1t3W0JqZ/keenlore-02.png
* https://i.ibb.co/LdBqHwKB/keenlore-03.png
For example: https://sites.suffolk.edu/jhtl/2025/10/30/game-over-for-unau...
Software developers, unfortunately, have been convinced that they don't need to unionize, so have no collective bargaining power for dealing with situations like this.
That’ll be somewhat detrimental to me perhaps (which isn’t certain), but that’s okay. I’d rather attempt to adapt to a changing world.
A union doesn't give you unilateral power; it just gives you a better seat at the bargaining table. Capital pools its resources to negotiate better as a single bloc; why shouldn't labor as well?
San Francisco needs less people, not cramming in more. USA needs more cities. The bay area is tapped out.
It is if it makes it worse for everyone else.
>California’s legislation passed AB 2602 and AB 1836 in September 2024, prohibiting media companies from using AI to replicate actors’ performances without their consent.
it's a very reasonable law, but it is not the win you seem to believe it to be. the actors who refuse to consent will simply be passed over in favor of those who don't. no law will ever be passed to force companies to employ humans over machines, and if they were, the industry would move elsewhere. this is not without precedent :)
speech models have got so good so quickly that you can already replace a VA -- even an AAA prima donna -- with a teenager from Fiverr, who will simply bruteforce the right inflection.
I think too many just expect that they can get by like before because they're a 10x engineer or whatever
Inexplicably for the current moment, AI has so far actually meant I have even more to do instead of less. I expect that to change eventually... but man, is it a bit of whiplash to go from wondering if my job will be around in 10 years to starting the work day and being more backed up than ever. Doubly so since the rate of change does not seem to be very evenly distributed by tech role.
To be fair, most of us spent our entire career trying our best to automate ourselves away one way or another, and always seen that as our job description.
Some people dislike automation altogether and like the computational aspect. Most people seem to enjoy constructing virtual worlds and Rube Goldberg machines.
It's kind of hypocritical to change just because it's now a different industry being impacted.
In my experience this is what almost everyone thinks, right up to the point where it starts happening to them.
And it isn't just an individual blind spot, organizations suffer from the same thing in the sense that many companies will be happy to automate away all their labor to avoid paying the "human tax" without giving much thought to the fact that the need for the company itself will also be automated away soon after.
If you can replace nearly all of your workers with some cheap tokens and prompts, everyone else who previously would have been a customer can replace your whole company with the same thing.
Useful idiots always go first after the goal is accomplished.
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252481961/Amazons-Whole-...
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01762...
It’s brutal for these people. The creative industry was always hard, but this is just plain brutal.
All these demos are focused on how easy it makes everything. Easy is great, but if everyone is able to make instant cute cat videos or whatever it just devalues it. I want to see turning a photo into a rigged 3d model, letting the artist animate and then generate the video. This technology could be used to increase creative expression, but instead it's being used to squeeze out creative expression
one youtuber used irl footage, with hands and stuff - so I know there's human behind the camera
the other was a letsplay that reacted to events just fine emotionally
and yet the uncanny valley of the sound is in full force. Maybe youtube has done something with the codecs?
I feel sad
It has nothing to do with skill. Both were very skilled jobs. Draftsman as well despite many people going to it straight from school. But computers and CAD mean that it is now necessary for someone to do a STEM degree to be a draftsman. Recorded audio made many stage musicians redundant. It is cheaper to do it this way and gets superior results, that is all, there is no further agenda.
Now too, the next generation of voice actors and many other knowledge workers will have to go up the value chain one step and operate or potentially build these tools (in whatever form they mature to in a decades time).
The current generation of voice actors will face the same situation as many before in the performance industry - stage musicians/performers for example that were made redundant by recorded audio. The reality is that most of them just left and dispersed into the economy doing completely unrelated jobs.
For software and generally computer engineers, this new primitive happens to itself be software, so it's less of a transition and an easier upskilling path to learn to build it. And building it is one step higher in the value chain than simply using it. That is a structural advantage.
But now that we are automating white collar work... where will people go? I'm a 36 year-old veteran who has returned to college and so many of the younger students seem to be filled with despair.
I have hope for the future, but I think there will be an uncomfortable period of time.
>Firefox makes up about 90 percent of Mozilla’s revenue, according to Muhlheim, the finance chief for the organization’s for-profit arm — which in turn helps fund the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation. About 85 percent of that revenue comes from its deal with Google, he added.
https://www.theverge.com/news/660548/firefox-google-search-r...
The capital infusion the frontier labs have received has gotten to a size where many believe it may not be possible to recoup this investment without some very unrealistic things happening.
I think it's reasonable to not completely drain one's cash reserves trying to stay ahead in a race where participants may very clearly be about to run straight off of a cliff.
Sure downside would be not learning from people using your model for coding, if we're on the cusp of huge leaps in self-improvement. But there is a reasonable case for avoiding desperate scramble, especially if other parts of the business can also create value with the compute.
They never gave an official answer as to why, so I'll let you draw your own conclusions.
They did not decide it wasn't worth spending the money to train.
They absolutely spent the money.
Pro models are mainly for coding agent work; it doesn't necessarily make them any money.
Maybe because they see video generation as key to developing "world models"?
When it comes to fish swimming around I don't think I would be able to reliably tell what was real vs generated even with deep inspection.
x There are so-called “SOTA” or “frontier” models that are more effective than the other ones (independent of harnessing and routing)
x OpenAI and Anthropic have all the SOTA models and lead all the innovation
x Google’s moat is its search bread/butter (it’s the only reason they’re relevant)
All 3 operating assumptions are - I think - false.
What Google has done that the “cuter products” (Claude, ChatGPT) haven’t is connected relatively standard LLMs to an externally valuable live service.
As more companies realize that is where all the value is (the service) and not in the AI capability, then products (and humans) become important again.
Google should just be Google again, and Gemini should be Gemini, off to the side. Omni confuses everyone (and angers some iykyk), they should resolve “AI mode”, rename Gemma? and consolidate the brand overall so it’s clear what Google is.
Google is search.
It helps people on all sides of the market find what they’re looking for.
I don’t really see how repeatedly reinventing and rebranding the same AI chat UX is accomplishing anything toward that goal.