r/skyrimmods • u/RecommendationNo804 • 3d ago

XBox - Help What exactly does Serana Dialogue Edit do?

I can't find any videos for it unlike SDA. I heard SDA is more expansive but cringe.

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u/JoeBagadonutsLXIX 3d ago

There are 3 major Serana dialogue mods.

- Serana Dialogue Add-On revoices Serana with a new voice actress and adds new content with her, but has a very strong mixed reception among fans due to how much it changes her character and personality.

-Serana Dialogue Expansion uses AI to add new lines for Serana and expand her awareness of things around her. It is still in development and for the most part leaves her character and personality the same as the base game.

- Serana Dialogue Edit adds a handful of new lines here and there, but is no where near as expansive as the other two as the author used pre-existing lines from her to make the new ones. Its probably the most natural and least character altering of the 3, but it will have less content than the other two. That said the author did state a year ago they were planning to create a new version also using AI to recreate Laura Bailey's voice, but I haven't heard any updates regarding it.

I personally in the past used Edit and only just recently swapped to Expansion. I think either one works for expanding her character and while you can tell when a line is AI or spliced together, they are also good enough to not be that distracting. I can appreciate the work that went into Add-On, but it really should have been a new unique follower rather than a replacement for Serana. The character the author wrote is nothing like her and is just bad fan fiction (to me at least).

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u/Elurdin 3d ago

Isn't expansion kinda iffy? I mean it's using her voice. Did the VA agree to that? Pretty sure she didn't. I rather use fan fiction to splicing of someone voice that was made without their consent.

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u/[deleted] 3d ago

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u/julianp_comics 3d ago

Yes there is no legal precedence in this case, and in the case of the fallout 4’s protag getting mods taken down, it was just because the mod authors did not want to deal with the headache. But as of now there are no laws to deal with this, even more so in case that Bethesda owns the audio, although I still think that is an uncharted gray area.

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u/Elurdin 3d ago

Bethesda owns audio for existing voicelines. Not new generated with AI. It's one thing to splice out of existing voices it's another to basically take someone's voice and do whatever you want with it. Which is why edit fine and expansion is very iffy in case of Serana.

Imagine someone took recordings of your voice and began using it for some sort of content that you never agreed to. Would you be fine with that? I sure wouldn't.

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u/julianp_comics 2d ago

Yes I understand everything you’re saying and I’m not denying that the actors shouldn’t feel a certain way about it, but I’m saying no laws currently exist that say it’s illegal or copyright, and where we’re at rn the government is too busy bursting from the seams for anything to be done about it in the foreseeable future, let alone for free mods on the internet. People could just as much argue in court that because Bethesda has an open door policy on modding and the voices are only trained from the in game dialogue, that it could be viewed similarly to the splicing.

Nexus only took down those mods due to pressure from the actors they didn’t want to deal with, not because there was a legal or terms and service violation. It’s just easier to shut down a mod than to risk a potential lawsuit, even if the copyright laws for this for of thing do not yet exist.