Actor Troy Baker says creatives shouldn’t “demonize” AI as it “cannot create art”

Veteran actor Troy Baker says that while it’s tempting to “demonize” and “denigrate” AI and its impact on the global games industry, he believes it will eventually “drive people to the authentic,” adding: “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.”

Talking to The Game Business, Baker – who has voiced and/or mocapped some of gaming’s most iconic characters, including The Last of Us’ Joel Miller, Death Stranding’s Higgs Monaghan, and the titular role in Indiana Jones and the Great Circle – stressed that art “requires artists.”

“There’s a fundamental premise to making art that people are not remembering right now, and it’s that it requires artists,” Baker said.

“People go, ‘look what AI can do’. It’s like, ‘yeah, okay. I see what it’s capable of doing. It doesn’t matter.’ And we don’t need to diminish it, we don’t need to denigrate it, 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,'” he added. “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.”

Though he acknowledges that “people in the business of content” are apprehensive, and there’s “no doubt that AI can make content way better than humans” – “You want to see what it looked like to be at the Gettysburg Address?’ Sora can do that in a matter of minutes, seconds” – LLMs can create content, but they “cannot create art.”

“And the reason why is because that invariably requires the human experience,” Baker added. “What I see happening is that this birth of AI, and this burgeoning industry of it, is actually going to drive people to the authentic.

“And we’re going to see opportunities of like, ‘I want to go and watch this person sing this song live.’ ‘I want to see theater.’ ‘I want to read books.’ ‘I want to have this first-hand experience as opposed to the gruel that gets distilled to me through a black mirror.’ I think that it’s a good thing. It’s a revolution.”

Yesterday, January 6, the CEO and founder of Arc Raiders developer Embark Studios, Patrick Söderlund, said the company is not using AI to reduce its investment in people.