Troy Baker — the voice and motion-capture actor behind Joel in The Last of Us and the recent incarnation of Indiana Jones — has a clear message for creatives nervous about generative AI: don’t demonize the tool, but don’t confuse it for art.
Baker’s comments come from a wide-ranging interview where he wrestled with the practical and philosophical sides of AI in games. He acknowledged the technology’s raw power — “AI can make content way better than humans,” he said — but drew a firm line between polished output and the human story beneath it: “AI can create content, but it cannot create art.”
Not a jeremiad — a wager on audiences
This isn’t a defensive soundbite from someone clinging to an old business model. Baker frames his position as a kind of optimistic wager: as cheap, abundant machine-made content fills feeds and storefronts, people will rediscover what’s unique about human-made work. He imagines fans saying, “I want to see this person sing this song live,” or choosing theater, books, and first-hand experiences over what he calls “the gruel that gets distilled to me through a black mirror.”
He’s also refreshingly pragmatic. Baker doesn’t pretend AI won’t disrupt livelihoods or that studios won’t be tempted to replace people where it saves money — he cited examples of developers experimenting with AI-generated NPC voices — but he insists there’s still a fundamental choice for artists and producers: to opt in to live, messy, human expression.
Where the fear comes from
The unease Baker describes isn’t theoretical. Last year’s SAG-AFTRA negotiations put actor protections around voice and likeness squarely in the spotlight, and high-profile experiments — from AI-rendered celebrity voices to systems that can recreate historical speeches in seconds — sharpen the debate. Baker even referenced a demo-level capability of modern models, noting how quickly they can reproduce a scene like the Gettysburg Address, and used that to make a point: speed and fidelity are not the same as lived experience.
That said, studio economics matter. As some outlets and developers push into automated content and voice generation, the question shifts from “can it be done?” to “who pays for art?” Baker’s argument is cultural rather than legal: if the market values authenticity, human work will retain a premium. If the market rewards only low-cost, high-volume AI, artists will be squeezed.
A call for trust, not panic
Baker returned repeatedly to one theme: trust. Where teams and stakeholders trust creators and take risks, he argues, better work follows. Where fear dominates, product becomes conservative and derivative. That’s a point with practical implications for studios deciding whether to rely on generative systems or invest in people and new ideas.
He also said he’s not closing the door on using games to tell his own stories — he wants to make games, not just act in them — which underlines his broader belief: creators will keep finding ways to use the medium’s unique strengths even as tools change.
The landscape around Baker’s view
The industry is already in motion. Big AI players and tools are rolling into gaming and creative workflows — from large multimodal models that can generate images to voice tools and research features that thread into productivity suites. If you want a quick handle on how fast those systems are spreading, note how services like OpenAI’s Sora have been pushed to more platforms and sparked debates about deepfakes and brand rights OpenAI’s Sora Lands on Android as Debate Over Deepfakes and Brand Rights Intensifies. And Google’s work on integrating deep-research capabilities across Gmail and Drive shows how closely AI is being stitched into everyday creation and discovery Gemini’s Deep Research May Soon Search Your Gmail and Drive — Google Docs Gains ‘Document Links’ Grounding.
Those shifts make Baker’s plea — accept the tool, but choose the craft — more than an argument about taste. It’s a practical strategy for creatives who want to keep control over their voice and livelihood.
What this means for players and performers
For consumers: expect a glut of highly polished machine-generated stuff and, alongside it, a premium market for human-driven experiences. For performers and creators: the leverage lies in uniqueness — live performance, personal storytelling, and collaborations that are hard to imitate with a prompt.
Baker’s closing note is deceptively simple: art requires artists. The industry will exhaust a lot of permutations of automated content; whether that leads to a richer cultural ecosystem or a hollowed-out marketplace depends on choices made by studios, platforms, and audiences. If you believe him, the struggle over AI isn’t about stopping innovation — it’s about deciding what we value enough to protect.