Cyberpunk 2077 mod was supposed to be a tribute to Deus Ex. „No. Do not f*** do that,” warns the actor

Using generative artificial intelligence in games is a hot topic and stirs up a lot of controversy. AI also doesn't leave mods alone. One of the questionable uses of genAI in this segment is the creation of digital copies of actors' voices by some modders.

1. The latest example of this is Elias Toufexis, known mainly for the role of Adam Jensen in Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. Commenting on the recent cancellation of Perfect Dark, in which this actor was supposed to appear, one of the players suggested as an alternative to play Cyberpunk 2077 with a mod that makes V speak with Adam Jensen's voice. Of course, the modification was created using genAI.
2. Elias Toufexis reacted very negatively to this suggestion, saying:

1. In this case, the modder probably didn't have bad intentions. This project was released in 2023, when controversies around generative AI were just beginning to appear. The creator of this modification removed it from NexusMods as soon as Elias Toufexis asked them to, and didn't upload any mirrors to other places, which doesn't mean that no one else kept a copy of this project to share it somewhere later.

Fight for the actors' voices goes on

It's no surprise that voice actors react very strongly to such things. The voice is something very personal, and using its digital copy to create recordings of things that a given person has never said arouses strong negative emotions.

On top of that, there are financial issues because cost-cutting publishers are trying to push through very unfair contracts with actors. According to these contracts, they only have to pay the actors once for a role, and then they can keep using their recordings indefinitely. In this case, however, a lot has been achieved - the SAG-AFTRA trade union negotiated with the company Replika, which specializes in this type of technology, an agreement under which actors will be paid when a model developed based on their voice is used to generate new dialogue lines.

In the case of Elias Toufexis, an additional reason for frustration is his exceptional bad luck in recent years. First, he missed the chance to play as Adam Jensen again, after the new Deus Ex was canceled (although it's not clear if Jensen would have been in that game at all), and now Perfect Dark was also dropped.

Cyberpunk 2077

December 10, 2020

Rate It!

• Overview
• Guide
• Review

• actors
• AI / Artificial Intelligence