Arc Raiders CEO says studio has “re-recorded” AI lines: “A real professional actor is better than AI; that’s just how it is”

Arc Raiders developer Embark Studios has re-recorded some of its AI-generated voice lines, acknowledging “there is a quality difference” between lines recorded by human actors and those generated by AI.

“We use AI as tools to assist in some content creation, but it’s always in the context of creativity, as an expression of the team,” CCO Stefan Strandberg told Eurogamer back in October.

“[Text-to-speech] allows us to increase the scope of the game in some areas where we think it’s needed, or where there’s tedious repetition, in situations where the voice actors may not see it as valuable work. So it’s a wide umbrella, but the experience of the game doesn’t use any generative AI,” he said.

Now, however, talking to our sister site GamesIndustry.biz, CEO Patrick Söderlund has revealed the studio has since “re-recorded some of the lines post-launch”.

“We pay our actors for all time spent with us in the booth and continue to bring many of them back as we carry on updating the game,” the CEO explained. “For select usage, we also pay them for the approval to license their voices through text-to-speech for lines that aren’t as essential to the immersion of the experience, mostly ping system audio.

“We re-recorded some of the lines post-launch and made them with real voices,” he added. “There is a quality difference. A real professional actor is better than AI; that’s just how it is. We look at [AI] first and foremost as a production tool. We can test things internally. We can test 15 different lines without recording them, and then we know what to record. It’s also a way for us to work, not replace actors. We don’t necessarily believe in replacing humans with AI all the time.”

In other Arc Raiders news, Discord has responded to a recent data security issue that arose with Arc Raiders’ Discord Integration, which was storing users’ private Discord messages locally on their PCs. While this has now been hotfixed by the developers at Embark, a Discord spokesperson said it was “providing guidance to developers and updating the Discord Social SDK with additional protections”.