In Real Life: Outperforming AI

Video games rely on skilled human actors to bring their virtual worlds to life. But the rise of generative AI has many actors worried about their future in digital performance.
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In the last decades, video games have gone from jagged polygons and pixels to photo-realistic scenes and characters. But these cinematic moments aren't pulled from thin air. Big budget video games rely more and more on human actors to bring their virtual worlds to life with their voices and bodies.

Acting for video games requires performers with specific, dedicated skills, and those skills have only gotten more important as the industry has grown. But those actors now have to contend with the same fears that helped fuel mass labor strikes all across Hollywood: the rise of generative AI.

Video game actors have always relied on technology to translate their performances into the virtual world. Now many are worried the technology that created this platform for actors could replace them completely.