Actor Stephen Fry says his voice was stolen from the Harry Potter audiobooks and replicated by AI—and warns this is just the beginning::The actor told an audience in London that AI was a “burning issue” for actors on strike.
I’m sorry, while I understand this issue is a more visible issue for actors/voice actors, there are a lot of people who are going to be hurt by this in the long run.
You think scam calls are bad now? Imagine if Gamgam gets a call from “you” saying you’re hurt and scared and need money to be safe. And I don’t mean just someone pretending to be you, I mean that the person on the other end of the phone sounds exactly like you, up to and including the pauses in your voice, the words chosen to say, and even the way you roll your r’s. All because someone skimmed your public Facebook videos.
Someone wants that promotion you’re going to get? Record your voice a few times, then have you “drunk call” your boss hitting on them, and then harassing them when they don’t react well to it.
This is going to be one hell of a ride.
It would effectively kill traditional phone usage pretty much overnight as enough people get scammed and scared off the technology.
I’m sorry, while I understand this issue is a more visible issue for actors/voice actors, there are a lot of people who are going to be hurt by this in the long run.
I’m sorry, but as somebody who’s tried out the tech, the amount of vocal processing required is still many hours of data. Even the more professional AI cloning web sites that allow you to clone your own voice require that you submit “a couple of hours” of your voice data. The reason why musicians and voice actors get into the middle of this is because they already have many hours of voice work just out there. And in many cases, the speech-to-text transcription, which is required to train a voice model, is already available. For example, an audio book.
You think scam calls are bad now?
You think scam call centers are going to spend the time to look for voice clips, parse them out, transpose them into text, put them in a model, train that model for many hours, realize the Python code needs some goddamn dependency that will take many more to debug, fix parameter settings, and then get a subpar voice model that couldn’t fool anybody because they don’t have enough voice clips.
They can’t even be bothered to look up public information about the caller they are making the call to. Fuck, the last call I got was from a “support center for your service”, and when I asked “which service?”, they immediately hung up. They do not give a fuck about trying to come prepared with your personal details. They want the easiest mark possible that doesn’t ask questions and can get scammed without even knowing their name.
Imagine if Gamgam gets a call
Who’s Gamgam?
Record your voice a few times
Yeah, sorry, you need more than a “few times” or a “few voice clips”.
Amazon showed off voice cloning over a year ago, and iirc it was claimed to not require hours of content. You’re lagging in your understanding of current capabilities, nevermind the fact that I was talking about the near future.
I have personally used VALL-E and tried it out. What they are claiming is absolute bullshit. It is “a” voice, but it’s certainly nowhere close to “your” voice. Don’t believe me? You can try it out yourself.
Real AI training requires putting in the work.
Well that’s weird, since the article says:
Perhaps owing to VALL-E’s ability to potentially fuel mischief and deception, Microsoft has not provided VALL-E code for others to experiment with, so we could not test VALL-E’s capabilities.
You think maybe that Github release, which isn’t from Microsoft, might not be the same thing despite the name?
All of the AI tech is based on research papers, which are semi-publicly available.
Theft of others’ creative works (and to an actor their voice is part of their creative work) has been going on via Big Tech for decades now. My first view of it was years ago when Google started stealing books it hadn’t purchased and wasn’t licensed and adding them to public spaces on the internet. I remember the big publishing houses and a lot of authors up in arms, but obviously they weren’t able to truly reverse any of that.
well lets be real there is a undefinable unique quality to true Original work that most people somehow can pick up on. i dont think ai will ever trully be able… idk whatvim talking about anymore sigh
I’m sure it wasn’t just the HP audiobooks. He’s been on television for 40 some odd years. There’s hundreds and hundreds of hours of recordings of his voice to train an AI model on.
Hours of monologue with zero background noise is absolute gold for training the model though. You’d have to chop up and edit a lot of footage to get an inferior result with the television footage. Still, it’s entirely possible and it may possibly have been trained on both.
replicated by AI
Where? Who was selling what?
I mean humans can do and have been doing this exact thing forever. Computers make it faster and easier, just like everything else. This isn’t AI, this is training a speech model using machine learning techniques.
A few humans imitating other humans is not even comparable to the scale that computers imitating humans can reach though.
True. I think the main difference is that a computer has no moral compass and won’t remember the large scale criminal operation it was a part of. I don’t think it’s worthwhile to fear or regulate this kind of ml application, the cat is out of the bag and the best we can do is implement security controls like passwords with our important relationships.
