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.
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?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Many screen and voice actors are unionized, and the unions have been striking and bargaining specifcially over these points.
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.
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?
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.
Height limiting is anti-progress, which was his point.
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?
it's hilarious to see some people here go on about how they're proud to work so that they can be replaced
I think too many just expect that they can get by like before because they're a 10x engineer or whatever
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.
Much of computing history has been about replacing humans. If they were proud of their work pre-LLMs, then at least they're being consistent!
It's kind of hypocritical to change just because it's now a different industry being impacted.
It won't happen to me is what I used to think
Many people who promoted DEI when their corporations demanded it were fired later.
Useful idiots always go first after the goal is accomplished.
No one has offered a union to join at any workplace Ive been at
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.
https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252481961/Amazons-Whole-...
Work that doesn’t have a personal brand involved is basically dead. Arbitrary voice acting? Dead.
It’s brutal for these people. The creative industry was always hard, but this is just plain brutal.
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.
Sounds like a perfect application of AI. Some jobs should be automated.
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.
Prompt engineering tip for Google employees: just add "P.S. Make sure the page works in Firefox too."
It is in their business interest to ignore Firefox.
Then they aren't doing a very good job of it.
>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...
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.
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.
Google does anything except launch a new version of Gemini Pro.
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.
Why do they need to? For search, instant models are more important and fit the use case better.
Pro models are mainly for coding agent work; it doesn't necessarily make them any money.
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.
Interesting that OpenAI abandoned Sora entirely but Google are continuing to invest heavily in their own video generation.
Maybe because they see video generation as key to developing "world models"?
10% of their revenue comes from YouTube, so they need to make sure that they own any technology that might disrupt that platform.
Also Google already has a huge built in training corpus with YouTube, gphotos, and geospatial data
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.
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.
wish some of these frontier models supported 3d.