In case you haven’t heard, Fortnite — the megahit video game from Epic Games that’s stuffed with characters from every media franchise imaginable, not to mention real celebrities — has become a cause célèbre after it introduced Darth Vader as an in-game boss.
This was no ordinary homage to the “Star Wars” villain. It uses “conversational AI” to recreate the iconic voice of the late actor James Earl Jones, allowing gamers to chat with the Sith Lord and ask him pretty much any question they want.
Though it’s resulted in plenty of light-hearted fun, gamers, being gamers, immediately set to work tricking the AI into swearing and saying slurs.
But that’s only the beginning of the controversy, if you can believe it.
On Monday, the Screen Actor’s Guild blasted Epic Games for its AI Vader stunt and filed an unfair labor complaint against the developer with the National Labor Relations Board, arguing that Epic’s use of AI violated their agreement by replacing human performers without notice.
“Fortnite’s signatory company, Llama Productions, chose to replace the work of human performers with AI technology,” SAG-AFTRA said in a statement. “Unfortunately, they did so without providing any notice of their intent to do this and without bargaining with us over appropriate terms.”
SAG-AFTRA is still on strike against the video game industry, though actors are still allowed work on Fortnite and some other exempted projects, notes the Hollywood Reporter. Voice actors, in general, have struggled to win the same protections against AI as other performers in other fields. It’s easier and far cheaper to fake someone’s voice and pass it off as real than it is to mimic a visual performance.
For this stunt, Epic used Google’s Gemini 2.0 model to generate the wording of Vader’s responses, and ElevenLabs’ Flash v2.5 model for the audio.
Whatever your thoughts on the ethics of resurrecting a dead actor’s voice with AI, no theft is involved with Epic’s AI Vader — just, if SAG is to be believed, dubious labor practices. It was created in collaboration with Jones’ estate, according to an Epic press release featuring a statement from the family. Jones, shortly before he passed away, signed a contract with Disney allowing the AI startup Respeecher to clone his voice.
That’s all fine with SAG-AFTRA. It doesn’t necessarily have a problem with actors — or their estates — licensing AI replicas of themselves.
“However, we must protect our right to bargain terms and conditions around uses of voice that replace the work of our members,” the union wrote, “including those who previously did the work of matching Darth Vader’s iconic rhythm and tone in video games.”
We’ll have to see what the labor board and Epic make of SAG-AFTRA’s claims. In the meantime, it’s pretty jarring to see an AI version of Jones’ legendary Vader performance out in the wild and answering silly questions in a video game.
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