Damien Valentine 00:35
Hello and welcome to another episode of A now for something completely machinima. I'm joined by Tracy Harwood and Phil Rice.

00:52
Hey there.

Damien Valentine 00:54
Ricky is still enjoying his summer vacation at the horror convention. I was trying to think of something funny. Yeah, so I hope he's having a great time. But here we are. We're going to be discussing the news of things related to machinima and related technologies. So Tracy, what have you got for us this week? Oh,

Tracy Harwood 01:24
Another bag load of stuff. Game News, let me start with some of that. So for the last few months, I've been looking forward to seeing something stunning that celebrates World of Warcraft's 20th birthday, but I've honestly found nothing at all that I want to share with you. And then I saw that someone had created a world of warcraft, 2.0 in Unreal Engine. So I thought, here we go. This is the thing that I can share. And I have to say, it looked really stunning. There are a few kind of comments videos on it as well. But the next thing I know, this thing has been a copyright strike from Blizzard. So yeah, there's still nothing really to share with you that celebrates wows creative community contribution to the world of machinima. So please, somebody, if you are listening, do share some interesting machinima with us, because after four months of looking, I'm getting desperate with it. Nothing

Damien Valentine 02:39
Blizzard would want to do something, because 20 years is a big milestone. It is. They'd want to celebrate that and let the fans celebrate that.

Tracy Harwood 02:47
Yeah, I am very disappointed. I have to say, all round I'm very disappointed. There's loads of kind of speculative, you know, this is what the next iteration of it could be, and all that sort of stuff. But it's done with AI, and it's not, it's nothing to do with machinima in the way that we've always understood it. I mean, if Olibith was still around, it would be just up his street to present something in in the the way that he used to create those beautiful videos. But sadly, he isn't. Anyway. Please, somebody share something that's of relevance and interest for the WoW machinima community in particular. I'm desperate. Anyway. In other news, I was kind of intrigued to see that some game developers are now releasing music albums from the games. It's kind of long been, I think, fairly interesting fact that none have done that really before. I know you're going to contradict me on that, Phil, but I actually thought, you know, it's not uncommon to hear folks attempting to play some of the more iconic pieces, but, but you know as orchestral pieces and what have you anyway. The particular one that I picked up on this month was from classic Runescape with a Battleaxes and Ballads album that's been released by Jagex, Laced Records and Regen Audio. Now Laced have also released a soundtrack album from Metal Gear Solid, also from Resident Evil and from Tekken eight and square. Enix apparently has released 175 track version of the Final Fantasy seven rebirth soundtrack earlier this year as both a digital download and the limited edition CD box set. Yeah, quite, quite interesting. I think this is particularly interesting, though, with this kind of activity, I wonder what the thinking is for how these soundscapes can be used in machinima. Now, because the. Just scrape bits of audio, which is what you tend to see being used in, in in filmmaking. Possibly is, you know, this is, this is possibly not going to be something that you're going to be able to do when, when they've taken the trouble to actually release it as an album. And as we all know, kind of, you know, music IP protection has always been considered in a little different way to the way gameplay assets have tended to be viewed by developers. So I suspect what you've got going on here is maybe a bit of a Sideswipe at the community of machinima creators in an attempt to kind of stop them in their tracks, perhaps, or maybe just another way that the developers are thinking of how they might make money from content creators. Because maybe what you've got is kind of like, you know, market saturation in terms of the sale of the game itself. Anyway, I welcome thoughts on where folks think this one might be going as well. Phil, did you want to come in on that as well? Because I think you've got some other observations on doom. Did you say, Well,

Phil Rice 06:16
when you mentioned the the old school Runescape soundtrack. It reminded me of a it was a user led project. It wasn't something endorsed by id Software, but basically a user led project to take the the music of the original Doom games from id Software and really those with with modern instrumentation, the original Doom Music was mostly delivered in the game as as just general MIDI files that would, you know, just just play, because that was efficient. It was very small file size and and and also the composer of that music, Bobby Prince. It basically was very cooperative with letting people do things with his soundtrack stuff. There's actually, I've got a personal example of that. Actually, there's a song on the album that I put out recently that is built on a chord progression from one of his doom soundtrack selections. And I contacted him way back, like in the year 2000 I want to say, and said, I love this piece that you composed for Doom. I'd like to build a song on it. I've got, I'm hearing a melody. Got a lyric idea. I want to build a song. Would you be interested in, you know, some kind of a either derivative work or even, you know, going in as CO writers on it. And his response to the email with the same day, very nice man. He said, That's not even a song, what I made. It's just a chord progression. You're welcome to do whatever you like with it. You don't need to credit me. You don't need to do anything. It was amazing. And apparently that's that was his, his attitude about that stuff. He was a very, very unselfish human being. He sadly passed away in 2007 but he was old. He was quite old, so, but anyway, it made me think of that project where, in the early 2000s a bunch of users came together with kind of modern electronic and and, you know, a lot of the a lot of the MIDI music from music was technically heavy metal chord progressions, but played through MIDI, it sounded, you know, like video game music. It didn't sound like metal. And so, yeah, they did that project. I think that the you hit on something Tracy with Why would, why would the developers themselves do this? First of all, indie developers have been releasing their soundtracks through Steam as like bonus content for years. In fact, it's a very common thing to happen for indie games that they'll just they'll release the soundtrack through Steam and you can play through there. But maybe the reason they do it, and definitely the reason the big companies would do it, is that's the easiest way to get your music into YouTube's content ID system, which is the thing that can identify it in other videos. That's just the easiest way to get that done. To manually register music is is cumbersome, but if you just release it as an album, your music distributor will take care of that for you automatically. So that's that's the that would be the reason why they're doing it. Now, the positive to that is that music that's in the YouTube content ID system usually means that if you use it in your video and it's detected, then there will be. If, if your video is monetized, then there will be a shared monetization applied to that video. So it's not a copyright strike. It doesn't get you banned from YouTube. Instead, you, if you're, if you have monetization, if you're a partner channel, then you won't be able to be the only one making money off of the ad revenue on that video. Usually it's a split, a shared situation, and I think it's proportional to the amount of the song that's used. And so that's, yeah, in terms of revenue stream for the developers, that's that's a logical reason for them to do it. I have no reason. I have no way to know that. That's why. But that is how it works. Now, if there is still some music that if you use it, it will be a legit copyright strike. And that's just that's that's the the risk of using someone else's music. But usually you can tell that the best way to approach it is if you're going to use going to use music you know is copyrighted, then upload your video as unlisted. Don't publish it or make it public or anything at first. Upload it as unlisted. And even if the there's a copyright detection process that happens right after the upload, and if there's an option where, where you can, where you can, can choose to be notified once they've finished the copyright check, if it doesn't complete immediately, and then they'll notify you of the copyright status and what the consequences will be and such like that, before you actually publish it. And that's a way to test the waters on that without actually getting a damaging copyright strike. So yeah, it's weird, because it has become easier for owners of copyrighted music to regulate and make revenue off of the use of their Music in cooperation with YouTube. And I guess that's a I guess that's a positive thing, and it means that actual copyright strikes like the damaging kind, are far less frequent now it's more of a you've used this music so you know you're going to share any revenue you make with the music owner. Or YouTube actually just released a tool that I plan on testing and making a video showing the results that will use AI to remove just the offending music from your video while preserving other audio. How? How well it works? I'm not sure yet. I'm going to find out, and I'll, I'll share the results here, but, yeah, it's good, because

Damien Valentine 12:53
the current system is it'll just remove all of the audio from that section, which means, yes, if you've got some dialog, that goes too, yeah? So it makes your video. It's an option if you've just done a music video, but you can't replace it easily, so you just go back to your editor and put in some different music and upload it again. Yeah, which is obviously the the easiest solution than trying to mess around with the YouTube things. We'll just have a Sunday year video go silent.

Phil Rice 13:19
Yeah. I just got notification this week that they've rolled out that feature, and they're inviting people to test it out. So I'm going to actually test it with some known copyright music, just in an unlisted scenario, and just see what it can do. And then I'll, I'll report back on that. But yeah, that's that's most likely. The reason Tracy that they're releasing them as albums is because the distributors have all these channels already set up to inject that music into the copyright ID, the content ID listings at YouTube, and it's a way to make revenue and with and honestly, it's a way to it makes it easier for music publishers to establish A friendly relationship with people who would use their music. Now, someone who is who really wants to make every cent of revenue off their videos might still find that oppressive, but you are using someone else's stuff. So if you want to make all your revenue, use original music. Yes. Solution, use, don't even use free music like there's, there's stuff on the Free Music Archive. For example, Fma, don't even use that, because someone can put something on the Free Music Archive and then two years later change their mind and put it into content ID that happens to that site that I used to use for years and was part of called film music IO, if you guys remember that. Yeah, and the owner of that, Sasha, ended up basically shutting that site down, and the only music artist on there now is him, because one of his biggest, one of the biggest composers that was participating in that site decided. To after putting all their music catalog out there through his site, as Creative Commons, decided to change the licensing and upload it to Content ID on YouTube. And so his site was getting all these inquiries about copyright strikes. Is the term people use, but it's the shared revenue thing, and it just infuriated him, and he just says, I don't have time to do this. I'm not running a, you know, I'm not a copyright lawyer. I don't have time to do this. I just want to make music. But he had to shut the whole thing down to get out of that. So the point of that is that, you know, someone who releases music, they can change their license, and YouTube isn't gonna YouTube doesn't have the facility to be able to negotiate through that. If you go well, at the time that I used the music, it was creative comp, there's no way to you can't really convey that kind of subtlety very easily through the appeal system. So the easiest solution is just, here's original music, AI music I'd be cautious about because

Damien Valentine 16:07
it was very trained on other side, exactly,

Phil Rice 16:10
right. Yeah, yeah, and, and, frankly, all of those have very confiscatory terms and terms and conditions. If you if you read the fine print on those music you create, it's not yours, it's not yours. It's yours to use in the way that they see fit right now. But long term, no, it's all theirs. So be real careful about AI music. So yeah, the free and clear way is work with an original composer, and, you know, build, build a library of music with that, and then you can use that but or use it through a legitimate licensing service like Epidemic Sound or art list IO, or one of those reputable places that you're paying for it. But there's, there's no, there's no free route for that stuff, unless you just befriend a composer. There are composers out there who will do that and not charge a thing. They just love making music. So you just got to find somebody

Damien Valentine 17:13
like that. There's a composer called, I think his name's Scott Buckley.

Phil Rice 17:17
Yeah. Is he still active? Yeah.

Damien Valentine 17:20
He composes music, very good music, and it's all creative commons for you to use. He insists on. He has put special thing in to credit him, and he's got a special way to format it, right, but that's it, and he's got a donation button. So if you do use his music you can donate to him, which, of course, you should do, because he's putting this out for free. And you know, I've used his music a couple of times in some videos, and you know, it's really good music. It's the kind of music you'd expect to pay good money to be able to use. But he did absolutely

Phil Rice 17:56
for free. Sasha, and is another one. The guy who runs the website is still filmmusic.io, all of his music, hundreds of compositions of various genres, and really good quality. All Creative Commons free to use on YouTube. You can buy an extended license to be able to use it even further, but the default license is Credit in the way that he asks and you can use it. It's amazing. And he's really, really, really good, very this young German composer. He's fantastic, like every style you can think of he's done. So yeah, there's good, there's resources like that. You just gotta look

Tracy Harwood 18:40
for him. So we're thinking here, then with this particular move, we're going to see a lot more games devs putting on the music and the soundscapes there.

Phil Rice 18:53
Wouldn't surprise

Damien Valentine 18:55
me,

Tracy Harwood 18:56
I guess the key one Hang on, just thinking, extrapolating from that kind of conversation, and Phil's comments there, maybe the key ones that they're actually aiming at, then wouldn't necessarily be the Machinima creators, but the let's players who are ones that have many more millions of followers, primarily sure they're just, you know, playing The game, and the content is just going there.

Phil Rice 19:22
I mean, honestly, it makes logical sense too, because it's so cheap to put an album out and distribute, I think with like CD Baby is one, distrokid is another, under $20 and you can publish an album and they'll take care of all that stuff. Oh, wow, yeah. 20 bucks for a composite, for a compilation of music that's, you know, many, many songs. It's not expensive to do. That's really good news for people who want to produce their own music. But it also, I mean, everybody's gonna be able to use that. So, yeah, it makes total sense for them to do that. It costs them nothing, virtually. And then the only potential is. Outcome for them would be some revenue. So why wouldn't they? Yeah? So yeah, I think that is and I think yeah, the juicier, the target, the more audience, then that's obviously more revenue. So

Tracy Harwood 20:12
sorry, Damon, you were gonna say, I was

Damien Valentine 20:13
gonna say, about 15 years ago, there was a thing that came video games would usually include the soundtrack as a special feature on the disc, and Mass Effect comes to mind specifically. And so when the DLC for Mass Effect was released, they would actually release an album of the music they composed for it. But this is before the content ID system on YouTube existed. So I think that was just for profit, and because a lot of fans liked the music and they wanted it. And then that seemed to stop, but now it seems to be coming back. And obviously that this conversation, well, yeah, physical

Phil Rice 20:48
media is dead, essentially. So, yeah, why would they do that quake? Quake did that quake was the first game I know of that the actual game, one of the discs that came with it, was intended to be put in the drive while you played, and it was the soundtrack. And so they could have this CD quality music without it being taken up space on the drive. And as you know, Trent Reznor did the soundtrack for, you know, the Nine Inch Nails guy did the soundtrack for quick one, it was fantastic. They did the same thing with quake two. It was a disc. This time. They hired a composer that's much cheaper than Trent Reznor. I'm sure. I can't remember the I can't remember the guy's name. He was a young guy, but he did a great soundtrack for quick too. It's much beloved. So yeah, that used that was the trend in the late 90s and early 2000s and yeah, then physical media started to go away. So yeah, they found a way to do it. And you know, why not

Damien Valentine 21:43
give music you're going to want to listen to it when you're not playing so,

Tracy Harwood 21:47
right? Well, yes, and evidently, many will, I suppose, anyway. So that actually was a really interesting discussion, and went to the direction I wasn't really anticipating. So it's really good to get your input on that that possibly related. Actually, I've got another kind of thing that I've picked up on, which I also shared with you in the in the thing that we use to sort of share content before we kind of come on the podcast. This one is about the debate that's going on around game destruction and consumer rights. Now it's it's being spearheaded. This is a campaign being spearheaded by accursed farms. And basically what's being argued here is that what happens when games are taken down after copies have been sold to players with very little warning. What happens to the game copy that you have? Can you still legally play it and so forth? And apparently, there's arguments on both sides. No, you can't. No, you shouldn't. No, it's no longer supported to well, you bought it, didn't you? Is it a good or is it a service kind of argument? And I There isn't really a good answer to this. It would seem in in the legal systems around the world, they haven't really thought this one through very well. It kind of actually relates to the point that gangs have lives long after they've been closed down there. You know, if it's if it's software, once a game has closed down, then it's orphan software. And there are campaign groups that exist which will argue that actually, as orphan software, shouldn't that just be given to the community? That's, that's a thing, that's a, you know, that's a group of folks that are making that argument. Now, curse Farms is sort of arguing for greater clarity on the rights of game players under the legal systems around the world. I don't think this is ever going to be that clear cut, though, because, you know, from some of the responses he seems to be getting, they're basically kind of pushing back to him and saying, oh, yeah, you need to sort that out in the country where the publisher is, is, is located. So they're kind of almost absolving responsibility at a kind of, you know, national level, to sort of more local levels, you know, I was kind of thinking, well, actually this is kind of an interesting legal side of things, which Could also be extrapolated to the way in which content using those very same games is also, you know, accessible long before, long after the game is kind of closed down. And we've always sort of, you know, looked at things in the moment. In terms of, you know, you know, fair use, custom and practice and all of that kind of stuff, where, where the content as the creator might put out is kind of protected under that kind of kind of system. But if, if this legal process goes the way these guys want it to, I think it will have ramifications for machinima. Um, not, not least because this content can be used and reused and reused again, multiple different times in multiple different ways, long after a game has been, you know, been taken out of the markets altogether. So they're arguing for for some sort of update to T's and C's, which basically say how long a game is available for if they did that, that would immediately put a life on how long a transformative piece could also be available. I think, although it's, you know, I think it's not very clear. So I think there are ramifications from what's being discussed here, and no kind of legal brain on this sort of thing. But I definitely think it's worth thinking about the life cycle of games, not just as something that is played, but as something that is used in alternative ways. And kind of where I'm going with that as well is because I'm another one of the projects that I've been involved in we're talking about heritage content, and the heritage content from games and the the archiving of old games, old machines, such that future generations have the opportunity to experience those games in typically, museum and arts organization, kind of context, which is another set of use of the games themselves, none of which seems to be figuring in any of the kind of discussions that this community and spearheaded by a curse farm, seem to be looking at. So I think there needs to be a sort of a slightly wider take on what's being discussed here, to include the breadth of the way these things are being thought about. I just throw that out. Throw it out there, really, because I'm sure other folks have got an opinion on it. I'll share the video that you can have a look at, because this clearly has been going on a little while. It's obviously popped out of something that they've experienced themselves. Like I said, I don't think there's any immediate answers on it, but I think it's just one of those things that we probably need to be watching in terms of the potential, maybe unintended consequences on the likes of the Machinima creator community.

Phil Rice 28:00
Seems crazy on the surface to me, it does like the notion that to me, I don't see any on the surface, I don't see any difference between the stance that a game can no longer be played once it's been closed to me, that's, is that any different than if a book goes out of print, you can no longer read it? Yeah,

Tracy Harwood 28:30
that's right, what?

Phil Rice 28:32
It doesn't make any sense. I don't, I don't know. I can't think of

Tracy Harwood 28:35
any Well, he's, he's kind of legal parallel. You know, there isn't a legal parallel to it, but he's kind of, you know, analogized it to an author coming into your home and saying, right, I have that's my book I can burn, that you're not allowed to keep it on your show, right?

Phil Rice 28:52
Yeah, same, same concept there, yeah. And just that seems nuts. Now, the thing is, too is, I can't help but wonder if there's more under the surface of this possibly than it might appear. Because I think there's a possibility that the people who are raising this issue and pushing back against it. What they would really like is for there to be something that makes an abandoned game fall into the freeware domain, fall into the public domain, and that is something that developers would push back against, if for no other reason than history has shown us that games once thought dead can sometimes get re released through there's these platforms, like galaxy of games, I think it's called or Gog, all of a sudden, yeah, that you can play the original Roller Coaster Tycoon, which I don't think we'll even run on mod. On computers. It needs, like Windows 98 or something, but, but they've got an emulator where you can then purchase that game and run it again. Yeah, and if you had the disc, you wouldn't be able to do that. You know, they only release games. They'll have an old computer. They

Damien Valentine 30:14
only release games if there's a way to play them on modern computers. They'll spend if they get a license for it, they will spend ages finding a way to make that work, and if they can't, they won't release

Phil Rice 30:23
it. Yeah, yeah. So, because there's that possibility, you know, even games, I mean, as as unlikely as it seems, there's so many games from like the 1980s that were done on Commodore 64 for example, or something that, you know, there's just not really any way for most people to play those. I mean, I purchased hundreds of dollars of games in that decade that I can't play now, but I but that's not because they prohibit me from doing so, it's that they're just the the hardware and software is obsolete, like that operating system without an emulator, or you can't even and even if I had the emulator, you have to be able to get it off the I don't even have the physical media anymore. There's all kinds of things in the way of it. Even

Damien Valentine 31:09
if you had the actual hardware, you have to find a screen to connect it to. And of course, the connections are different now. So

Phil Rice 31:16
yeah, you want one of their screens, yeah, and there's people who have that, but it's rare. It's really, really rare. But the notion that, you know, there's some who would say, Well, okay, that's the situation. So that whole library of games should just be free to the public, because you can go download an emulator for any old system. I'm talking from the box arcade units all the way up. Every home game system ever made, every old PC ever made, there's an emulator, and you can run it, and then you can go download the game for free. Yeah? Well, I mean, that's that's a paradise for somebody who just wants to be able to just confiscate these old games. But you figure a company like, oh, I don't know, Infocom that that company's been out of business for decades, but they made this whole string of games that essentially are interactive novels. Why would they give up the rights to those forever? Because, I mean, those games were re released on Steam not too long ago through an emulator, but it was legal, and you had to purchase it again, but it was cheap, and so yeah, there's, there's, I can see why developers don't like the idea of that these properties become abandoned, that these properties become freeware just because they're no longer in active development. But I don't think it's just, oh, I bought it in the past, so I should still be able to play it. I think that's a that's a non issue. I don't think there's any chance that there would be a law that would get passed that prohibits someone from playing the old thing. It's this is really about what's the solution to that? And the solution, I would bet, behind the scenes being pushed for is this stuff should just become free issues.

Tracy Harwood 33:06
I have absolutely no doubt that's, that's the case. Yeah, and

Phil Rice 33:10
that that raises different issues, you know? I

Tracy Harwood 33:12
think so. Yeah, I

Phil Rice 33:13
think it's one to watch for sure.

Tracy Harwood 33:14
It's, it is. It's very interesting, um, debate, which I just feel is a kind of very one dimensional at the moment, but I think it has to be richer than what it is because of all the unintended consequences around, yeah, what's being proposed, I think,

Phil Rice 33:34
right. Well, then you factor in the the reason you brought it up, which is okay, so if the if the rights related to that game have some dramatic legal shift, then what does that do to the rights of content created with that game? That's a great point. It's great point,

Damien Valentine 33:52
yeah. I was thinking, yeah, yeah. I was thinking, I don't get it either, because there's nothing to actually stop me from. I've got over here a shelf with various PC games on it, and some of them are available on Steam and GOG and so on. Some are not available, and part of it is because they're licensed games, and the legal process of releasing those again, it's such a nightmare. It's just not worth it. But I could take the disc off, put in my computer and play it again, and you know, those companies can't do anything about it. The other thing I can think of is online games where the servers shut down. That's a different category. Well, that's

Phil Rice 34:27
different, yeah, yeah, and that's different. That game was technically a service all along, yeah, a game that's reliant on the online hardware that I have, I don't see any issue with. But you're right. Damian, first of all, apart from even just the absurdity of the rights thing, of trying to tell Damien you can't do what you just described. How would they enforce something like that anyway?

Damien Valentine 34:49
Yeah, or even know that I'm doing it right. It's

Phil Rice 34:53
totally, yeah, it's, it's, it's a little absurd in the same way. I mean, the book analogy works, you know, I've got. Some book that was published in the 1960s and it's been out of print for 40 years, and what? So now I can't read it, and if I do, how are you even going to know I do? Yes, unless I read it out loud into my Amazon Alexa, so that the NSA knows that I'm reading it, then you know

Tracy Harwood 35:18
so. But we're now getting into the realms of the human brain, completely the interface design. Well, the other thing

Damien Valentine 35:26
I'm going to finish off with is there are a lot of games. So again, 20 to 1515, to 20 years ago, where in our single player campaign, then multiplayer, but the multiplayer would use GameSpy, and there would be no direct IP connections, so you have to use that. The online service that's provided. It's free, but you still have to use it. Game spy doesn't exist anymore, right? One of the games that have that built in service, yeah,

Phil Rice 35:50
there were like a wasn't it some kind of peer to peer thing, similar to Napster, except legal. That's what gamesky was built on. I remember that. Yeah. And

Damien Valentine 36:00
then, of course, the multiplayer for those games no longer works, and there's nothing you do about well, there's some other apps you can get to simulate the IPX connection and stuff like that, but that's really finicky, and it doesn't always work that well. Now there was a Star Wars game called Empire at War, this real time strategy game like

36:21
I remember that. Yeah,

Damien Valentine 36:24
that used GameSpy. So when that disappeared, the servers disappeared, so you can't play online anymore. About 10 years after GameSpy disappeared, it was released on Steam, and the original developers had updated the game to use the steam servers. So multiplayer worked again. Wow. And cool. There was another Star Wars game. I think it's one of the battlefront games. They did the same thing with that as well. So people could play it again, because, you know, they'd gone for a long time without being able to and I think having that option open is good as well. Sure.

Tracy Harwood 37:01
Yeah, yeah, really interesting. I'll keep you updated on on that, or if you spot anything, please do share it with us as well. Okay, so on generative AIS, I'm going to just put a few things on on the blogs, few links of things that I found that were reasonably interesting, that you may or may not be interested in. The thing that I wanted to just touch on is 11 labs voice cleaner. Have you? Have you come across this? Guys? This removes unwanted background noises and enables you to isolate voices. Now I thought this might be quite useful for us, if anybody wants to have a little go for that at that. Yeah, that's

Phil Rice 37:45
another one I plan on testing. I have not tested it yet, but, yeah, noise reduction generally is, it's challenging to get good results that are so I'm I've been impressed with their their efforts, generally, 11 laps. They're really, they

Tracy Harwood 38:03
seem to be the top one, don't they really? Oh, yeah, absolutely. And then on the music side, I saw SunOS contest winners were being promoted, and one winner had a really interesting track. I mean, it's really very listenable. It's called, maybe I'll put a link to it, see what you think of it. I think what's quite interesting is, for the for the winners, they put something like a million dollars aside to pay out, or these kind of CO created. You know, prizes for these co created works. This the guy that has made this particular one got a 10,000 payout as the surprise for his work, which I think is, is brilliant. I've just been looking at him on on X Twitter. He's got virtually no followers, but his music's been downloaded nearly a million times sooner, which I think is really interesting. So good, good luck with that. I think that's that's a fascinating thing. And then, Phil, you've got something that you wanted to share with us on the on vimeo's updated AI policy as well. I think.

Phil Rice 39:18
Yeah. So we talked a few episodes back about the changes to YouTube's interface to reflect the changes in their policy about how they're you know at this point, how they're going to identify or how creators are going to kind of self declare on whether or not AI content was used and, you know, we had, we had quite a, quite a discussion about that. Well, Vimeo has updated their policy in terms of the title The article is, how do I label my videos to indicate they contain AI generated content? So, like we. It, like we discussed on the on a video this month about is this the the digital creator pronouns thing? You know? Yeah, but, but essentially, that's it. How do you it's, it's, it's, what's interesting about it is it means that they can't it means something we already knew, which is that they can't detect when AI content is used because they're asking people to self declare, right? So that's interesting in and of itself. I don't know that that will always be the case. I think detection is is in our future for sure. But essentially, in a nutshell, their policy is not all that different from from YouTube's. They're, they're, they're vague or open to interpretation by using certain terms that really don't, aren't, don't have agreed upon definitions in the context of AI. So they say, Well, you know, thing, does something look realistic? Does something look lifelike? Those things can be fudged, you know? I mean, that's opinion. It's subjective, so I it's, it's essentially the same policy, maybe a little bit more clearly articulated, but still relying on self identification of the usage, and also these, these very subjective terms about, you know, the notion behind it is supposed to be, you're not supposed to use, you're not allowed to use AI without declaring it if you're going to deep fake, essentially, I mean, that's the term that does not seem to appear anywhere in either of their content policies, but that's what they're worried about, clearly, is deep fake, the deep fake phenomenon, creating something that didn't happen and deceiving people, right? But they can't see. Neither one of them could seem to figure out how to pin down what that is, and so they leave it very open and broad. And essentially, the policies are just, they're not really actionable unless you just like putting your AI pronouns on your film and saying and declaring like, like the Creator did this month, unless you just like doing that, as under the under the guise of, like, taking a stance or something, but in terms of usefulness or effectiveness or policeableness, yeah, it's There's nothing. There's nothing enforceable here, really

Tracy Harwood 42:41
no, but maybe what they're doing is getting us to tag a training set

Phil Rice 42:47
right? That is possible. Yeah, that is possible. Which, and it's also alarming, because

Tracy Harwood 42:58
crowdsource, you're crowdsourced

Phil Rice 42:59
Exactly. Do you mean to tell me that there's not going to be any dishonesty in the self labeling thing? So, yeah, it's, it's, it's a mess. It's a hot mess. Nobody really knows what we've said this before on episodes here. Nobody really knows what to do about this thing. You know, and it's happening. It's, it's evolving into something so fast. And you know, policy is, there's just no way for policy to keep up with this at this point. So they're doing the best they can. I think these policies tend to be, you know, they're more of a cover their ass objective than anything else, that they know that if this does go bad legally, that they could potentially be on the hook, because they're going to be the biggest targets to sue, so they have to try and cover their butts. But nobody really knows how to do that. Yet, it's, it's, it's, it's a bit of a mess, but, you know, anyway, so yeah, that's, that's what happened with Vimeo recently.

Tracy Harwood 44:08
So have a really interesting real time challenge that we're facing with it. I think almost in real time evolution is fascinating. Absolutely. Okay, so I've got a couple of other things, if you can bear with me. Sure. One is I saw that Louis Andrade had put a how to video up for that stunning work that we shared with you in episode 130 called Firefly, which was that music video he directed for esoterica made in Unreal Engine. It's a really interesting how to video. It's not your standard. Well, I did this and then I did that. It's done in such a beautifully poetic way. It's definitely worth watching it because, my God, I've seen so many How To videos now. I just loved what he'd done with this. One. So I'll put a link to that. I found a few Unreal Engine things I'd like to share as well. One being to a set of dynamic lenses that you can kind of download from the marketplace and play with. Now, these don't require blueprints. They their own. As I understand it, only lens objects that can be applied to any cine camera, and they work interactively within the unreal game engine, all of which sounded really fascinating. I'm guessing they're they. They maybe put like filters on somehow. I don't know. I'm not really too sure quite how virtual lens. I'm

Phil Rice 45:40
not quite sure how those work, either. Yeah.

Tracy Harwood 45:42
Anyway, the guy that's created these is professional special effects filmmaker. His name's Andy Davis, and I'll put a link up on those as well. And then there is a kind of a more traditional lip sync, lip tutorial about live portrait in comfy UI for those that are looking to figure out how to do lip syncing images and videos with ease. So there's another one that I'll share with you. And then I want to just sort of close out from my comments this month on something which I found particularly interesting in the context of how content distribution channels, channels may become more expanded. And these are comments made by a guy called Harmony Corin, who's a filmmaker. He stated that the film marketplace, especially in the US, is very narrow, which we kind of all know. If you only consider box office, the box office as a metric for for success from an exhibition standpoint, you're cutting off other ways to think outside the box. If you don't continually reinforce this idea that movies and media can travel and exist across different frameworks, then people default to only the one mode right now, younger audiences don't want their options limited. Now, why that is so important. I mean, for many years, we have been saying and highlighting what a broken distribution system there is for content creation, such as machinima, with the only real viable option being YouTube, because, let's face it, Vimeo is there, but it's not really viable if you want an audience. It's just for hosting your content in many ways. And that would be true also of all the glam organizations, the galleries, the you know, the arts organizations, museums and whatnot, through which and film festivals, through which a lot of other types of content is actually distributed as well, but it never makes it in anything other than this kind of one typical Hollywood way. Um, so Well, my my view here is that if more directors and filmmakers across the spectrum are prepared to come out and say that there needs to be more emphasis on distribution channels, then one would assume eventually we will get a marketplace, you know, actually responding to that request. And like I said, I keep trying to highlight this, I think it's imperative that somebody starts to take on board that we need more than YouTube for supporting the distribution of the kinds of content that we're looking at here. We're just, we're in a monopolistic situation with YouTube, and it's, it's wholly unsatisfactory, in my opinion. So yeah, just wanted to sort of close out on that really. I would like to see many more ask these kinds of questions, particularly those in the Hollywood set. I think it's long overdue, in my opinion. So there you go. That's my thoughts for the month. I hope you've enjoyed some of the points. Damian, I think you've got a few things you wanted to share as well.

Damien Valentine 49:07
Yeah, I've got a few fun ones and and then a serious one. I'll do the fun ones first, because I imagine the serious one will generate some discussion. So first off, there's a game called Deep rock galactic and it's it's a one to four player game where you play as a space dwarf, and you take on various missions, working as a team on randomly generated maps, and you have to mine minerals and survive random attacks by alien bugs. And it's a great co fun game to play, and they've released a rock and roll well, it's a heavy metal song. It's called rock and stone, which the phrase comes up a lot in the game. And it's Italian band who have done it. They're dressed up as dwarves, uh. They don't dress up as dwarves from the game, they're wearing the more the medieval fantasy, kind of like you'd expect in Tolkien, but they're singing about the game, basically. And I thought this went nicely with your discussion a little bit earlier in this episode about music and from games. It's a great song, and it's fun to watch, even if you've never played the game, it's just, it's just kind of fun. So I wanted to bring that up because, you know, you don't see that kind of thing happen very often. They don't actually use footage from the game in the music video. But that doesn't matter. It's still a case of a game has inspired this song, and it's been licensed officially by the company. So I thought that was quite fun. Um, the next one is a big update for No Man's Sky. This is game we've covered many times. We've seen many videos created with it. And this update overhauls the graphics engine of the game and reworks how worlds are generated so they're now they're much more detailed. Water looks more realistic. There's more client life, and aliens look better. There's just a whole load of updates to make the game more modern. Because, okay, it's not that old again, but they want to keep it up to date, and they're working on another game, which the name of it escape me right now, but they want to move some of that technology into No Man's Sky as well. So No Man's Sky players could benefit from that, which that's a very rare thing, because usually whether they're developing for the next game gets doesn't make it back to the previous one they worked on. I've not had a chance to try it out yet. When I added to the list, they had just released the trailer to say it's coming, but it was actually released a few days ago. So when you listen to this, you can give it a try if you want. And if you're going to use this game for machinima, you're going to find that your videos look a lot better than if you're working on this just a few weeks ago. So I thought that was quite good. And the next one, it's a similar thing for Microsoft Flight Simulator. I don't know. We don't really get that much Masjid we made with that, but they released the content pack, and it's not it's an update through the way the many cities in the UK are rendered. Now my understanding is they actually flew helicopters and planes over these cities to capture all the buildings and roads and landmarks and everything and as much detail as possible. So I did fly over. I can't remember how many cities are updated this, but the three cities I know very well, so I flew over them to see just how accurate they were. So Bristol, which is near me, I went down really low, and I could see Primark, and it actually has it written on the side of the building. Oh, that's how accurate it is now. So there's this big statue thing on the outside. It nothing to do with the shop. It's just there that didn't get captured so well. It looks kind of weird. But the actual buildings, they look great. If you live in one of these cities, I imagine you could find your house and it would look like your house. So I don't know if that's useful for any machine that creators out there, but you know, if that's the kind of detail you want in something you're working on. Give us a try. And this is update 17, and many other world updates for different parts of the world that have done this very similar thing to it. So you know, if the K maybe not of interest to you and your project, but maybe one of these other areas is give it a try. I know that Brazil is the next one that's coming up, but they're still in the process of analyzing all this data they've captured, so I don't know. Imagine that's quite a time consuming thing. So I don't know how long it's going to take, but I believe that is the next one.

Tracy Harwood 53:53
I'd be very surprised if the brand owners, like you said you saw Primark there. I'd be very surprised if they weren't straight onto that, asking for some kind of, either take down or repent for being represented in that way. We've seen that happen before with something else that kind of, I can't I think it was something somebody recreated in Minecraft, which was a kind of a representation, but there was a major claim against them from a brand owner who said, You can't put that in there. It even looks like our building. Take it out, or we'll sue. Yeah, I don't

Damien Valentine 54:38
know how Microsoft are going to get around with us, because I flew over. I mean, I don't think you're really meant to fly this low and see these details, but I did it because I was really curious, and I recognized many shops in exactly the place they are, yeah, and they're very easily identifiable by the names outside. But. You have to get really you're almost touching the rooftops to be able to see it, and you're probably going to crash. I mean, I did crash when I was trying to find Primark, but that's the kind of detail that they captured, and I was quite impressed by it. Be right? There are going to be companies out there who are not happy that, and somewhere like Primark, which is all over the country, they're going to have to go through each of those cities and find every single branch of Primark, or some of these other shops which are much more like Tescos, or any of those supermarkets where you can go into a city, and there's probably about 50 of them, even just the little ones.

Tracy Harwood 55:38
Yeah, yeah. I don't know. There's gonna be a lot to get there's a difference between what this is and what Google Earth does. Yeah,

Damien Valentine 55:44
yeah, because they actually had to fly over the city to capture the data from above. But they must have done it at a street level as well, because otherwise you wouldn't get Primark written on the side, because it'd be very distorted. So I don't fully understand the technology of how they did it, but it was pretty

Phil Rice 56:03
accurate. Yeah, you know, I can't help but wonder, you know, there is Google Earth, and even, I mean, Google Maps, which kind of references Google Earth at times. And you know, the Street View cars capturing things, Microsoft actually led the way on that, before Google took the lead. But back, back in the day, Microsoft had something where they were, they were assembling satellite photos of the entire Earth. That seems like a nothing thing now, but like somebody had to do that for the first time, right? And it was this impressive thing. They called it the Terra surfer, I believe. And yeah, they were basically, hey, we're photographing the whole world again. That seemed This is 25 years ago, or 30 years ago, even 25 Yeah, 25 years ago. But to me, now, that's like, I've got a app on my phone that I can do that, right? But at the time it was a big deal. How do we capture all those where do we store them all? How do we make them available? So this, this gathering of this visual information about geography and architecture, has been going on for decades by big, big companies, the biggest of companies, they must have, there must be something that enables them legally to do that and avoid, you know, individual corporations from saying we don't want ourselves on there. You know,

Tracy Harwood 57:33
like, which, which might be true if what you've got is a public service, like a map, but now what you're talking about is a game. Yeah?

Phil Rice 57:42
Well, yeah, that's the but that's the thing. Is Microsoft Flight Simulator, real pilots use it to train so, like, what? When is it application, software, and when is it a game? It's all about how you use it, you know? But I just, I can't help but wonder, like, you know, Microsoft's not stupid, so they wouldn't have been going and gather, gathering all this without having crossed all their T's and dotting all the rise legally. So yeah, this will be interesting to see how this happens, because it just doesn't make sense that, you know, if your objective is an accurate, detailed scale model of the earth you've probably thought about, you know, if Randy's plumbing says that they want to opt out, they probably can't, you know, I mean, I guess Google, or North Korea, opts out of Google Earth, don't they, to some degree, like, there's, there's parts of the globe, yeah, that you can't see in the level of detail that we see. But how much of that is that nation getting what they want, and how much of it is just that they're refusing to cooperate? So there's no Google street view cameras, you know, driving around Pyongyang, so we don't have that detail there, but, you know, it goes down my street or your street, so I don't know it's, that's, that's interesting stuff, but it just seems, yeah, I It wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft and Google both have someone has signed something somewhere, right in all these endless terms and conditions we all accept when we launch things that basically those rights have been signed over to these corporations. They can, they can photograph whatever they want and not be in the same kind of trouble that like I would be if I, as an independent filmmaker, went downtown and filmed something in front of the Chrysler Building, or something. Chrysler could come after me, right? But I don't know. It seems like Google and Microsoft, they probably are probably not terribly worried about that, but I wonder why. So,

Damien Valentine 59:55
yeah, if you're, if you're doing, if. Film shoot in you maybe could be slashed on this. Let's say you're filming in New York, and you see all that you got a shot. You're able to get a shot of the cityscape behind you. And obviously, people own every single or people or companies own all the buildings you're going to see. How do you even contact them to say, Well, I'm making a film, and your building is in the background, you can't really see it that well, but it's over there. And what are you going to do complain about it all about, if you're a tourist, and you take a bit, you know, you go up on the Empire State Building, you take a picture of the city, and then you post your pictures on, you know, Facebook or Instagram, whatever. And you know, those buildings are out there, or you're not going to edit them out, because the owners of them might not be happy about that. So I wonder if it comes into something of that as well.

Phil Rice 1:00:49
Yeah, it can get, I think it can easily get very complicated. We've even seen this in Second Life, right? Yeah, yeah. Where, where there is a kind of a rights holder stake that the owner of a build on there can potentially have over even having their their sim, be photographed, yeah, which own my mind like, Yeah, but, but that's true. And I think when someone, when someone gets a film permit, there's probably, that's probably something that's factored in. There's a lot of bureaucracy behind it, you know, so, but yeah, how to, how to individual, what's the legality on individual buildings? Does it? Is it every single building has that right, or is it only ones that have been determined to have almost a trademark look to it. You know, that's, that's a great question, and I don't think I want to

Damien Valentine 1:01:49
know. And, in fact,

Phil Rice 1:01:51
I decided I'm not going to enter filmmaking. Now,

Tracy Harwood 1:01:54
is that a Ricky question? Does

Phil Rice 1:01:56
he might know that may be a Ricky question

Damien Valentine 1:01:58
we'll have to ask you when he comes back on the end, maybe we shouldn't be giving lawyers ideas about, I know right things even further,

Tracy Harwood 1:02:10
but it was really just a very interesting point as to why they would be doing that. Yeah, because, I mean, you know, you can now generate cities procedurally, even in such an amazing level of detail in something like Unreal Engine. Why would you bother to do this for a game

Damien Valentine 1:02:30
with a flight simulator?

Phil Rice 1:02:31
It's a flight simulator, that's

1:02:34
right. Well,

Phil Rice 1:02:35
people,

Tracy Harwood 1:02:37
are you simulating actually flying or what you're looking at on the ground.

Phil Rice 1:02:41
Oh, you're simulating flying,

Damien Valentine 1:02:44
but you want to fly in a real place. It's

Phil Rice 1:02:46
highly accurate. There are real pilots who set themselves up with quite a rig with the panel and everything to I mean, it's, it's, it's reputable in that regard. So realism is, A plus. Okay, now going down on the street level, yeah, why? But I guess it's, it's one of those, well, because we can, yeah,

Damien Valentine 1:03:09
I've tried to, I found my village in this simulator, and it did not get included in the updates. So what that looks like is, you've got the satellite photos. I can see my house as a texture, but they've also placed a house building on top which looks nothing like my house. No, I can recognize my neighbor's cars and things like that and say, Oh, I know that. Yeah. Blogs do, because it's just a kind of blob on the texture. There's no actual car there.

Phil Rice 1:03:37
Yeah, Google, Google Earth evolved in the same way, yeah, when Google Earth first started to go 3d it was by default. There were models that were either tapped on by some kind of algorithm or attempted to be extrapolated from the satellite imagery. But then they encouraged people remember Google SketchUp? Yeah, Google SketchUp was developed primarily for that purpose, encouraging people, Hey, go 3d model your area, your city, your building, and then they would there was an approval process where they could submit it for inclusion. This happened over a period of decades, and slowly but surely, it gets filled out. So yeah, these things took a long time, and a lot of of human hours put in creating them, but they crowdsourced a lot of it at the beginning. And I'm sure Microsoft approached it the same way. And as they get more now, there's more technology that can actually lift 3d out of photos and stuff. They don't have to do that anymore, but that's how it started. So, yeah, you end up with these weird things where we get at the right zoom level. It's like some absurd looking geometric smudge instead of your actual house. Yeah, that's the way it was.

Tracy Harwood 1:04:58
I might be. Somebody planning a terrorist attack on one of these cities. Let's use one of these things.

Damien Valentine 1:05:04
I'm glad to live in a verge where the it's not entirely accurate. I mean, it's from above. The roads are all the right place. The both houses are, they are they do look like houses, just not the actual houses. And there's the correct number of them up the streets. You know, I stopped and counted. But you know, if you're wanting the actual, my actual house to see it in the game, all you're going to get as a smudge on the which you can see under, sort of bleeding out around the edge of the 3d house. That's digging out. But yeah, when I went to Bristol in the game, and it's just they got the Clifton Suspension Bridge to the valley, and they've got the suspension bridge across the top that is perfect. You can fly under it and everything. Previously, it would probably be a generic bridge. And you'd see the suspension bridge as a texture going down the valley and up the other side painted on, because there are lots of things like that in London as well. By the Excel Center, there's a huge hotel. It's actually a boat. Previously that was a boat shaped texture on the ground and the water was actually above it, so it looked like it sunk. But now the actual hotel build boat is there, and it is. I checked the photos. It's the exact boat that they have, and it's highly detailed, so they had to get that somewhere.

Tracy Harwood 1:06:23
Yeah, lots of dodginess for this one. I think, yeah, I

Damien Valentine 1:06:28
still got one last thing, which I thought was the serious one would generate a lot of discussion, but they've just had that with the flight series. Sorry, sorry. Last year the there was a an actor strike, with lots of actors going on strike against Hollywood studios and TV shows and actors and movies. So a lot of things got held up. They've gone back on strike, and this time it's about video games. So lots of video game voice actors are now on strike. Sag AFTRA leading it again, and this time, it's about big publishers using generative AI to create voices and not compensating the voice actors who provided the original samples. And I think it's fair that you know, these voice actors should not be replaced. That's what they're there for. So if you are going to use their samples to generate content for your games, you should pair them fairly, pay them fairly for it, because otherwise they're going to find other jobs, and then you'll have no voice actors to get any samples from. So I don't obviously this has only just started. I don't know how long it's going to take, or imagine it's going to be quite a while, and it's going to hold up games that are in that sort of mid level development where they haven't got the dialog fully recorded yet, or anything that's going to be released between now and Christmas, that's probably fine, because everything's going to be recorded and finished or close enough that they'll just go with it, but this is obviously going to hold up games and affect the gaming industry for quite a while. Hopefully there will be a quick resolution for that. But as we saw last year, it took them quite a while to come to a solution that they were happy with, and I was actually thought that this was covered in the deal that was settled last year. But I think we need Ricky and I discuss

Tracy Harwood 1:08:25
that that's really interesting, because if you remember, must be a couple of years ago now, we were talking about Ricky's evil What was the name of his character that he played there, Henry, the red. Henry the red. That's it being ripped off from the film and put into a new game without Ricky even being consulted. And it's Ricky acting that character looks like him. It moves like him. It talks like him. And he's not been included any in any of the royalties in in the process of turning it from film to game.

Damien Valentine 1:09:06
And I was really annoyed about that, not because I've done that, but they had a a voice actor to voice the character. Well, Ricky first, yeah, if he says no, then fine, find someone else to do it, but give him a chance to do it, because they did get some of the other actors from those films to voice their characters who had been given the same treatment. So, you know, ask Ricky to do it, and it's up to him if he wants to do it or not. But when we talked to him, he hadn't been asked, right?

Tracy Harwood 1:09:34
Yeah, difficult, yeah. It's a messy industry that,

Damien Valentine 1:09:38
yeah. So we'll keep an eye on this one and see where it goes. But if you're looking forward to any games coming next year for many of the big studios, maybe,

Tracy Harwood 1:09:50
oh no, is that GTA six? Like GTA six,

Phil Rice 1:09:56
they tend to have a little bit of voice acting in their games, don't they?

Tracy Harwood 1:09:59
Oh, just tell.

Damien Valentine 1:09:59
Bad. Actually, GTA six has a special clause in the voice actors. They're exempt from this strike, which the actors union is not happy about, but there's nothing they can do about it right now. So it's not, are

Phil Rice 1:10:12
you serious?

Tracy Harwood 1:10:13
Really? I

Damien Valentine 1:10:14
don't know the details of it, but it's not going to affect GTA six. Savvy

Phil Rice 1:10:18
move by Rockstar there. Wow, savvy move. Yeah, I hope that this is an easier one. To me, this seems like maybe it's just because it's so specific and so narrow a situation. This should be, in theory, easier to negotiate terms on than the overall, the larger issue around the first strike was very complex, you know, because there's a lot of different kind of moving parts to it and and a lot of different types of media and this, it just Seems like there's, it's a matter of agreeing to a rate that they can agree upon, that the actors can agree upon, and that the developers can agree upon, of because I don't think the developers are going to say, well, we just okay, we won't use AI at all. It's, it's, it's too good a technology to for them to ignore. It's, it's got huge advantages, but it shouldn't be free and at the expense of the actors, right? There should be something, but that's really the only to me, that seems like the only major point of negotiation here is what rate is fair? Yeah, you know, with reasonable people, that should be resolvable in an afternoon, but it's never quite that simple, right? So we've

Damien Valentine 1:11:42
got to a strike. So they can't be that reasonable, because obviously they've been negotiating it for a

Phil Rice 1:11:47
while. Yeah? Well, I mean, and, you know, I mean, let's face it, probably the reason that the actors were forced to do that is because these big companies are greedy, I mean, and, and that's just, that's the nature of human beings, you know. So it's not as big an indictment as it might sound. But hey, you got to be fair here, and you can't, you know, you can't kill the goose that lays the golden egg here, that voice actors are hugely important for these games. So yeah, again, if, if there's rational people involved, they're going to recognize that, and it's a matter of just deciding on a price tag for it, which could be a real win for the actors in the long run, like if they could come up with a rate they agree to. How awesome is it to get paid essentially a royalty to not do any more work. And for the developers, it's a big win, because I think the biggest value of you know, let's just use 11 labs tech as an example. You've hired an actor for a role in a game, and you need a handful more lines from them, delivered in the same tone, delivered in the same level of speech and everything as the original for some kind of expansion pack, well, bringing that, you know, arranging to bring that same actor in who might be quite busy, and then hoping that they'll be able to achieve the exact same output, as opposed to what 11 labs could do with a nice, rich set of samples. I mean, that's just a that's an efficiency thing. That is, it's hard to resist, you know, so, but the key is, the actor shouldn't be shafted there. They should be, they should be paid something for them, because it wouldn't be possible without them. Yeah, so I think, I don't know. I'm optimistic that this will be something that's not terribly difficult to to find an agreement on, and hopefully it's sooner than later. Because, yeah, I mean

Damien Valentine 1:14:00
updating the the gameplay in a way that the original recorded dialog no longer makes sense, like a tutorial. Sure, you know, character narrating the tutorial, and you've changed the keyboard layout, so rather than getting them in just to repeat a few lines, then do that. But if it's going to be a big thing, then definitely get the original actor back, because, right? You know, if they're a major character and they've got a lot of new dialog, get them back. It's worth getting them to do the proper performance. Yeah, just a couple of lines here and there. Well,

Phil Rice 1:14:28
that's what I think the actors probably would object to the most, is the idea of, let's call it the worst case scenarios for what developers would do, which is, they're going to hire an actor, they're going to get enough voice samples from them to build out a profile that they can then generate unlimited dialog of whatever they want for the rest of their lives. Yeah, that's awful. Yeah, awful. You know that can't be allowed. It's it's just wrong. You. Like, it's clearly, obviously morally wrong. You know, that's what the actors are going to be pushing back against. That's probably what would the developers would think is the best case scenario. Let's just build a stable of actors in one year of recordings we could be set for life now, and looking at

Damien Valentine 1:15:20
what? Yeah, but looking at this to publishers that they're striking against, you can feel that the people in charge of those companies thinking, Yeah, let's save some money and yes, yeah, yeah.

Phil Rice 1:15:34
Now, one benefit that would be lost from Ai use of a voice actor is a lot of these games, the higher end games, they're doing face capture at the same time, right? Using technology like what James Spartan does with with iClone and what and what James Cameron does with, you know, Avatar is they're they're capturing the voice performance at the same time they're capturing the face, and you don't you'd lose that if you went with AI reproduction. So, but you know, for games that maybe don't emphasize that as much or think they can fudge it, yeah, they they try to save that money. So again, hopefully they that reason prevails here, and they come up with something that's fair compensation for that, because I don't think the tech is going anywhere. It's a brilliant innovation. To be able to clone a voice is brilliant. It's fantastic, but you can't exploit somebody when you do it,

Damien Valentine 1:16:36
yeah, hey, it needs to be used responsibly. Yes, yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Well, I think that's all of our news this month, unless anyone else has got anything we want to discuss. Alright, so thank you for listening. We've come a lot different subjects here, and AI has obviously come up quite a few times, as it always does. It's a technology that we keep a close eye on. And so yeah, if you've got anything you want to talk about with AI or any other things you discuss in the news, please let us know at talk at completeness shimmer.com we look forward to your feedback, and we will see you all next week. So from me, David Valentine, from my cos, Phil rice and Tracy Harwood, we'll see you again.

1:17:21
Bye, bye, bye.