Yet Another Year in Review

At the beginning of the year I usually have an idea of things I want to try out in my videos and goals I want to set for the year, and this year is no different.

Due to recent developments with AI generated content and the direction it is going in, transforming from the helpful and sometimes funny tool it was meant to be into a grotesque amalgamation of stolen work seeking to replace human creatives, I’ve decided I’m no longer comfortable using text-to-speech voices in my videos going forward.
This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while, but I had figured as long as I stuck to Amazon Polly/Ivona TTS voices, which were recorded from consenting voice actors, I would be in the clear. That is, until the recent SAG-AFTRA agreement with Replica Studios, which caused me to look closer into how even consenting AI voice replication can cause harm. I found articles from Amazon Web Services advertising Amazon Polly, where I get the voices I use in my videos, as a replacement for “costly” voice actors in games, stating “Can’t afford to professionally voice 1000s of NPCs? Maybe you can use Amazon Polly”. Seeing the exact voices I use being advertised in this way made me realize that so long as people like me use text-to-speech for content creation, companies like Amazon and Replica Studios will see a market for AI voices in content creation and advertise it for that purpose. I feel gross contributing to that proof of concept, especially as someone who deeply enjoys games and all the people who put their hard work into them. Though I still firmly believe text-to-speech is an important accessibility tool when used in screen readers and giving a voice to people who have none, I disagree wholeheartedly with using it to shove real voice talent out of an industry they've put so much love into.
I hope you'll all understand my reasoning, and please know this wasn't an easy decision to make. It was fun to create with these voices, and I will definitely be a bit sad to leave them behind, but I think I’ve grown enough as a creator to do well without them. I have so much more experience at my disposal now than when I started this channel, and I would rather set an example and move on than constantly feel the guilt of knowing what I know now and continuing to ignore the writing on the wall.
I’m not too sure how I’ll pull off sketch-style or random facts videos from now on, but I know I’ll figure something out! Trust that it will almost definitely be resolved in a wonderfully strange and silly way, as with everything :)