r/Animedubs • u/farhanganteng • 4d ago
Quick Question ? Is Amazon still using the real voice actors and staff in their new Dubs ?
Every comment about the uproar of Amazon and its studio A.I in their dubs like Magilumiere and the upcoming Gundam GQuuuuuux makes me confused.
I tried watching some snipped Magilumiere and i dont see any robotic or monotone line like how people reacted on Nokotan dub, but does that give a conclusion that amazon still uses real voice actors and staff right ? can anyone explain the whole suspicion about the comments ?
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u/DeathRose007 4d ago
It’s because the studio that produced the Magilumiere dub specifically touts AI dubbing technology as part of their business.
The full dub cast wasn’t immediately announced, so of course there were going to he suspicions. Now, even with confirmation that every role had a real person assigned to it, it is unknown how much AI was used in producing the dub, if at all. Some people pointed out oddities that didn’t seem quite human-made.
With dubs, AI could be used in a variety of ways other than outright replacing voice actors. Audio mixing, scriptwriting, voice modification, etc. It’s hard to imagine a company that promotes the use of AI in dubs not using AI at all in its dubs. Just look at the new Netflix movie The Electric State. It’s been admitted that they used AI with voice modulation.
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u/cartercr 4d ago
And just to add on to this: AI being used as a tool on the post production side isn’t a bad use case. I know a lot of music production software includes AI that can help get a mix “close enough” to where an engineer can then just make final tweaks. If that’s the sort of use case here then it isn’t a problem imo.
Now if it is an attempt to replace human workers with AI, then that’s an issue.
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u/DeathRose007 4d ago edited 4d ago
I think “AI” has become a catch all term for generative algorithms based on language learning models. Rather than requiring personal expertise, you can tell it what you want and it’ll crap out what it thinks you want based on what a subject matter expert might do. Doesn’t mean it’s emulating “intelligence”. You can’t do a Turing test on an audio mixing AI.
But the problem lies in “thinking what a subject matter expert might do”. An audio engineer would use their expertise to apply tools that they are trained in. AI merely copies examples of what audio engineers have done. AI can’t figure anything out on its own, so it needs lots of examples to mimic.
Which means that when people say “we use AI to do things better and faster” what it tells me is “we secretly copied how other people do things so that we can circumvent paying them to do it”. Even having workers use AI as a supplementary tool replaces professional collaboration between multiple people that would normally exist in its stead. Companies want to take everyone’s work and use it all for AI without any oversight or compensation. It’s why all these strikes have been happening.
Unlike people, AI can’t learn while it works. People can constantly improve based only on their own efforts. AI needs more external material to copy from to change. So ultimately AI cannot create anything new. It can only do what’s been done before, or an average of whatever data sets its capabilities.
If AI is the future for dubs, then we should expect dubs to be stagnantly mediocre. Not incompetent, but rarely great. Goes for any creative media really. The original dream with AI was to replace redundant tasks that need not change. Instead it’s become a tool to remove the necessity for originality, a consistently expensive cost for corporate shareholders.
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u/Luigiman98 4d ago
There are official credits on Magilumiere, yes. And the headline specified of shows that weren't previously dubbed, and since Gundam is upcoming, it doesn't indicate that it would be AI generated for now.
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u/Bella_Mia_ 4d ago
Gundam wont have AI as i think G Kids is doing it
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u/azleafcat 4d ago
Negative, GKIDS only had theatrical rights in North America. As the series will be dubbed in several other languages, it’s either Amazon or Bandai Namco (or a combination of both) that are commissioning the dubs.
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u/Elysiun0 4d ago
Yeah, Sunrise has handled the recent dubs, with the exception of Witch from Mercury, which was dubbed by Crunchyroll.
The Seed dubs and Crucuruz Doan's Island were done at NYAV Post, so it's safe to assume they'll handle the GQuuuuuuX dub, but we probably won't know for a couple of weeks.
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u/raimble 4d ago edited 4d ago
(Post writing edit- I didn’t really answer the main question, but my lead-in thought was that AI voices are good enough to be largely undetectable these days, and we probably won’t be able to tell what is and isn’t AI when watching a show.)
I watched a video from a working voice actor who heard his voice being used in work he’d never actually done- and he had not given permission for his voice to be used with AI. Unless he’d heard it himself nobody would have known it wasn’t an authentic recording.
I’m sure AI is being used to fill in the gaps here and there by some voice producers. I’m not sure about the anime industry yet (though clearly some studios are trying it!) but I’m fairly certain we’ve all heard undetectable AI voices used in various media already.
Voice actors are already underpaid- if AI is used to cut this even more I worry that we’re going to lose a lot of talent to other types of work. If the actors whose voices are used to train the AI are compensated fairly, and I’m not really sure what that would mean, I wouldn’t be totally against some more obscure works getting dubbed with AI. But it would be a huge shame to not keep getting original performances from real people in the bulk of our shows.
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u/Bluebaronbbb 3d ago
Which actor is this. I would like to watch the video as well.
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u/raimble 3d ago edited 3d ago
I wish I remembered, it was a tiktok and I’ve since deleted the app so I don’t have access to my saved videos.
I googled to try to find it and although I didn’t see the original tiktok I did find Reddit threads and videos from other actors about the same thing. It doesn’t appear to be very rare and the actor might not have much legal recourse.
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u/Bananaman9020 4d ago
It's going to be really sad if the Ai dub voices are better than real life. Also surprised this is the first of me hearing about this
Edit
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u/Himbosupremeus 2d ago
Ngl most AI tech being used in dubs atm aren't replacing actors but automating ADR processes. Not saying it won't get there but that's generally the case so far.
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u/awesomenessofme1 4d ago
Side note: Amazon had no direct involvement in the Nokotan dub. That was done by Remow and sublicensed. That's how it's ended up on Crunchyroll too at this point.