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Ashly Burch, a prolific actor known for roles like Aloy in the Horizon games, Mel in The Last of Us 2, and Chloe Price in the Life is Strange series, is worried about AI displacement in the gaming industry, and in particular the idea of AI replacing human actors in lesser roles like NPCs and minor characters.
In a new episode of Ginx TV’s The Games That Made Me series, Burch broaches the harrowing topic of the rapidly increasing presence of AI in video games, and she has a personal perspective on why that’s particularly daunting for young actors trying to break into the scene.
“I am afraid of some developers trying to use AI to replace performers in roles that I cut my teeth on coming up,” Burch says, adding that right now, she’d be “very surprised” and “horrified” to see “an entire open world game where every character was AI.”
While that would indeed be horrifying, Burch argues that there’s a greater and more immediate risk of more minor characters with fewer voice lines becoming voiced by AI. That would put inexperienced talent at risk of having an even harder time establishing a foothold in an already brutally competitive industry.
“I do think there is a risk of NPCs in those worlds or, you know, characters that are in multiplayer games that do callouts. Like, things that are maybe less sessions and maybe are not as narratively heavy,” Burch said. “I could conceive of a world in which a dev might be like, ‘yeah, let’s just have AI do that…’ if you cut away so many of these roles that younger performers need to cut their teeth and get their experience, we’re gonna be losing out on our next generation of great performers.”
Burch’s comments are particularly pertinent now as video game actors who are participating in the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strikes, of which she’s a part, are doing so primarily to protect against the unauthorized use of actors’ performances through generative AI.