ARC Raiders replacing some AI voices, CEO says "a real professional actor is better than AI"

ARC Raiders is still one of the most popular games around right now, and thankfully some of the generative AI voices are getting replaced.

The CEO of Embark Studios, Patrick Söderlund, spoke to GamesIndustry.biz in an interview covering a nice selection of topics. And of course, since generative AI is a hot topic and ARC Raiders has been using it - that was touched on as well.

Explaining how generative AI is actually used, which has been clarified before elsewhere: "We pay our actors for all time spent with us in the booth and continue to bring many of them back as we carry on updating the game," the CEO explains. "For select usage, we also pay them for the approval to license their voices through text-to-speech for lines that aren't as essential to the immersion of the experience, mostly ping system audio."

What Söderlund is talking about above is where you middle-click ping an item, or an enemy, and your raider will say something basic like "I have some Oil". Clearly, those are here to stay but other parts are being replaced with proper voice lines. They use a similar system for THE FINALS, their other shooter for voice-over lines from the announcers. Both games have attracted a fair amount of criticism for it.

"We re-recorded some of the lines post-launch and made them with real voices," he says. "There is a quality difference. A real professional actor is better than AI; that's just how it is. We look at [AI] first and foremost as a production tool. We can test things internally. We can test 15 different lines without recording them, and then we know what to record. It's also a way for us to work, not replace actors. We don't necessarily believe in replacing humans with AI all the time."

Nice to see. And it is a bit of a "well - duh" type of thing. Of course a person is going to be better than AI. The whole point of having voice actors is they know how to actually act, to bring some kind of clear intention and emotion into their roles with all their own little personal voice quirks. You don't get that with generating fake AI voices.

ARC Raiders continues to run great on Linux / SteamOS thanks to Embark enabling the anti-cheat.