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Voice cloning is a surprisingly underdicussed area of generative AI. It's also much more thorny: while text-generating AI and image-generating AI atleast help e

Voice cloning is a surprisingly underdicussed area of generative AI. It's also much more thorny: while text-generating AI and image-generating AI atleast help expand the creative sphere and tend to be more obvious, voice cloning intentionally blurs the lines, which also professionally and impacts the source of the voice being cloned: https://www.axios.com/2023/07/24/ai-voice-actors-victoria-atkin-assassins-creed https://www.axios.com/2023/07/24/ai-voice-actors-victoria-at... Last month, there was an incident where a prominent voice actor had their voice cloned for an AI parody video and the actor asked them to take it down; in response, the voice actor was harrassed off of social media for a bit.

morelisp 3y ago
> text-generating AI and image-generating AI atleast help expand the creative sphere I don't think these are as distinct as you think. Especially image-generating AI uses seem driven by the same impulse as voice cloning, virtually always "I want a picture like this picture I already have of X, but drawn like artist Y" (or "I want a picture of X for purely prurient reasons"), very rarely is it people struggling to put their own ideas into the world.
- minimaxir 3y ago
  That was a stereotype from a year ago when Midjourney was first released, and hasn't been accurate for a very very long time particularly as new creative approaches have developed.
  - morelisp 3y ago
    > Data Scientist at BuzzFeed in San Francisco, creator of AI text generation tools Ah, I get it, AI tools which earn you money good and creative, AI tools which don't bad.
    - minimaxir 3y ago
      Or, alternatively, I am one of the few people who understands the many nuances in the generative AI space from experience.
aidenn0 3y ago
Hopefully slightly less thorny when the voice cloned is of someone who died 40 years before the song they have it cover; e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Jh7Jk3aSlo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Jh7Jk3aSlo
- minimaxir 3y ago
  That just makes it even more thorny because "who owns a voice" is legitimately a complicated legal question. Does the record label still own the cloned voice used for a song? What were the original samples used to clone the voice used from? With Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT you can argue that it's a massive amalgamation of inputs with no specific one having a huge impact, but voice cloning currently requires specific example(s). In the case of voice actors being unable to get their voices taken down from AI sites, they can't take legal action because the IP owners have the rights to their performance.
  - aidenn0 3y ago
    I think it's strictly less thorny because all of those things are issues with living artists, but you have lots of other added issues when the AI generated voice is also plausibly something that a living person might have done.
knodi123 3y ago
There's a guy at work who has started using an AI avatar of himself, and an ai voice generator trained to his voice. He writes his daily standup notes in a text file and then lets his robot deliver the standup for him. I could tell something was a bit off with him, but after going through the "shitty zoom filter", honestly it was subtle and most people didn't notice.
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 3y ago
  Whoa, how does one make a Zoom avatar of oneself? What tool is he using?
  - rnk 3y ago
    Yeah, how did you know it was really coming from them? ;-)
    - knodi123 3y ago
      because after he was done, he derailed the meeting for like 5 minutes telling us how he set it up. I kid , though, it was actually interesting.
      - rnk 3y ago
        I'd actually like to see how to do that. It would be cool to do it.

morelisp 3y ago

> text-generating AI and image-generating AI atleast help expand the creative sphere I don't think these are as distinct as you think. Especially image-generating AI uses seem driven by the same impulse as voice cloning, virtually always "I want a picture like this picture I already have of X, but drawn like artist Y" (or "I want a picture of X for purely prurient reasons"), very rarely is it people struggling to put their own ideas into the world.

minimaxir 3y ago
That was a stereotype from a year ago when Midjourney was first released, and hasn't been accurate for a very very long time particularly as new creative approaches have developed.
- morelisp 3y ago
  > Data Scientist at BuzzFeed in San Francisco, creator of AI text generation tools Ah, I get it, AI tools which earn you money good and creative, AI tools which don't bad.
  - minimaxir 3y ago
    Or, alternatively, I am one of the few people who understands the many nuances in the generative AI space from experience.

aidenn0 3y ago

Hopefully slightly less thorny when the voice cloned is of someone who died 40 years before the song they have it cover; e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Jh7Jk3aSlo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Jh7Jk3aSlo

minimaxir 3y ago
That just makes it even more thorny because "who owns a voice" is legitimately a complicated legal question. Does the record label still own the cloned voice used for a song? What were the original samples used to clone the voice used from? With Stable Diffusion and ChatGPT you can argue that it's a massive amalgamation of inputs with no specific one having a huge impact, but voice cloning currently requires specific example(s). In the case of voice actors being unable to get their voices taken down from AI sites, they can't take legal action because the IP owners have the rights to their performance.
- aidenn0 3y ago
  I think it's strictly less thorny because all of those things are issues with living artists, but you have lots of other added issues when the AI generated voice is also plausibly something that a living person might have done.

knodi123 3y ago

There's a guy at work who has started using an AI avatar of himself, and an ai voice generator trained to his voice. He writes his daily standup notes in a text file and then lets his robot deliver the standup for him. I could tell something was a bit off with him, but after going through the "shitty zoom filter", honestly it was subtle and most people didn't notice.

8f2ab37a-ed6c 3y ago
Whoa, how does one make a Zoom avatar of oneself? What tool is he using?
- rnk 3y ago
  Yeah, how did you know it was really coming from them? ;-)
  - knodi123 3y ago
    because after he was done, he derailed the meeting for like 5 minutes telling us how he set it up. I kid , though, it was actually interesting.
    - rnk 3y ago
      I'd actually like to see how to do that. It would be cool to do it.