Troy Baker, one of the most well known actors working in video games, believes generative AI could have a positive effect overall on performing arts. Baker thinks it’ll cause a reaction whereby people will seek out “authentic” experiences more – live shows, live theatre – and turn away from “gruel that gets distilled to me through a black mirror”.

“AI can create content but it cannot create art,” Baker told The Game Business in an interview. “And the reason why is because that invariably requires the human experience.

“There’s a fundamental premise to making art that people are not remembering right now, and it’s that it requires artists. 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 demonise it. We need to just go, ‘okay, it’s there’.

“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.”

The fear comes from looking at AI from a business point of view, he said. From that perspective, yes, AI is threatening. “There is no doubt that AI can make content way better than humans,” Baker said. “By far, it can crank it out no problem.” But that’s where the adverse reaction will come from.

“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, ‘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.”

Troy Baker, whose performances in Death Stranding 2 last year and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle earned him award nominations, is no stranger to dabbling in controversial new tech. In 2022, Baker partnered with an NFT company that was making what it claimed were the world’s first voice NFTs – voices you’d own to create content with. Baker’s provocative marketing resulted in a fierce backlash and he backed off a bit, but the idea itself doesn’t sound far removed from companies like Elevenlabs that are training gen-AIs on actors’ voices now.

Incidentally, Troy Baker will also star in the vintage Disney noir shooter Mouse: PI for Hire, which is due this year, and Naughty Dog’s new game Intergalactic: The Heretic Prophet.