A preview before the new Tell Your Tale tomorrow!
Click on the image for the full comic.
THE PLOT THICKENS. After loads of digging, G5 superfans have found who the french voice actor's Hasbro source is, and determined that this person doesn't appear to be a employee of the company at all. While dubs in other countries have fallen massively in quality, it's most likely that they are simply using lower end studios rather than actual AI.
Of course, more things could change at a moments notice on this juicy story. We still haven't seen any response from Hasbro yet. Hopefully they can clear this all up for absolute good! For now at least, it seems AI was not the reason for the shutdown of Make Your Mark, and is not being used for voicework in non union countries.
That being said, AI TOOLS are a completely different beast, and finding artifacts in voice work might be due to these, rather than due to the entire thing being recorded in AI. Most companies are using some form of AI at this point just due to it being baked into every modern creation software out there. Lower the pitchforks for now when it comes to this technology. It's going to be harder and harder to tell.
Now back to poni.
UPDATE: This has most likely been debunked. The VA that reported all of this may have had an unofficial Hasbro contact all along. See this post for details.
Yesterday we posted about the use of AI in Tell Your Tale season 2 for various language dubs around the world, but further translation of the conversation has revealed something pretty startling. Apparently Cort Lane, producer of Make Your Mark, allegedly called off the project entirely when Hasbro demanded they use AI in the second season of the show.
We still have a lot of digging to do here, but multiple french speakers have confirmed that this is what was said, including right here in the comments of EQD.
Of course, it's always possible that more was to blame for the lack of future Make Your Mark episodes. Way back at the beginning of G4 something similar allegedly happened with Friendship is Magic in terms of creative differences between staff and Hasbro. In that case, Lauren Faust straight up left the show. Instead of cancelling the project, Hasbro went forward with the rest of the team for the seven remaining seasons we got over the decade. It's weird that they'd scrap the project so quickly in this case.
This is a spicy situation all around, so we will keep you all informed if more arises. There has been a bit of AI drama on Amazon Prime Video, and in gaming it's already popping up everywhere with AI Voicework being used in the FPS game The Finals. We are in for a very interesting rest of the 2020's at this rate.
NOTE: We are getting reports that some of the info provided by the VA might be inaccurate. More on that soon hopefully as we dig for more confirmation!