Zaubermuffin

And that's fine - like I've said, I have nothing against properly sourced, and attributed, synthesized voices. I just don't believe that the ones used in SimRail, by the official developers, and distributed over Steam, match any of those. Listen to the files, then come back again. It's incredibly frustrating to be labelled as some kind of idiot when all you have to do is just look at the, frankly overwhelming, evidence there is. This isn't a secret easter egg or requires to fiddle with some extractor or anything. You can literally just go to the folder, open the files, and listen to them.

I'm not going to argue with someone who's obviously doing it in bad faith. The files reek of AI. It has all the hallmarks of it: Garbled audio, odd noise, this eerie non-sense pronunciation of words. The timing, the pacing, it's all off. Yes, you could get that with an actor too, but once again let me ask you what's more likely: That they hired a dozen impersonating actors, or just use ElevenLabs or similar. The burden of proof should not be on my side, but on theirs. If they have been actors, then I'm sure they can provide some proof about it, and we can go our merry way. It's easier for them to prove that it isn't AI, than it is for me to prove that it is AI. If you wish to do an in-depth analysis of the audio, then by all means, please go ahead and do it. The audio is really, honestly clear, however. It's not garbled by radio effects or similar, it's as plain as you can get it, and it's not a case of "sounds an awful lot like X" or "reminds me of X", which I would all accept as "weird, but okay". This definitely isn't. Have you listened to some of the files, at the very least? Or are you demanding proof and analysis for something that you haven't even bothered to look at yourself in the first place? I listened to the files, I had other people tell me about them, so it's not exactly just me hearing things.

The accusation is impersonation/voice cloning, not copyright theft. Open up any of the files and listen to them. There's three possible options here: They actually got the last US presidents, some politicians, and actors, and paid them to record some voice lines for SimRail in both English and Polish They actually hired some very talented impersonators to do that They used voice cloning software/TTS to generate those files. There's one option that's very definitely not happening, one option that is quite odd and highly unlikely, and one option that, given the current craze, seems like a real possibility. What exactly do you expect me to do? Send the file to realdonald@whitehouse.gov and ask if it's him? Do you really want to shine a spotlight to this issue to those people that would have very plausible reason to actually threaten legal action?

You can open the files yourself and check. They're MP3 files lying around in the game's directory (e.g. SimRail\SimRail_Data\StreamingAssets\Sceneries\5_Lodz1\Scenarios\08_Cargo-LodzPru\Sounds\en\Ł1_08_carg_ŁP_G2.mp3). The files in particular sound, in my opinion, so astoundingly similar to the real persons - including pronounciation and intonation - that I don't think there's any kind of detailed heuristic necessary. Edit: To add to that, if this were a one-off (i.e. a single well-known voice) in a sea of otherwise unremarkable ones, I would completely agree with you that further scrutiny is warranted. But if you have a clear pattern ("US presidents"/"famous people") across a dozen or more files, with half a dozen or more different, rather easily identifiable people, it's less about a one-off incident of a rogue developer or something and starts to feel more like this is the standard and done by design.

Someone just told me about this and I think it's a bit insane. If you go through the official SimRail scenarios and listen to some of the files, you'll find very familiar voices. Including (en/): Donald Trump (Ł1_08_carg_ŁP_G2) Joe Biden (Ł1_02_tlk_WŁ_Sk2) Barack Obama (Ł1_08_carg_ŁP_Ko2) Jeremy Clarkson (Krk_04_tlk_KatoKrk_K5) Samuel L Jackson (Krk_04_tlk_KatoKrk_Kz5) and probably many more that I don't recognize Some of them are used multiple times; some of them (e.g. Obama, Biden and I think Clarkson) appear also in some of the Polish versions (e.g. pl/Ł1_03_r_ŁS_Sk2.mp3). I don't mind AI in video games, if it is done ethically (i.e. from proper sources with authorization) and declared as such. But this is neither - I'm pretty sure there's no permission to use those voices, and SimRail isn't listed as using AI on the Steam page, which I think is also a violation of the Steam ToS. Could we get some kind of official statement on this?