10 ms·

I love the technology behind this stuff but the number of applications with negative social benefit seem to outweigh the rest.

• mrwh 4y ago
  I'm inclined to agree. So clever, and yet what's the actual good of it? Feels like there's a crisis in our industry (talking of the wider software engineering world) of finding real, human problems to solve. And so we end up with this, so highly advanced and yet it's not going to improve any lives (and possibly very much the reverse).
  • tomc1985 4y ago
    It will improve the lives of these projects' financial backers. Won't somebody think of the investors?
• belter 4y ago
  I can see famous actors licensing their image, with multiple shadow actors doing their moves. Now you can make 50 movies per year instead of 5. You heard it here first...
  • wsinks 4y ago
    I've been thinking it, but I haven't seen someone else write it - see ya in 2025 Belter.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • lijogdfljk 4y ago
    Yup. As an aspiring indie game dev i eagerly await large scale emotive text to speech. Being able to write a script and have it "acted" for a fraction of the cost, possibly free if i build it myself, is kinda mind blowing.
    • nl 4y ago
      Microsoft's latest models are very, very good at this. Try the demos here (and be sure to experiment with the "speaking style" parameter box, and try out the "(Neural) Preview" voices for US English): https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-services/text-to-speech/#features https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-service...
    • account42 4y ago
      As a gamer this is also something that I could see having a positive impact as currently the requirement for voice acting a) often limits the amount of text content because it costs to have it voice acted in all supported languages and b) locks in content once the voice acting is done because it would be too costly to redo it for fixed text / questst / etc.
    • sheepybloke 4y ago
      Also, shout out to the team my Mycroft for Mimic3, their open source TTS model: https://mycroft.ai/blog/introducing-mimic-3/?cn-reloaded=1 https://mycroft.ai/blog/introducing-mimic-3/?cn-reloaded=1
  • pmontra 4y ago
    Too much exposure. I'm thinking instead about a dozen more young Sean Connery 007 movies, ten more young Harrison Ford Indiana Jones and Star Wars movies, etc. diluted in the next 30 years. Replace with any other star and repeat for the next century. I guess that copyright could be extended to faces and the usual 75 years after the death of the actor. Studios will take care of that.
  • ceeplusplus 4y ago
    The shadow actor still needs to deliver a convincing performance though (=$$$). AI can't magically make bad acting turn into good acting.
    • kibibu 4y ago
      Why not create an AI model that improves acting?
      • towaway15463 4y ago
        Acting style transfer. And they thought the creatives would have the safe jobs! Ha!
  • throwaway675309 4y ago
    With the rise of really good neural TTS engines that can re-create voice actors with a high level of accuracy, I've been predicting the same thing will happen in cartoons and anime for years now.
  • UmYeahNo 4y ago
    Pretty sure that's already a thing, not for movies per sé but for ads where a celeb can license their avatar - 3d model and voice for use in ads. Especially useful when they want the celebs lips to move correctly when the ad is translated into non-native languages.
    • upwardbound 4y ago
      Damn, I didn't realize that was already being done. Are there any articles about this or other references you could point us to about this phenomenon?
  • sangnoir 4y ago
    I can see studios licensing upcoming actors in perpetuity for a pittance. Alternatively, they can synthesize a persona that never ages/complains, and have dozens on nameless grunts be the underpaid talent -like the thousands of people who've donned Goofy suits for Disney
  • ricochet11 4y ago
    see the film "The Congress" where Robin Wright does exactly this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkDyKWKNeaE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkDyKWKNeaE
  • jwmoz 4y ago
    That sucks, movie nowadays are getting pretty bad.
  • DrewADesign 4y ago
    I wonder if The Rolling Stones will be around long enough to license AI-written and performed albums.
  • poulpy123 4y ago
    you should patent/copyright the idea and profit from it
  • selfhoster11 4y ago
    You say "licensing their image", I see "pirated likeness". Not that this is necessarily a bad thing.
  • account42 4y ago
    The next step is obviously for studios to create their own artificial actors. Why let someone get famous enough to demand high licensing fees when you can fully own the likeness that gets famous. Not even sure this is a bad thing since celebrity culture isn't really good either.
  • poulpy123 4y ago
    the eternal reboot of the MCU movies
• postalrat 4y ago
  Similar technology has been around for a while and so far it's only generated a few laughs and some use in the film industry. GPT-3 hasn't taken over social media. Dall-e 2 hasn't put all graphical artists out of a job.
  • shynrou 4y ago
    ..., yet. Mostly because of the tech being decently locked down by license and limited access currently. At the pace these models are developing it's pretty much unthinkable that it will not have a big impact in the next 20 years.
    • postalrat 4y ago
      Access is limited by the hardware you have access to. Forget about training, just running these models takes a lot of memory.
      • mcbuilder 4y ago
        AI compute is increasing at a rate faster than Moore's law. Right now if DALL-E 2 takes an 8xA100 box to run inferences, how long before it's on the workstation? 4-5 years?
        • deleted 4y ago
          [deleted]
        • selfhoster11 4y ago
          It's to be expected. Almost nobody really cared about accelerating AI computations, so I expect that AI chips will be catching up.
  • anigbrowl 4y ago
    Get back to me in 5 years.
  • xpe 4y ago
    It would be unwise to ignore the trajectory, a.k.a. rate of change. In general, when looking at some phenomena, don't only look at the primary measurement (e.g. f(x)). It is often useful to look at the derivative (e.g. df/dx) as well. P.S. The second derivative also may be informative as well. Keep going if you want.
• mandmandam 4y ago
  I dunno. A lot of the worst stuff this could be used for kinda pales in comparison to what's going on already by different means. Like, if you're trying to smear someone, using big media and abusing the courts to fuck them up (say, Assange or Hale or Reality Winner) makes this look like a Fisher Price toy club next to an uzi. If you're trying to sway an election, the big data and subtle ads (and again, big media and the courts) makes far more of a difference than this. Think Brexit, Trump 2016, the count in Florida in 2000, Diebold machines, etc. If you're trying to topple a government / make taxpayers pay a huge bailout / start an illegal war / etc, etc, etc - this is just another small tool; the leather punching tool on a vast penknife. ** Conversely, the creative potential may be larger than most suspect. To me, this feels like we're getting close to something like the holodeck in Star Trek, where people can share the fruit of their imagination with anyone for virtually no cost (IP lawyers shudder, like Lionel Hutz imagining a world without lawyers).
• zamalek 4y ago
  > the rest. It's often missed that "the rest" includes plausible deniability. As states become ever more infatuated with surveillance, this is going to become extremely important.
• xpe 4y ago
  > I love the technology behind this stuff but the number of applications with negative social benefit seem to outweigh the rest. Trying to measure the overall social impact is notoriously hard. I doubt that "counting" applications is a useful way to do it. Let me refine the initial idea (above) into two more detailed ones: 1. What are the specific aspects of why this technology might have negative social implications? How might these be mitigated? 2. Who or what (people, institutions, norms, guidelines, laws, incentives, etc.) can help increase the chances that such technology is (a) well understood; (b) designed conscientiously; and (c) deployed reasonably?
  • selfhoster11 4y ago
    > 1. What are the specific aspects of why this technology might have negative social implications? How might these be mitigated? Seems pretty obvious to me. People are notoriously hard-to-patch components of any IT/social system, and exploiting them with this kind of tech is possible, because they are hardwired to expect that video faking is scarce. > 2. Who or what (people, institutions, norms, guidelines, laws, incentives, etc.) can help increase the chances that such technology is (a) well understood; (b) designed conscientiously; and (c) deployed reasonably? The horses have bolted the barn. You literally cannot stop anyone with enough GPUs/AI accelerators from replicating a free-for-all version of any "conscientious" AI scheme, unless we ban general purpose computation. This tech is already here. There's no taking it back easily.
    • account42 4y ago
      > Seems pretty obvious to me. People are notoriously hard-to-patch components of any IT/social system, and exploiting them with this kind of tech is possible, because they are hardwired to expect that video faking is scarce. People will learn to distrust video content once fake videos become commonplace so direct exploitation is only really a short term problem - at most for one generation of people growing up with friends making funny videos of things they didn't do. The longer-term problem is the loss of trust in video content used as evidence. OTOH as others have pointed out this might actually be a positive thing too considering the increasing amount of video surveillance that will too become less trustworthy and thereby also less of a problem. > unless we ban general purpose computation. Now that's a scary thought - it's unfortunatly already all too commonly accepted that people can't be trusted to decide what to run on their devices.