How do you do the voices?

Most of the voices are performed by myself into a microphone, then processed through an AI voice clone created using audio from the source material.

I do not rep any specific software, but if you're interested in trying this out, searching "AI voice to voice cloning" will come up with plenty of different options.

What about (X)? Was that a "real" voice actor?

When a VA other than myself appears in one of my videos, they will be clearly credited in the description on YouTube.

If you do not see a VA credited, it is safe to assume I am doing the voice myself using a clone based on game audio.

Wait, you use AI?!

Yes I do, and if you're feeling upset by this, I imagine there are probably a lot of thoughts racing through your head about what this means. I would encourage you to challenge yourself by asking yourself these questions:

1. Did you watch and enjoy a video of mine?
2. At the time, did you feel doing so was a "human" experience?
3. Do you now feel compelled to retroactively change your mind?

If the answer to all three questions was Yes, I believe you are working backwards. You should let your own mind inform you how to feel. Anti-AI zealotry on the internet has caused people to second-guess their own subjective experiences, which, as you can imagine, has not been hugely helpful to the art world.

If it makes you feel any better my use of AI is extremely limited, which is why you probably found it unnoticeable. But if you continue reading, I hope to convince you that doesn't matter either way.

But AI steals people's work!

I could have a long debate with you about how it's impossible to consider something stolen if the original owner still possesses it. But that's a philosophical debate. Let's work pragmatically here and judge ourselves by existing standards.

In classical YouTube Poop (as with the art forms of collage, sampling, etc.), an existing work is spliced up and repurposed to tell a new story. Traditionally the way to do this to vocal audio is through Sentence Mixing, a process by which various syllables of an actor's vocal performance are rearranged to produce new sentences.

This is literally the exact same thing I'm doing with AI. I am using existing game audio and repurposing it to create something new. The only difference is that I am able to arguably inject MORE human creativity into the process, since I can guide the characters' inflections with my own voice. To me this often feels like a distinctly human process compared to the mechanical, surgical precision of splicing together audio clips to create a robotic voice (This is a personal preference, sentence mixing takes a huge amount of work and can be hilariously impressive)

More to the point, I am not stealing anyone's work. Nintendo explicitly allows materials from their games to be repurposed in creative ways, and there is no version of Earth throughout the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe where YTP viewers have ever complained about this supposed "theft". Not until AI came around and everyone lost their minds.

But AI uses a lot of electricity!

Yeah, there are a lot of cool-as-fuck things that use a lot of electricity. There are also a lot of useless things that use a lot of electricity, like the privately-owned grocery store a quarter mile from your house that is running the air conditioning and freezers 24/7 just so they can throw away 40% of the food.

I'm eager to explore any and all options for clean/renewable energy so we can continue to support this and other miraculous technologies. Stifling innovation is pretty much the opposite of how we should solve this problem.

But AI is owned by billionaires!

Yeah so is every-fucking-thing else, including every app you use lol. Let me know when we're ready to take back the means of production and I'll be right there with ya. Marx wrote quite a bit about how labor automation will be necessary in a moneyless society. He defined Free Time as "both idle time and time for higher activity". Automating labor expands people's capacity for creativity and self-actualization (the opposite of what anti-AI people claim, including the Marxist ones!)

If you don't feel like reading that text, I had Gemini summarize it to make you mad:

"In short, the text argues that labor automation is the historical trajectory of capital, driven by the desire to reduce costs. However, this drive inevitably makes the wage-labor system obsolete. Automation transforms the worker from a manual laborer into a supervisor of technology, creating the potential for a society rich in free time, provided the social relations of capitalism (which tie survival to wages) are overcome."

Why do you use AI? Do we need to help you get real voice actors?

I am a real voice actor. I enjoy performing these characters. I enjoy post-processing my performance for uncanny accuracy. It surprises and delights people.

I disagree with people's attempts to draw a distinction between "AI" and any other computer application. When I open Photoshop and click "Render Clouds" to draw some clouds on the screen, I don't get Cloud Artists in my inbox calling me a hack. The anti-AI sentiment is going to die out the same way, as people start to realize the value of software comes from what humans do with it.

So it's all just low-effort slop, huh?

It's certainly within your rights to make this rude conclusion about my art. As the person who spends hours and hours writing scripts, recording voices, and hand-drawing animation frames - all in order to make content that hopefully puts a smile on someone's face - I would certainly object to it. 

But it's not "art", you used AI.

There are a lot of misconceptions about what people can do with AI, and how it is typically used in productions. I've found the people who are least familiar with these workflows are the people who are most confident in making wild assumptions about them. I'm making animated online videos in the most classical possible sense, with tools that have existed for decades and methodology that takes years to master. AI is a small, subtle, integrated part of my workflow. It is absolutely astounding to me how people who are supposedly "pro-art" will attempt to bully me into changing the way I create art.

You should go back to sentence mixing instead.

I'm going to keep this one in my back pocket, just in case I ever decide I want the voices to take 10x longer, be less fun to do, and sound worse.

If you're not doing anything wrong, why are you being so defensive?!

Being defensive is a somewhat reasonable response to being attacked. At this point of the page, I'm out of ways to explain to you why the things I create are my own business, not yours.

But you didn't CREATE anything!!!

What have you created, Captain Douche? There are a lot of letters in that sentence. Words, even. Did you create those yourself, or are you just stealing other people's work and frankensteining it into a soulless abomination!? Do you plan on paying Merriam-Webster next time you rip off their hard work, you hack?

Do you see how that feels? It's obnoxious and it sucks, and worst of all, it's not rooted in any kind of sensible logic. We obviously can't live in a world where every single person who has ever done work is paid in perpetuity for that work every time another person enjoys the fruits of it, and obviously using components another person has made does not invalidate your status as a Creator. This is such a stupid debate I can't even.

Did you mute me from your channel?!

Probably, because there is literally nothing helpful that can come from yet another debate that amounts to "I don't like this" vs "okay and?". If you don't like me or the things I do, I can't imagine why you would want to spend any amount of time on my channel. I encourage you to find a channel that will be more tolerant toward your intolerance.

I don't like the video. Because of the AI

I get it! God, do you people have an off button?!