Harrison Ford Accidentally Becomes Union Hero After Realizing AI Can’t Mimic Grumpy Old Man Energy
Hollywood legend and professional curmudgeon Harrison Ford shocked the world last week by inadvertently taking a stand against AI in video games. Ostensibly just here to compliment Troy Baker’s voice performance in *Indiana Jones and the Great Circle*, Ford, 81, also managed to turn a spotlight onto a months-long strike by SAG-AFTRA video game performers, because, as it turns out, the industry would love nothing more than to replace actual humans with soulless digital puppets.
“You don’t need artificial intelligence to steal my soul,” Ford told *The Wall Street Journal*. “You can already do it for nickels and dimes with good ideas and talent.” And while Ford clearly meant this as a grumpy-old-man compliment for Baker, struggling voice actors everywhere latched on like drowning sailors to a floating Harrison Ford-shaped life raft.
The strike, ongoing since July, demands financial compensation whenever AI generates performances using recorded work, combined with maddeningly basic asks like “consent” and “transparency” from game publishers. Unfortunately, gaming behemoths like Activision Blizzard, Disney, Warner Bros and Electronic Arts appear to have adopted the revolutionary business model of “What if we just didn’t pay people and hoped they wouldn’t notice?”
Predictably, this has led to chaos, with recent major games such as *Destiny 2: Heresy* and *Genshin Impact* simply lacking English-language voice performances. Thousands of U.S. gamers, suddenly deprived of generic grunting noises and awkwardly over-sexualized anime voices, have been left in existential turmoil.
Game publishers, meanwhile, insist AI-generated voiceovers are simply an efficient cost-cutting measure in an era when development budgets have ballooned to “large nation’s GDP” levels. Of course, that “cost-cutting” mostly means fewer actors getting paid at all, but who can put a price on corporate efficiency?
For now, the world’s voice actors must cling to the rarest and most powerful form of support—concern from Harrison Ford. While he is unlikely to show up at any rallies (or even remember what he said about this next week), his offhand remark has at least done what years of organized labor efforts could not—get people to look up from their PlayStations for five f#&$%ing seconds.
