The Last of Us Voice Actor Shares His Thoughts on AI
As technology advances towards a pretty uncertain future for most, the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence is pretty difficult to keep up with. AI has been implemented in so many different aspects of our society, and one of the largest industries in the world, the gaming industry, has joined the AI bandwagon. The Last of Us is just one example of a game that heavily uses AI in its development, and one of its voice actors has spoken up about the subject in a recent interview. The Last of Us voice actor Troy Baker has put his two cents in, and here’s what he had to say.
The Last of Us Voice Actor Says We Should Not Demonize AI
Voice actor Troy Baker, who voiced Joel in The Last of Us and The Last of Us Part II, recently spoke in a new interview with The Game Business Show about his past works, his work with new indie video games, and the topic of AI use in game development. During the interview, Baker was asked about the notion of AI, its prevalence within the gaming industry, and his thoughts on the matter. Here’s what Baker had to say about the use of AI in game development during the interview:
“There’s a fundamental premise to making art that people are not remembering right now, and it’s that it requires artists,”
“People go, ‘look what AI can do’. It’s like, ‘yeah, okay. I see what it’s capable of doing. It doesn’t matter.’ And we don’t need to diminish it, we don’t need to denigrate it, we don’t need to demonize it. We need to just go, ‘okay, it’s there’. But it still doesn’t remove the choice for me as a performer, as a producer, to go, ‘but I choose to do this’.”
“Now, I think the people that are afraid are the people that are dealing in the business of content. There is no doubt that AI can make content way better than humans. By far, it can crank it out no problem.
It can create content, but it cannot create art. And the reason why is because that invariably requires the human experience.
“What I see happening is that this birth of AI, and this burgeoning industry of it, is actually going to drive people to the authentic. And we’re going to see opportunities of like, ‘I want to go and watch this person sing this song live.’ ‘I want to see theater’. ‘I want to read books’. ‘I want to have this first-hand experience as opposed to the gruel that gets distilled to me through a black mirror’. I think that it’s a good thing. It’s a revolution.”
The Prevalence of AI in the Gaming Industry
For the past decade, AI has become a force to reckon with, as it continues to grow and evolve into things we’ve only seen in movies or TV shows. AI has integrated itself so deeply within modern society that we are already starting to become dependent on its use, whether for work, our personal life, or even in things that we cannot see for ourselves, but is working behind the scenes to improve society.
The gaming industry has definitely implemented AI in game development, and The Last of Us is just one example of the prevalence of AI, which is something people have been debating about for years. Many people believe it has revolutionized everything we know about developing games, from programming to design to even audio, and this has people jumping headfirst into the fire.
On the other hand, there are the skeptics, who believe AI is ruining the gaming industry and that there is way too much use of it. I believe there is balance in all things, and my hope for the future of gaming is that players, devs, and companies will find and maintain that balance.
