Darkest Dungeon developers Red Hook will “never, ever” use generative AI to recreate the voice of recently deceased series narrator Wayne June, co-founder and creative director Chris Bourassa has told players during a discussion of the currently hypothetical Darkest Dungeon 3. That’s despite June himself apparently giving the idea his blessing, shortly before he passed away in January last year.
“In one of his last emails to me, Wayne gave us permission to train an AI on his voice, something he’d staunchly opposed prior to the end,” Bourassa revealed over the weekend in a comment on a Reddit post about possible replacement actors for June (which doesn’t itself propose the use of generative AI, though the idea is circulated in other responses). “We’d never asked to do it. I think he was trying to put the game/team/fans first – offer us a ‘way forward’. I declined, and we donated to his family anyway.
“I would never, ever erode his incredible and timeless performances by teaching a machine to sound like him,” Bourassa went on. “His voice and delivery was *human, [sic] and I’m forever grateful I got to write for him.”
Another commenter responded to Bourassa’s post, suggesting that not using genAI could prove “a bad decision”. The user later edited in more thoughts, offering the argument that concerns about the tech’s environment and workplace impacts, together with non-consensual usage of people’s work, data and personal characteristics, can be addressed by more ‘human curation’.
Responding to this post (but not the subsequent edit, going by the dates), Bourassa wrote: “You can’t make decisions based on fear. In this moment, the Most Right thing we can choose is to eschew AI and preserve Wayne’s legacy. Comparing hypothetical outcomes will drive you crazy, and worse, paralyze you in the present.”
The idea of using generative AI to recreate the voice of a dead person, that they may live on for the sake of Product and Profit, is inherently ghoulish, though some people have begun modelling the dead to help with the grieving process. It also inevitably deprives living voice actors of opportunities. Amid some contentious ‘resurrections’ in cinema, there has been an outcry across the creative industries – last May, US union SAG-AFTRA took Epic to court for using generated AI to recreate James Earl Jones, the voice of Darth Vader.
It’s a particularly creepy idea with regard to June and Darkest Dungeon (beware moderate spoilers from this point). June’s character, the Ancestor, kills himself shortly before the events of the game; the opening cinematic is his suicide note, summoning you to repair the results of an occult investigation that has transformed your family estate into hell.
In a sinister transition that seems at first like routine non-diegetic narration, the Ancestor continues to speak to you throughout the game, hailing your successes and gloating over your failures. In that regard, then, turning June into an unholy chatbot is consistent with Darkest Dungeon’s premise, but I don’t think anybody would view either the Ancestor’s weird unlife, or the Manor’s inexhaustible vaults of mutants and abominations, as an argument for using generative AI to re-voice the dead.
