Prolific voice actor Troy Baker, known for a plethora of video game roles, including Joel Miller in The Last of Us and Indiana Jones in 2024’s Indiana Jones and The Great Circle, has recently shared his thoughts on generative AI, revealing that he has a more optimistic outlook on how it will impact art as a whole.
Rather than counting himself among those worried about it negatively impacting the livelihood of artists, Baker sees generative AI as something that will drive people to engage more with the entire spectrum of genuine, human-made art.
Troy Baker Talks AI
“There’s a fundamental premise to making art that people are not remembering right now, and it’s that it requires artists,” Baker explains in an interview with The Game Business, positioning himself as someone who isn’t immediately concerned about AI replacing humans despite being completely aware of its growing capabilities.
“[…] we don’t need to diminish it, and we don’t need to denigrate it, and we don’t need to demonize it, we need to just go ‘okay, it’s there.’ But it still doesn’t remove the choice for me as a performer, as a producer, to go ‘but I choose to do this.’ […] for the last 2,500 years, since we first set foot out onto a stage, humans have been doing this. So, maybe we trust that. Maybe we trust that this will be part of the process.
In Baker’s view, the concerns of those who “deal in the business of content” are, instead, justified since “there is no doubt that AI can make content way better than humans, by far. It can crank it out no problem.
“The videos that we’re seeing of ‘hey, want to see what I’d look like to be at the Gettysburg Address?’ Sora can do that in a matter of minutes, seconds! It can create content, but it cannot create art. And the reason why is that it invariably requires the human experience, and it can simply synthesize that. And what I see happening is that this birth of AI and this burgeoning industry of it is going to drive people to be authentic.”
Baker believes that AI will push people to engage more with genuine art made by humans, whether by going to see musicians performing live, watching theater plays, reading books, or otherwise experiencing it firsthand.
“I think that it’s a good thing. It’s a revolution, absolutely. And I think, again, the pendulum will swing to the other side and […] if you want to go watch your AI procedurals, just like we had with soaps and all the serials that happened in the 50s and the 60s, that kept people employed, by the way, those will continue to be there. But then there will also be what we are really driven to and what we really want to make, which are these artful stories.”
The interview touches on a handful of other topics and is worth watching in full. As far as the rise of generative AI goes, one can only hope that Troy Baker’s predictions will reflect its actual effects, in some capacity, and that this new technology ends up helping revitalize interest in genuine art rather than burying it.
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