One of the biggest fears I hear expressed about AI is what it will do to creative professionals.

That was a core topic for SAG-AFTRA, an American labor union of actors and voice artists, when union members went on strike last year, bringing much of the filming in Hollywood to a halt for months. What you might have missed was another deal that was struck in January, a couple months later — SAG-AFTRA signed a licensing deal with Replica Studios permitting voice performers to work with Replica and create digital replications of their voices.

Fast forward to now, and today Replica is officially launching its Voice AI product suite using that new licensing model meant to fairly compensate voice actors for their work.

What does it mean? Replica’s demo is pretty cool. Type a simple prompt, like “A giant talking tree in a magical forest” and you’ll get audio that sounds like Ludo from Labyrinth. And if you don’t get that reference, just imagine the top-notch voice acting you’d hear in a movie or RPG game. That new feature called Voice Lab lets makers custom design voices with accents and speaking styles.

Instead of creating those voices with a ton of public content from YouTube, for example, Republic creates them with content created by its network of voice actors. According to co-founder Shreyas Nivas, “actor partners choose whether or not they wish to continue hosting their voice on Replica when their contract comes up for renewal - [Replica does] not 'buy out' voices with a one time payment as that would be terribly unfair to the actor…”

But not everyone is happy (yet?) One customer chimed in on Product Hunt claiming that they lost their audio when a voice actor left the platform, affecting his project half way through. Nivas responded to the user here.

An article from the Verge back in January also notes that some actors were still unhappy to see SAG-AFTRA making deals with AI companies, but spokespeople for the union felt, in summary, that union members just needed more info to understand the deal.

The partnership makes me, for one, optimistic about what I can tell people when they ask how we can prevent AI from destroying artist careers. According to the Republic team, Republic is “the first AI company to partner with SAG-AFTRA, and pioneer AI licensing models that create new revenue streams for actors and talent.”

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