Over 30 Apex Legends voice actors refuse to sign an agreement that would see them 'give up our expertise to train the generative AI that will replace us tomorrow'
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission.
The turmoil that AI (specifically, generative AI) has caused in the voice acting industry continues to rage—while an ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike proceeds apace in the US, it seems like gaming companies are continuing to fumble the bag in other territories. Like EA, who has very likely asked the French cast of Apex Legends to train AI that would, invariably, replace them.
That's as per voice actor Pascale Chemin (Wraith) who, in a post to Instagram (translated here by ResetEra user Rouk') has been given an offer she, and 31 of her colleagues, can absolutely refuse.
It should be noted that Chemin has not confirmed that this agreement came from EA, or that it's for Apex Legends, but it's the game her tagged colleagues all share in common. The 6-year-long role she later cites also aligns with the release date of Apex Legends, which came out in 2019—and launched with the character she voice acts.
"The studio sent me (and the 31 other VA in the casting) a [email] containing an annex of confidentiality and handover directly from the publisher. I needed to accept these terms before being able to go to work. I thought so when I read through them and a legal expert specialised in audiovisual confirmed it: These terms weren't acceptable.
"I was now forced to give up the role I had been working on for almost six years. In no way could I force the rest of the casting members to do the same, but one thing was certain: If we all refused, it could maybe have an impact. Otherwise, it would have been in vain."
However, it seems like collective action won out, as Chemin claims: "Without any hesitation, the 31 other VAs all refused to sign this annex. We wrote a collective letter of refusal that we sent to the publisher and are waiting for an answer. If we aren't united now so that a clause that protects our voices can be officially added in our contracts—and not just for us here, but for every video game dubbing studio—we'll never get one, and we'll be heading for a disaster."
The implication, it seems, is that EA was asking the game's French cast to allow their voices to be used to train generative AI—the kind that could be used to replace them. "We aren't simply asked to work. We are asked to give up our expertise to train the generative AI that will replace us tomorrow. We are asked to agree to what we specifically fight against. We are asked to shoot ourselves in the foot. We are asked to support AI."
Chemin later wrote on X (via machine translation): "Video game publishers want to force their way through. But to accept would be to give up, in the short term, our profession, it would be to accept being replaced by a machine."
I've contacted EA for comment—but given the public support by Chemin's contemporaries, and EA's literal stated aims to use AI "as quickly as possible", I'm personally willing to take this at face value. In which case, I am both very tired and not particularly surprised. Last October, EA CEO Andrew Wilson stated, rather ominously, that "large systematic change is required" after the game didn't hit its microtransaction targets.
While I'm sure EA—and many other publishers who care primarily about the line going up—would stand to gain via short-term savings, by no longer needing to pay its voice actors, this whole thing is just… tremendously short-sighted. Any time a company needs to save money in our modern era of game development, it seems institutional knowledge and long-held voice talent is the first to go.
Even putting aside the ethical concerns (which you shouldn't, obviously) AI voicework is generally unappealing to listen to even when it's higher-fidelity than the alternative. The genuine heart and soul put into performances like Neil Newbon's Astarion can't be replaced by a prompt. Is shaving off margins for your next quarter really worth permanently making your game sound like a cheap plastic imitation of itself? In the world of shareholders, maybe, but for everyone else—the AI enshittification continues.
2025 games: This year's upcoming releasesBest PC games: Our all-time favoritesFree PC games: Freebie festBest FPS games: Finest gunplayBest RPGs: Grand adventuresBest co-op games: Better together
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
Marcel Ophuls, maker of The Sorrow and the Pity, which examined French collaboration with the Nazis
Marcel Ophuls, who has died aged 97, was a German-born documentary-maker who fled his homeland in the 1930s and spent much of his career interrogating the various legacies of the Second World War; his international breakthrough, the landmark The Sorrow and the Pity (Le Chagrin et la Pitié, 1969), revealed the extent to which his adopted France had collaborated with the Nazis. The son of the German-Jewish director Max Ophuls – known for such elaborate melodramas as La Ronde (1950) – Marcel began his career in film drama but achieved greater traction with complex, rigorous, meticulously edited non-fiction work. In documentaries such as The Memory of Justice (1976) and Hôtel Terminus (1988), the filmmaker set multiple testimonies side by side, sometimes corroborating, often contradicting, always inviting the spectator to shake any passivity and judge for themselves. In The Sorrow and the Pity, Ophuls spent four and a half hours of screen time – and many more hours of shooting – staking out the city of Clermont-Ferrand 'to analyse four years of collective destiny'. Patiently hearing from residents of all walks of life, the film picked insistently away at the Gaullist myth of a country united against an occupier, instead revealing two Frances at odds with one another – one resisting, the other collaborating. In France, Sorrow was denounced by conservative politicians as 'a prosecutorial film' and initially rejected for both theatrical and television distribution. After much legal wrangling, it finally opened in 1971, earning an Oscar nomination the following year, but it did not air on French television until 1981; a station director said the film had 'destroyed myths the French people still needed'. Ophuls subsequently made films on Vietnam (The Harvest of My Lai, 1970) and the Irish Troubles (A Sense of Loss, 1972), though the latter was rejected by the BBC. His personal favourite, The Memory of Justice, revisited the Nuremberg trials in the context of more recent conflicts in Algeria and Vietnam, though the project was again beset by lengthy and expensive legal challenges; Ophuls filed for bankruptcy shortly thereafter and spent a decade on the lecture circuit. He made a triumphant return, however, with the Oscar-winning Hôtel Terminus, on the life of the Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie. As free-roaming as its subject, unearthing material both disturbing and absurd, the film ends in one of documentary cinema's most extraordinary sequences, as Ophuls witnesses a chance encounter between a woman who as a child had seen her father carted away by the Gestapo and an elderly neighbour who had turned a blind eye to the same events. Though Hôtel Terminus sparked violent arguments at Cannes, the critic Roger Ebert admired its tenacity, calling it 'the film of a man who continues the conversation after others would like to move on to more polite subjects'. Yet as a characteristically combative Ophuls countered in 2004: 'I'm not obsessed. I just happen to think that the Holocaust was the worst thing that happened in the 20th century. Think I'm wrong?' He was born Hans Marcel Oppenheimer in Frankfurt on November 1 1927, the son of Max Oppenheimer and his actress wife Hildegard Wall. The family fled Germany for France in 1933, taking French citizenship in 1938, whereupon Max dropped the umlaut from his stage name, Ophüls; after the occupation they fled anew to Los Angeles, where Max began an unhappy spell as a studio filmmaker and Marcel attended Hollywood High and Occidental College. Marcel Ophuls completed military service in Japan before studying at UC Berkeley, taking US citizenship in 1950. Upon graduation he moved to Paris, briefly studying philosophy at the Sorbonne, before dropping out and working as an assistant director (initially under the pseudonym Marcel Wall, to dodge nepotism accusations) on John Huston's Moulin Rouge (1952) and his father's sweeping Lola Montès (1955). He made his directorial debut with a German television adaptation of John Mortimer's The Dock Brief (Das Pflichtmandat, 1958), before being tapped by François Truffaut to contribute to the portmanteau film Love at Twenty (L'amour à vingt ans, 1962). By now he was part of the New Wave set: Jeanne Moreau funded his detective comedy Banana Skin (Peau de Banane, 1963), but his fiction career came to a halt after the flop thriller Place Your Bets, Ladies (Faites vos jeux, mesdames, 1965). Ophuls moved into documentary, taking a job with the French broadcaster ORTF, where he railed against the prevailing state censorship; he was eventually fired in May 1968 after making a film deemed sympathetic to the student rioters, though by then he was well into post-production on The Sorrow and the Pity. After Hôtel Terminus, Ophuls suffered mixed fortunes. November Days (1990), on the subject of German reunification, played as part of the BBC's Inside Story strand, but The Troubles We've Seen (Veillées d'armes, 1994), on wartime journalism and the Bosnian conflict, failed to reach an audience, despite a César nomination in France. He worked more sparingly in the new millennium, completing Max par Marcel (2009), on his father's legacy, and the career overview Ain't Misbehavin' (Un voyageur, 2013), his final completed film; a later project on anti-Semitism and the Middle East, Des vérités désagréables (Unpleasant Truths), ran into financial and legal troubles and remained unfinished at the time of his death. During a visit to Israel in 2007, Ophuls attempted to define his life's work: 'I'm not a preacher, a judge or an adviser. I'm just a filmmaker trying now and then to make sense of crises... Life made me, unwillingly, an expert on 20th-century crises. I would've preferred to direct musicals.' He is survived by his wife Regine, née Ackermann, and three daughters. Marcel Ophuls, born November 1 1927, died May 24 2025 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
USA Today
2 hours ago
- USA Today
Jared Leto denies allegations of sexual misconduct with teenage girls
Jared Leto denies allegations of sexual misconduct with teenage girls Jared Leto is denying allegations of inappropriate behavior with young women. In a report published by Air Mail on Saturday, June 7, multiple women alleged that the "Suicide Squad" actor, 53, behaved inappropriately with them when they were teenagers. A representative for Leto told Air Mail that "all of the allegations are expressly denied." The representative also denied an earlier allegation from Allie Teilz, a DJ who posted last month in a since-expired Instagram Story that she was "assaulted and traumatized" by Leto when she was 17, according to Air Mail. In a 2012 Facebook status update that she reposted on Instagram, Teilz wrote, "Youre (sic) not really in L.A. until Jared Leto tries to force himself on you backstage ... In a kilt .. And a snow hat." The representative said that "Ms. Teilz's allegations are demonstrably false." USA TODAY has reached out to representatives for Leto for further comment. One woman, model Laura La Rue, told Air Mail that in 2008, the actor approached her at a benefit in California and asked her how old she was. When she said she was 16, La Rue alleged Leto, then 36, still asked for her number. She said she was living in Ojai, California, at the time but that they began emailing and that she eventually went to visit him in Los Angeles in 2009. "I remember him teasing me the whole time I was there," she said. "He was flirting with me. He'd lean in close, then pull away, like it was a game." La Rue said she continued visiting Leto sporadically and claimed that on one occasion, when she was 17, he walked out of a room completely nude. A representative for Leto told Air Mail that the actor's communications with La Rue "contain nothing sexual or inappropriate," adding that "Ms. La Rue later applied to work as Mr. Leto's personal assistant, further underscoring the absence of anything inappropriate in any of their interactions." La Rue told Air Mail she did not apply to work as Leto's personal assistant. An unidentified model and music producer told Air Mail that in 2006, when she was 16, Leto grabbed her arm while she was on her way to the bathroom at a café and got her number. Days later, the actor, who would have been in his 30s at the time, allegedly called her home in the middle of the night and invited her to a party at his house, which she declined. But the woman alleged Leto continued to call her over the next three weeks, "always at one, two, three a.m.," and that the "conversations turned sexual," with the actor asking inappropriate questions about her past sexual experiences. The woman said she was shaken by Leto's behavior, and her mother, who said she overheard one of the phone calls, vouched for her daughter's account to Air Mail. "He changed − his voice, the way he talked. It scared me," the woman told Air Mail. Another woman claimed she began a texting relationship with Leto when she was underage. She said things could turn uncomfortable when she visited his home, with the actor asking her sexual questions. In an alleged encounter when she was 18, the woman claimed Leto "suddenly pulled his penis out and started masturbating," then "walked over, grabbed my hand, and put it on him." Leto's representative denied her allegations. Leto, who won the best supporting actor Oscar in 2014 for "Dallas Buyers Club," has starred in films like "Morbius" and "House of Gucci" and is the frontman of the band Thirty Seconds to Mars. He also stars in Disney's upcoming "Tron" sequel, "Tron: Ares," set for release in October.
Hypebeast
2 hours ago
- Hypebeast
The Trilogy Tapes Returns With More Abstract Summer Statements
London-based labelThe Trilogy Tapesis heralded for its avant-garde graphic streetwear statements, and for Summer 2025, the brand is leaning into its cult's favorites with a suite of abstract sweaters, tops, trousers, and more. Key pieces in the collection include the Overdye Crew in 'Grey/Blue,' which boasts an aqua glow around the perimeter of its oversized silhouette, and the TTT Cross Head T-shirt, which dons enlarged iterations of the brand's artistic emblems in black and red hues. Elsewhere, glow-in-the-dark shirts appear next to tops with all sorts of geometric patterns, and a series of shorts feature the same Cross Head design all over the body. Accessories include packable ripstop couriers, heart-shaped logo totes, TTT bucket hats, six-panel trail caps, 'Pain' trucker hats, 'Come Down' socks, and more logomanic items. Notably, the line arrives alongside a kaleidoscopic video campaign directed by Studio Info, which you can watch on Instagram below. The Trilogy Tapes' Summer 2025 collection is now available to shop on the label's brand newwebsiteand at Palace brick-and-mortar locations, with prices ranging from £17 GBP to £166 GBP. Take a look at the lineup in the gallery above.
