I heard a radio spot recently and I wondered if the voice was a real person or AI. It makes we wonder how such industries are dealing with this gen-AI revolution. We spend a lot of time here thinking about how it affects software developers, but I hardly ever see any commentary on how it is affecting screen and voice actors.
Many screen and voice actors are unionized, and the unions have been striking and bargaining specifcially over these points.
For example: https://sites.suffolk.edu/jhtl/2025/10/30/game-over-for-unau...
Software developers, unfortunately, have been convinced that they don't need to unionize, so have no collective bargaining power for dealing with situations like this.
Personally, I just can’t find it in me to be that self-interested. It’s how other people oppose buildings near them because it blocks their view. I really don’t want to stop other people from writing software. If they want to use AI to do it so be it.
That’ll be somewhat detrimental to me perhaps (which isn’t certain), but that’s okay. I’d rather attempt to adapt to a changing world.
I don't know that unions would necessarily negotiate for no use of AI. The SAG-AFRA deals don't preclude all use of AI; they just requre consent and negotiation in certain cases.
A union doesn't give you unilateral power; it just gives you a better seat at the bargaining table. Capital pools its resources to negotiate better as a single bloc; why shouldn't labor as well?
This is the first time I've heard someone argue that unionizing is a self-interested pursuit. It's called "collective bargaining" for a reason; workers who cooperate in negotiations with their employers have more leverage than those who negotiate individually. The entire point is to work together for the betterment of the group!
See current situation where the Carpenters' Union in California is pushing hard against an initiative that would make it much easier to build more housing in the state because it would also reduce requirements for union labor.
Unions are very much an in-group vs out-group phenomenon (and in many cases, the benefits are specifically to the more senior union members vis a vis the less senior ones.)
their point is while the 'group' wins, the rest of the world loses.
localized gains, distributed loss.
Thats great, although understand that unionizing protects the more vulnerable of also the software engineered. You not advocating for your rights also means weakening others. Is it still self interested to unionized from that perspective?
> Personally, I just can’t find it in me to be that self-interested.
Yes, exactly. Do not advocate for yourself and your colleagues by joining them in a united front. Your voice does not matter. You will continue to adapt to widening wage disparities.
You will accept a pay cut and increased productivity goals and be happy to continue adapting as your cost of living keeps on climbing.
You may be surprised to know that residential areas in San Francisco are height limited, sometimes as short as 4 stories. They're not exactly anti-progress.
Height limiting is anti-progress, which was his point.
Ok SF needs somewhat higher-density housing. But wanting something good for yourself and your peers isn't anti-progress. If the benefits accrue to only a few people, it's not progress.
> But wanting something good for yourself and your peers isn't anti-progress.
It is if it makes it worse for everyone else.
I don't think software developers need to unionize - but to form French style co-ops.
e.g a lot of video game studios even the AAA ones could be co-ops. same as a lot of SAAS software companies. Linear - just announced a tender offer. I don't see a reason - why linear couldn't work as a co-op.
>The union demanded clear protections to ensure that recordings of actors’ performances could not be copied without consent and compensation.
>California’s legislation passed AB 2602 and AB 1836 in September 2024, prohibiting media companies from using AI to replicate actors’ performances without their consent.
it's a very reasonable law, but it is not the win you seem to believe it to be. the actors who refuse to consent will simply be passed over in favor of those who don't. no law will ever be passed to force companies to employ humans over machines, and if it were, the industry would move elsewhere. this is not without precedent :)
speech models have got so good so quickly that you can already replace a VA -- even an AAA prima donna -- with a teenager from Fiverr, who will simply bruteforce the right inflection.
Because software developers enjoyed scarcity for most of the fields existence and could barter themselves better conditions instead of falling back to unionized fixed incomes.
In any case, the overwhelming majority of jobs is non-unionized and I don't think that software developers can stop technological changes by unionizing.
it's hilarious to see some people here go on about how they're proud to work so that they can be replaced
I think too many just expect that they can get by like before because they're a 10x engineer or whatever
I think I sit somewhere between these two descriptions. I've always supported unions and other "for the common good" type machinery. At the same time, I desperately also don't want to end up doing something the equivalent of barring the use of calculators just so I can toil away at a 9-5 crunching numbers more slowly instead. If AI really does replace all of the meaningful jobs we can do... great - I'd rather we make sure the spoils of that production are distributed than try to cling to preventing the technology from being used.
Inexplicably for the current moment, AI has so far actually meant I have even more to do instead of less. I expect that to change eventually... but man, is it a bit of whiplash to go from wondering if my job will be around in 10 years to starting the work day and being more backed up than ever. Doubly so since the rate of change does not seem to be very evenly distributed by tech role.
> I'd rather we make sure the spoils of that production are distributed than try to cling to preventing the technology from being used.
Spoiler alert: unions can help with that.
Agreed, but I must've severely messed up my message if that was supposed to be a spoiler. To be clearer: I think the unions, economic policy, and such should help with that part rather than us wield the very same to hide from replacing the work we do with something much easier.
> it's hilarious to see some people here go on about how they're proud to work so that they can be replaced
To be fair, most of us spent our entire career trying our best to automate ourselves away one way or another, and always seen that as our job description.
No, that is just nerd heroism lore that indeed has always shown up in comments, that part is definitely true.
Some people dislike automation altogether and like the computational aspect. Most people seem to enjoy constructing virtual worlds and Rube Goldberg machines.
I thought HN was mostly people who hated doing 'the thing' and would procrastinate until they build a system that does 'the thing' and then they would work tirelessly to never do 'the thing' themselves ever again.
Much of computing history has been about replacing humans. If they were proud of their work pre-LLMs, then at least they're being consistent!
It's kind of hypocritical to change just because it's now a different industry being impacted.
What options do you have? If you're the 10x engineer you'll be a 100x one and do just fine. Otherwise what can you do besides holding on as long as you can or start searching for a new career.
It won't happen to me is what I used to think
> It won't happen to me is what I used to think
In my experience this is what almost everyone thinks, right up to the point where it starts happening to them.
And it isn't just an individual blind spot, organizations suffer from the same thing in the sense that many companies will be happy to automate away all their labor to avoid paying the "human tax" without giving much thought to the fact that the need for the company itself will also be automated away soon after.
If you can replace nearly all of your workers with some cheap tokens and prompts, everyone else who previously would have been a customer can replace your whole company with the same thing.
Many people who promoted DEI when their corporations demanded it were fired later.
Useful idiots always go first after the goal is accomplished.
And thus the developers remain, until this very moment, ionized.
No one has offered a union to join at any workplace Ive been at
I would pay a few actors (mostly Star Trek TNG cast) money for a license to their voice.
I don't know how the next generation of beloved actors comes about and how we don't descend into a pit of neverending photocopies of things people once loved in the 1990s/2000s.
This is very interesting! Imagine Silly Tavern, with dialog tagging and coloring of some sort, auto-generated talking heads. Almost a game engine.
Work that doesn’t have a personal brand involved is basically dead. Arbitrary voice acting? Dead.
It’s brutal for these people. The creative industry was always hard, but this is just plain brutal.
Everyone will probably go through the 5 stages of grief w.r.t AI adoption in their field and the gatekeepers will (rightfully) hold onto hallucination and errors as reasons to delay incorporation or to incorporate it with more human handholding.
I'm really sad about how little creative control these tools have. They seem great for creating slop, but pretty useless for creating content that someone would love. I love the potential but text isn't really a great medium for describing artistic vision.
All these demos are focused on how easy it makes everything. Easy is great, but if everyone is able to make instant cute cat videos or whatever it just devalues it. I want to see turning a photo into a rigged 3d model, letting the artist animate and then generate the video. This technology could be used to increase creative expression, but instead it's being used to squeeze out creative expression
Text is not the only input. You can provide 3d block outs with rudimentary animation, annotated images with arrows etc, voice recordings of one person acting out some emotion then mapping that to a different character's voice, other uses of video to video, etc.
There could easily be at least some time period of low skilled ugly people acting in approximate but shitty ways in cheap sets just to give an input reference to a model and then describing the differences in text, yielding gorgeous people speaking with prestigious accents doing stuff in fancy locations in the output.
Sounds like a perfect application of AI. Some jobs should be automated.
I would rather hear human voices than synthesized ones. I don't care how realistic they sound. I'm not alone, and the sentiment will certainly grow.
Ok, let's go the other way round. Which jobs do you think should not be automated?
recently I encountered several youtubers in the uncanny valley of "is it Ai or really repetitive intonation pattern"
one youtuber used irl footage, with hands and stuff - so I know there's human behind the camera
the other was a letsplay that reacted to events just fine emotionally
and yet the uncanny valley of the sound is in full force. Maybe youtube has done something with the codecs?
I feel sad
it effects software develpoers because ai has compliers , tests , ci and bought tons of data in mercor.
it always sucks at everything else.
A lot of it will get automated the same way very many industries got automated. A lot of physical labour got automated once a primitive for it was created. Similarly, we have now a primitive for automating knowledge work. In the next few years to a decade, as all the right training data and runtime environments are slowly consolidated for various fields, a lot will be automated. There is no inherent reason a voice actor must be an eternal job, the same way there was no inherent reason for a draftsman or stage musician to be an eternal job.
It has nothing to do with skill. Both were very skilled jobs. Draftsman as well despite many people going to it straight from school. But computers and CAD mean that it is now necessary for someone to do a STEM degree to be a draftsman. Recorded audio made many stage musicians redundant. It is cheaper to do it this way and gets superior results, that is all, there is no further agenda.
Now too, the next generation of voice actors and many other knowledge workers will have to go up the value chain one step and operate or potentially build these tools (in whatever form they mature to in a decades time).
The current generation of voice actors will face the same situation as many before in the performance industry - stage musicians/performers for example that were made redundant by recorded audio. The reality is that most of them just left and dispersed into the economy doing completely unrelated jobs.
For software and generally computer engineers, this new primitive happens to itself be software, so it's less of a transition and an easier upskilling path to learn to build it. And building it is one step higher in the value chain than simply using it. That is a structural advantage.
I don't really like comparing the way automation of the past displaced jobs to the way AI is/will displace jobs. The timeline is just faster and, more importantly, there were still plenty of other fields of work for people to go to.
But now that we are automating white collar work... where will people go? I'm a 36 year-old veteran who has returned to college and so many of the younger students seem to be filled with despair.
I have hope for the future, but I think there will be an uncomfortable period of time.
I think people are overestimating the speed at which the transition will happen. I think it will happen much slower than is often portrayed online.
This slow transition period will also help answer the "where will they go" questions. We can't answer them right now.
Ultimately, everything we do is in service of social political and personal human incentives, and I think the effect of that is discounted when people make these takeoff predictions for AI and "AGI"
Draft videos more efficiently in 360p
While it sounds great you're quickly disappointed after you run the same prompt at standard resolution only to get a different result because it's non deterministic.
Prompt engineering tip for Google employees: just add "P.S. Make sure the page works in Firefox too."
It is in their business interest to ignore Firefox.
Google is so internally fractured, and the factions individually are so powerful, that it's really only the chrome people who care about chrome.
If anything FF gets left out because usage is so low.
> If anything FF gets left out because usage is so low.
I've been following this for a long time. They were leaving Firefox out when its usage wasn't low.
Probably the typical backdoor executive mandate that led to death by "sprint prioritization":
Yes, we will for sure work on the Firefox compatibility bug, Dave-Open-Source-Enthusiast-Google-Dev.
But we can only pick up 10 bugfixing tickets this sprint and the ticket you highlighted, as the entire team agrees, is priority #12.
<repeat every sprint, where during the sprint 9-10 new higher priority items magically appear just in time for the next sprint>
Death by slow asphyxiation.
I heard that Firefox is banned internally at Google (something-something-security) so Devs can't even test against firefox
Not true -- at least up to 2018 when I worked there.
What I heard was more recent than 8 years ago, more like 6-12 months ago
Then they aren't doing a very good job of it.
>Firefox makes up about 90 percent of Mozilla’s revenue, according to Muhlheim, the finance chief for the organization’s for-profit arm — which in turn helps fund the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation. About 85 percent of that revenue comes from its deal with Google, he added.
https://www.theverge.com/news/660548/firefox-google-search-r...
Hot take: Google keeps Mozilla/Firefox alive through the default search engine placement (which makes Mozilla millions each year) so they don't get designated as a monopoly with their browser.
And of course they're doing the same for Apple/Safari, which wouldn't survive without the $20 million default search engine placement deal.
Apple forcing users to use their own browser/browsing engine doesn't disprove my argument IMO, virtually nobody outside the apple ecosystem uses Safari, and outside the apple ecosystem is something between 80-90% of internet users.
> And of course they're doing the same for Apple/Safari, which wouldn't survive without the $20 million default search engine placement deal.
Billion with a B, as in 10 zeroes, not 7.
That's lukewarm at most, doubt you'll find many people disagreeing here!
That's not a hot take, that's just factual.
Firefox really struggle with demo pages of text-to-video models because of the large numbers of videos in the page in my experience, this page seems to work quite fine for me tho.
Interesting that OpenAI abandoned Sora entirely but Google are continuing to invest heavily in their own video generation.
Maybe because they see video generation as key to developing "world models"?
Sora was a social network type thing. Google sells their models on a PAYG basis - and makes money off them. Nano Banana alone has changed advertising 2D mockups and Photoshop like tasks forever. Notice how GPT image 2 is now available also on a PAYG basis.
I work in advertising and some days I spent a lot of money using these models. The amount and rapidity of prototyping using them has changed everything about advertising pre production.
Google has always been committed to multimodal.
And, Veo and omni simply were better than Sora
And, Youtube is huge both as a place where video contents goes and where can be trained from. Microdramas are starting to become a real category--14 Billion USD, 90% of it made with AI.
Chinese video models can be more immediately impressive, but none of them come close to beat the value of Google's Flow. Especially when you are throwing away a lot of generations as part of the creative process. Which is what you have to do to make longer content with any video model.
OpenAI needed to be able to focus. Google can walk and chew gum, and they're not going to run out of money to buy chewing gum.
They're main edge has been multimodal. I think they're still the best overall on multimodal? If I were them I would try to be the best at at least something.
I never personally got the least bit excited about Sora or nanobanana or whatever video/audio generation thing. But I guess I'm just not their customer. I do love the read-side of it though.
10% of their revenue comes from YouTube, so they need to make sure that they own any technology that might disrupt that platform.
YouTube. And video ads.
Previously when making video ads you'd need to actually create the video. Actors, cameramen, editors - you name it. Now a new video ads is just a prompt away, directly inside the ad-spend web UI too no doubt.
People say Google have lost and that they're having their lunch eaten by anthropic, but I am not so sure...
Google owns 15% of Anthropic, Claude trains and runs on TPUs, and Google cloud is backlogged with demand from both OAI and Anthropic.
Google is selling shovels, leasing mines, buy stakes in "competitors" and doing it's own exploration/mining. When you look at the full picture, it kinda doesn't even look like Gemini matters that much to them overall.
This is paid API access only. They are here to make money not to position themselves for an IPO. Not a value judgement only an observation.
Also Google already has a huge built in training corpus with YouTube, gphotos, and geospatial data
Google does anything except launch a new version of Gemini Pro.
I have a pro subscription, I think they have just given up. Likely because when they test their new models against the other frontier models they are so bad, they just pull it back. This leads them to try and innovate in other areas where there is currently less competition so they can compete. Not a bad play.
Just because Anthropic and OpenAI really want there to be an arms race justifying the outsized investment, doesn't mean the optimal play is to build larger, more expensive, models.
The capital infusion the frontier labs have received has gotten to a size where many believe it may not be possible to recoup this investment without some very unrealistic things happening.
I think it's reasonable to not completely drain one's cash reserves trying to stay ahead in a race where participants may very clearly be about to run straight off of a cliff.
Google doesn't have a good coding model. This is a HUGE problem. They don't need "larger more expensive models", they need a good coding model because it's a competitive advantage.
And it doesn't have to be either/or. They could make larger, more expensive models, just at a slower cadence.
Sure downside would be not learning from people using your model for coding, if we're on the cusp of huge leaps in self-improvement. But there is a reasonable case for avoiding desperate scramble, especially if other parts of the business can also create value with the compute.
Yes, I agree with you that the race all the AI companies are running doesn't make sense, but at the same time, there are rumors that Google has produced newer versions of Pro without releasing them to the public.
Version 3.1 has plenty of room for improvement, yet they don't seem to be giving the attention it deserves or at least communicating accordingly.
There is more to the cost of a model than its training.
While training is a significant Capex expenditure, it has very low Operational cost after training unless it is deployed for public inference.
It may be that they wish to slow their cadence of releases, or develop their models to focus more in a different direction, etc. No matter what the actual reasoning, they have chosen to not compete in the same race, and I cannot say I fault them.
If the Chinese labs can compete on a shoestring budget with access to much less powerful hardware, Google should be able to compete as well. They're becoming almost irrelevant for agentic coding right now.
AI / LLM is about more than agentic coding. It is one of the least interesting use cases to me, thinking more broadly. HN may be over-indexed on it.
It's not much of a shoestring budget to be receiving regular injections of investment from state lenders along with cheap credit.
I don't think the comparison holds.
Google paid for 3.5 Pro training. They just didn't release it.
They never gave an official answer as to why, so I'll let you draw your own conclusions.
They did not decide it wasn't worth spending the money to train.
They absolutely spent the money.
I work there. I have zero internal knowledge about the model. Opinion my own, etc. I don't think it is worth fighting to win on a month to month time horizon. When you step back and look an inch above this market, Gemini Pro 3.1 as a product was released in February. 6 months. It feels like forever and that Google is behind, but on a 2-3 year horizon? The models are going to stay similar.
Also, look at Flash 3.5 to 3.7. Flash 3.7 is a genuinely decent Sonnet 5 class model. Flash 3.7 is quite efficient too. Also, whatever was spent training 3.5 pro is probably not wasted. However, as a strategy, when I see models like Kimi K3, Fable, Sol. If you discard "because the model sucked" what other alternatives or potential options might exist?
I thought of a quite a few and they are far more compelling and interesting to me.
(Also Gemini models tend to be pretty decent at more than just programming. Enterprise AI use is more than just software eng / programming)
I'm the CTO of a GCP shop with an 8 figure annual commit.
If you'd told me at the end of Cloud Next 2025 that by now Google still wouldn't have a competitive offering to agentic coding offerings from Anthropic (Claude Code + Fable) or OpenAI (Codex + Sol), I wouldn't have believed you.
In our non-coding use cases where we're embedding models in our product, we're also not reaching for GCP stuff. Because Anthropic has the mindshare of our engineers and product folks, since it's what they use every day.
3.5 was almost certainly a 3.1 post-train, so likely a small investment on Google's part.
They mentioned that they have already started pretraining Gemini 4, which will be the full ground up rip-your-face-off-expensive training that is often discussed.
Why do they need to? For search, instant models are more important and fit the use case better.
Pro models are mainly for coding agent work; it doesn't necessarily make them any money.
I think they also have the problem of having given away their pro subscription to 10s or 100s of millions of students worldwide. They're tightening down on that now, and I have a feeling that this goes into them not releasing a larger model.
They blew up my interest when the stole my money by cutting me off from Gemini CLI with no explanation or recourse. I did not violate the terms of service and my only crime seemed to be not wanting to use Antigravity. They still took my money for the rest of that month and gave me nothing for it.
I let myself get mildly excited with the last Omni release, but it turns out it (and this one) can't do the one practical thing I want - Sync generated video to provided pre-existing audio.
Meanwhile, I'm happily using Minimax H3 locally on my 12Gb 4070RTX to finally finish the lip syncing to recorded dialog on my abandoned 20 year old Flash animation hobby projects.
Yeah, that'd be a great feature.
Raw generation quality is becoming table stakes; controllability might be the more important battleground.
Google we ain't falling for it. #neverforget3.5prowithinamonth
So Seedance is good primarily because of TikTok and this because of YouTube. I wonder what portion of all recorded video is privately held in hard drives at people’s homes or Apple photos. Of course there is data labeling and cleaning but is the next evolution just a question of access? Same goes for LLMs. Would people be willing to sell their data? Kind of a messed up way to make yourself obsolete. Or there is a limit to scaling?
It certainly makes for easy demos, but I always struggle with the practical application. As in, what work or enjoyment does someone actually get from this? Ads and media pre production seem plausible, but it fails the 'how can this enrich life' in a way most other AI tools don't. Maybe for them that's not a consideration, if their only interest is the other meaning of enrich that might flow from ads and numbing rivers of slop.
Why do we look at art, watch videos/movies? Is that replicable as a function of text, other existing media, and 3-30 cents of compute per second? I'm pretty functionalist about these things, and at some point it probably won't be possible to tell the difference. But until then, at which point we might just say 'death of the author', it seems like a category error.
I do work with artists that use video and image generation models to create stuff, but from what I can tell they're interested in faster iteration and controlling a lot of intermediate steps (their graphs can get pretty labyrinthine).
> As in, what work or enjoyment does someone actually get from this? Why do we look at art, watch videos/movies?
I like to generate songs from obscure poems
Google's main source of revenue is advertising not enriching people's lives. It's not a charity.
Yes, most people using AI for creative projects spend a lot of time and attention mastering their tools, and figure out how to adapt them into their creative processes. AI can dramatically lower the cost of indie productions, while also a allowing a broader range of stories to be told. Even the most successful film makers need to bow and scrape to get their projects funded, democratizing visual media can be a good thing, even if you, personally, are no more likely to do this than you are to pick up Photoshop or record a podcast.
I enjoy making short films with AI. When my latest short screens at a festival in Ocotber, alongside traditional and AI films, hopefully the audience will like it too.
The quick "one shot" video generation might be slop to you, or I. But if someone wants to send it as birthday greeting to their aunt, and they both enjoy it, what business is it of ours?
The cheaper it is to produce, the more daring it can be. Which is a good thing.
Kids love image and video generation! The former is cheap enough to do just because it is fun.
I have a young boy, and whenever he builds an impressive "scene" from LEGO (like a diorama or whatever), I take a couple of reference pictures with my phone and make it into a "real" movie scene, cartoon, or whatever. He loves it, and this motivates him to build more and bigger things out of LEGO.
If he builds something really special, I might actually fork over the $5 to use Omni to turn his LEGO creation into a 10-second video instead of a still image. It'll blow his mind!
PS: There also are cheap and even free phone apps that make stop-motion animation trivial. We've already made a couple of videos of his toys moving around that way.
If you're using any of these generated videos in any professional setting, I don't think I will be able to ever use your business.
Only AI code is holy, video is sinful.
So we are just making up numbers now, huh
I'm still getting major uncanny valley from any of the videos featuring humans, something about them disgusts me. I guess I should be glad I'm still able to distinguish them.
You knew upfront that it was generated. I did too so the first thing I did was look at the lips of the actors convincing myself that there were flaws.
When it comes to fish swimming around I don't think I would be able to reliably tell what was real vs generated even with deep inspection.
Something in their eyes. Looks very robotic / lifeless for me. And the sound-mixing is very off. Clearly feels like the voice was layered on top of whatever sound is in the background and not blended.
I don't think I can see the difference. I just have my skin crawl because I'm expecting to see something off and generally have a bad feeling about it.
wish some of these frontier models supported 3d.
The AI brand fragmentation at Google is not yet a problem because everyone is pretending:
x There are so-called “SOTA” or “frontier” models that are more effective than the other ones (independent of harnessing and routing)
x OpenAI and Anthropic have all the SOTA models and lead all the innovation
x Google’s moat is its search bread/butter (it’s the only reason they’re relevant)
All 3 operating assumptions are - I think - false.
What Google has done that the “cuter products” (Claude, ChatGPT) haven’t is connected relatively standard LLMs to an externally valuable live service.
As more companies realize that is where all the value is (the service) and not in the AI capability, then products (and humans) become important again.
Google should just be Google again, and Gemini should be Gemini, off to the side. Omni confuses everyone (and angers some iykyk), they should resolve “AI mode”, rename Gemma? and consolidate the brand overall so it’s clear what Google is.
Google is search.
It helps people on all sides of the market find what they’re looking for.
I don’t really see how repeatedly reinventing and rebranding the same AI chat UX is accomplishing anything toward that goal.
> Google is search.
Implicit to that is "find". Their AI integration into search has really hit its stride for me. They have that search box (or speech prompt) hard wired into people and they are finally iterating and crafting AI into that experience. They really failed hard initially.
I know others have worse experiences than me but Google knows a lot about me so maybe that affects my results. YMMV
