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Unauthorized "David Attenborough" AI clone narrates developer's life, goes viral
- vbeeaz 3y ago"unauthorized" is a weasel word because it implies that it should be necessary for the developer to ask David Attenborough for authorization to create a clone of his voice using AI.
- Willyfrog 3y agohe probably has verbal authorization XD
- Almondsetat 3y agoBy this metric I should not ask for permission to train a model on your liking and share with your wife generated pictures of you having sex with other women
- jwestbury 3y agoIntent matters a lot when it comes to both morality and legality.
- Boogie_Man 3y agoCorrect except for the "share with your wife" bit. That implies intentional deception, which does not appear to be what the developer is doing.
- TerrifiedMouse 3y agoRight of publicity. https://www.inta.org/topics/right-of-publicity/ https://www.inta.org/topics/right-of-publicity/
- orbital-decay 3y agoDoes fair use apply here? (I don't know) It's not like the author narrates a full-blown wildlife movie with the voice of David Attenborough. It's just a funny demo which doesn't depend on the specific voice (could be anyone), and also makes it clear the voice is synthetic.
- tantalor 3y agoIt is not clear that the voice is synthetic
- orbital-decay 3y agoHold on, are we looking at the same video and Twitter message? [1] He clearly states what he's doing, and in the video he launches some program that appears to speak in Attenborough's voice. How clear is clear enough? [1] https://nitter.woodland.cafe/charliebholtz/status/1724815159590293764 https://nitter.woodland.cafe/charliebholtz/status/1724815159...
- petemir 3y agoIt’s not clear from the voice alone
- TerrifiedMouse 3y agoIf you use a small clip of Brad Pitt in a 10 sec ad without his permission, he will probably sue you and win. So I don't think fair use is going to protect you.
- dcchambers 3y agoDisagree. If this could be created without using recordings of his voice to train the model, then sure. I agree a "sound-alike" like that is fair game. But since actual recordings of his voice were used in order to train the model to recreate the sound, inflection, cadence, etc...it should be required to get authorization to use those recordings for this purpose.
- Chris2048 3y ago> But since actual recordings of his voice were used in order to train Tell that to all the ppl who contributed to Co-Pilots training set..
- dcchambers 3y agoI have the same reservations That said, I think there's a slight difference in that this is targeting a specific individual.
- empyrrhicist 3y agoI mean, yeah? That's also something we need to seriously consider. These tools have the ability to copy the labor and property of others in a way that is economically important and socially challenging, and we don't yet have a legal framework to handle it.
- cma 3y agoShould an actor playing a public figure in a biopic have to get permission to study the subject's voice from copyrighted sources in order to reproduce it for the film (without AI)?
- empyrrhicist 3y agoCan actors audio-visually mimic their characters with increasingly convincing realism, and can they be artificially scaled, duplicated, extended, and applied for just the cost of a bit of hardware and electricity? It is not sensible to hand wave the "human like" learning process and ignore economic reality. This area requires careful thought about how our notions of individual rights apply to new technologies, and what kind of economic system can exist as a result.
- krisoft 3y ago> "unauthorized" is a weasel word Is not a weasel word. There is nothing unambiguous about it. > it implies that it should be necessary for the developer to ask David Attenborough for authorization Yes. It does. Now you might disagree with that, but it perfectly unambiguously means that.
- vbeeaz 3y agoIt is ambiguous because it makes it sound like we are talking legality here, but there's nothing illegal about making a project like this if you do not profit from it. Therefore, it is a weasel word.
- BSDobelix 3y agoI think you're right, as long as it's clearly labelled as AI-generated.
- thaumasiotes 3y agoWhat? It means nothing of the kind. Have you never heard about unauthorized biographies?
- throw101010 3y agoI wouldn't call it a weasel word because it describes accurately the fact nobody gave them the authorization to use the likeness of Attenborough, and there are laws to protect people's likeness in multiple jurisdictions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights) that might require such authorization (whether they could be applied in the case of AI remains to be tested, but apparently most of them do not question the "means" to impersonate but the act of it). It raises an interesting discussion about this though, how is this different from someone making an impression of him and doing a comedy show of it for example. They also had to listen to him for hours to reproduce the voice correctly, are they now infringing some copyright when they use this voice? To me, as long as you clearly state that this is an impersonation/parody, and there is no deception, I do not really see a reason to protect this, even for music. But I'd like to hear arguments for a protection and how it would be enforced, how do you judge of the likeness, how do you know/prove which source material was used for training for example.
- lancesells 3y agoHow is it different than an impersonator? 1. Let's say there's 1000 people that could, or would, want to truly impersonate him in the world as a job. Now there's 8 billion who don't need rest, who don't need to practice, who won't be indistinguishable from the real thing.
- meheleventyone 3y agoDepends on how it’s represented. If you booked David Attenborough and an impersonator showed instead you’d be annoyed. If TV shows started using an impersonator instead of Attenborough but said it was him both the audience and Attenborough would be annoyed when found out.
- lancesells 3y agoI'm not sure what you mean here but let me make my point to the "no big deal" proponents. Would you be ok if AI was used to impersonate you across the internet? Would you mind if I made a twitter account in your name and phone calls with your voice or upload to Youtube videos of yourself? I wouldn't do anything illegal or to make any money. It would just be entertainment impersonating your likeness and saying whatever I would want you to say.
- devnull3 3y agoThese things have suddenly going mainstream and lot of ppl (including me) are having existential question: what does it mean to be a human? PS: It will be fun to do in "damn nature u r scary" voice & style [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vlFHlSm1r4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vlFHlSm1r4
- davidhs 3y agoWe're becoming (cognitively) obsolete.
- andsoitis 3y ago> existential question: what does it mean to be a human? One perspective that might be helpful is that humans have for many millennia pondered this question, so it isn't new. We have a more exacting (but not perfect) definition from a biological perspective. We also have philosophical theories about personhood[1] and mind[2]. One can hypothesized that these, and other characteristics, such as the emergence of culture, etc. also exist in other entities (whether on earth, alien, or technology like AI), so perhaps humans can be though of us as occupying a region across these different dimensions that represent a unique combination. But we don't have exclusivity over a particular dimension (like reasoning, for example). Another perspective that might be helpful is that even if there are other entities that are very much like humans, it does not take away YOUR and MY experience of being human or the value and joy we derive from it. If anything, it can help us understand ourselves better. This introspection ability is another one of those characteristics that humans have. [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-personal/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-personal/ [2] https://plato.stanford.edu/search/searcher.py?query=mind https://plato.stanford.edu/search/searcher.py?query=mind
- devnull3 3y ago> so it isn't new I agree but so far mainly philosophers & intellectuals used to ponder. With advancement in tech many believed that intellectual or creative work is safe. I think now this is a jolt to a lot of white-collar folks who are looped in with the recent advancements in AI. Its not that intellectual or creative work will vanish but a lot of the current work will be commoditized.
- cube2222 3y agoThis demo is frankly one of the most mind-blowing things I’ve seen so far in the recent generative-AI boom. Could be quite cool to use in games, esp. competitive online ones, for a more dynamic announcer.
- tunnuz 3y agoThat’s so clever and cool.
- belugacat 3y agoRight now this requires API tokens and being dependent on third party companies that will cut off your access if they decide they don’t like you. The moment these models can run locally on the kind of cheap hardware that phone scam operations have will be the real Pandora’s box moment. (I give it 3-5 years or so)
- agloe_dreams 3y agoI kinda wonder how close you could get with Core ML on iOS. Apple already ships an iffy voice clone software.
- fotcorn 3y agoThe recently released XTTS-v2 model[0] from coqui.ai is coming very close to what ElevenLabs[1] can do. It runs reasonably fast on a recent GPU, and should also work on CPU. Requires a 3 second (!) clip of the voice you want to clone. License does not allow commercial use. 0: https://huggingface.co/coqui/XTTS-v2 https://huggingface.co/coqui/XTTS-v2 1: https://elevenlabs.io/ https://elevenlabs.io/
- alpaca128 3y ago> Requires a 3 second (!) clip of the voice you want to clone. Sure, if you want a guaranteed uncanny valley experience. There is no way a few seconds are enough to cover all the ways a specific person pronounces things. A person's voice is much more than just the pitch and with a 3 second sample anyone who knows them will be able to tell something's off within 3 seconds.
- dataangel 3y agoNo I suspect 3 seconds is often enough. It's not learning how you pronounce each word, it's seeing some pronunciations you use and from that guessing how you would pronounce other things based on how those pronunciations are clustered in its training data. In other words if in that 3 seconds it hears you say y'all it has a pretty good shot at inferring how you say a lot of other things.
- DanielBMarkham 3y agoI loved this when he posted it. Taking this a step further, and being facetious, I'm thinking of starting my own network! It's all me, all the time. Sometimes I'll be a nature show, sometimes I'll be in a spy movie, sometimes I'll have the guys from Mystery Science Theater 3000 cracking jokes at how dumb I am. Can't be that hard to do what this guy did, only in twenty-four different genres, one for each hour of the day. Turn it on, let it play. I think it would be fun. Having said that, can you imagine somebody with mental illness, perhaps that makes them paranoid, having an AI interweave them into a spy thriller or murder mystery? People already took computers too seriously before ChatGPT and the like. Having some official-sounding narrator, somebody you know from previous appearances, helping you out in your fantasy life? As much fun as this is going to be, it also bothers me quite a bit.
- eli 3y agoHave you tried to get a GPT to write a joke? It’s got a ways to go.
- DanielBMarkham 3y agoI read this recently. I can't vouch for the source and I haven't researched it. https://time.com/6301288/the-ai-jokes-that-give-me-nightmares/ https://time.com/6301288/the-ai-jokes-that-give-me-nightmare...
- qingcharles 3y agoThat article is pretty incredible. The movie industry is going to be a wild ride over the next few years.
- throwaway4aday 3y agoThe author just casually glosses over this point and never returns to it > One of the reasons I find these programs scary is that they seem to want to murder humans. They talk about it a lot, even when you ask them to be nice.
- 3y ago
- wrp 3y agoI want to have Emma Thompson narrating my life as in Stranger than Fiction (2006).
- guilamu 3y agoSame with Scarlett Johansson in Her.
- harshitaneja 3y agoLittle did he know, his life would be as mundane as the one before. (Edit: I wrote this but as soon as I did it sounds rude. Didn't intend it that way)
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago[dupe] More discussion here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38281079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38281079
- losvedir 3y agoSomeone at work shared this and I thought it was hilarious and awesome. A number of other people found it disrespectful or gross. I'm sort of fascinated at the values divide. I can see why SAG/ASTRA, or voice actors, aren't going to like this technology, but it doesn't feel all that different to any other industry swept away by tech, whether that's farming, horses and carriages, mining, etc. In other words, I can see the negative economic impact it will have on some people, which we may (or may not) want to protect via legislation, but I don't see how it escalates to a moral question. "Disrespectful" to me is flipping off David Attenborough, not getting a computer to amusingly narrate mundane things in a decent facsimile of his voice.
- tolmasky 3y agoHow is it different than someone making a funny video where they impersonate David Attenborough? Those aren’t generally considered disrespectful, right? Like, I get the potential scale is different. But this is some joke video, not someone trying to actually replace David Attenborough or something.
- asylteltine 3y agoI agree and the difference is commercial rights and intent. Parody, jokes, etc are fine. Using this to replace him on a documentary, not okay. Fair use already covers this all they have to do is extend copyright protections to peoples likeness and voices
- epolanski 3y ago> Using this to replace him on a documentary, not okay. I think it's legal if you're the copyright holder, e.g. Disney putting dead actors in their movies did not need anybody's permission, nor does any derivative work such as videogames as they own the image right to the characters they play. It would be interesting if they did a Planet Earth IV with Attenbrough's voice without his consent as David plays himself really...Not a fictional character.
- lsaferite 3y ago
- Ajay-p 3y agoThis was fantastic but I understand that Mr. Attenborough would be upset. I would hope that one day my life will be narrated by George Guidall.
- totallywrong 3y agoI'm sure Sir David would have a good laugh. People getting upset for this makes no sense.
- mechhacker 3y agoWhen I see a lot of this voice replication I am reminded of something. (Dune series spoiler) For example, Duncan Idaho keeps being brought back with cloning tech, over and over, for centuries, because Leto II just likes him. Over and over, the same man keeps being put by the (nearly) immortal emperor's side... I ask: are we stuck as a monoculture, not making new, interesting things, but simply replicating older ones? The technology is novel and interesting, but culturally, aside from the concerns about annoying the people being replicated, it seems a bit stuck.
- mjburgess 3y ago"Not making new things" is moreso the default, see: all mythology, religion, etc.
- galdosdi 3y agoThis reminds me of something I noticed: disproportionately, the classics in a given field (ie, the work agreed upon to be particularly important, influential, etc) are disproportionately the ones that were made shortly after a new medium or technique was invented. For example, It's almost as if we default to tending towards imitation and recycling, and only each time a totally new technology changes what is possible do we really try new things -- but the well of newness is rapidly exhausted and so those artisans who are fortunate to be able to be the first to work with a new medium get to be the ones that create its classics. The question is why? Does a medium combined with a culture totally determine the kind of work that can be made? Or is the influence of the original classics impossible to escape? In other words, is this situation path dependent?
- purpleflame1257 3y agoI'm not sure that's true. Look at the printing press. Sure, Shakespeare is a classic, but most of the rest of what we read as "classics" probably centers around the mid-1800s (at least in English-speaking countries)
- galdosdi 3y ago
- globalnode 3y agointake orifice O_o
- techterrier 3y agoHeres cockney gangster 'Bricktop' from the Guy Richie movie Snatch, talking about birdwatching https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRRrlrMDAd-a2sn1d81lTKA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRRrlrMDAd-a2sn1d81lTKA
- slhomme 3y agoLoved it, I thought that was quite hilarious! I can see how people get a little upset about it though, but in my mind this kind of content is just unavoidable. I myself have been playing a lot with this kind of tech lately by creating realistic clones (voice + videos) of YouTubers and tiktokers. I think it has potential to go viral quite easily. I never published any of those though, because of ethical concerns. Just a question of time before other creators do this at scale though. I almost did that with cloning real TV newscasters from bbc / fox / cnn, etc... but decided not to. But I did create a 100% "fake" journalist for an app that lets you create breaking news on the fly [1]. The result is still a little rough, obviously, but I can already tell how in just a few months it'll be impossible to distinguish a clone from a real person. [1] https://fakenews.me https://fakenews.me
- 4star3star 3y agoGet your parents' voices recorded in natural conversation, folks. You'll be able to talk to them after they're gone.
- lordnacho 3y agoGreat, they can criticize me from the afterlife!
- DamnInteresting 3y agoAnd, for better or worse, modern humans will lose their ability to let go.
- lioeters 3y agoOne area where this kind of technique would be a game changer, I imagine, is for blind people to have their surroundings narrated in real time. For example, through a pair of glasses with a camera for input, and an earphone to listen to the continuous narration. I heard about an online service where people can sign up to help the blind by describing visual scenes that they capture on their mobile. There must be companies out there developing a similar service entirely run on machine learning.
- InCityDreams 3y agoI know yours is a small comment in a huge sea, but how would the comments know what the blind wanted to see? If I could describe what i can see now it would be a long list left to right. Do i include the sunlight reflecting off an industrial chimney? Is the chimney important? I do enjoy hallucinogenics which, to me, remove the very filters that keep us sane. As much as I love the problem, filtration will always be the problem, unless the environment is extremely controlled (like an art gallery), but even then...how to describe the Mona Lisa. Let alone its frame.
- reidjs 3y agoIt’s a hard problem for sure. I guess You fine tune to their preferences. Everyone gets the “Giant bus headed straight towards you!!!!” Alert. But let’s say you’re at the grocery store, maybe it’s clever enough to read the aisle descriptions for example.
- lioeters 3y agoThat does sound like an interesting and tough problem, how an intelligent agent can know what is relevant to the listener, and what to filter out. I imagine it would work similarly to how human brains do, or at least how we think they do. To notice the "big picture" first, recognize large shapes then smaller details, or faster moving things then static things. > remove the very filters that keep us sane Haha, yes, I know what you mean. If our brains paid attention to everything coming in through the doors of perception, our mind would be flooded with information, way too much for practical purposes. Occasionally it is helpful to access such a mode of experience, but the filters are necessary for daily life in society. We can't be going around in rapturous ecstasy of gnosis all the time. A related problem might be too much filtering, or the wrong criteria for the filters, missing what's important. I imagine this could be solved by a conversational interface, where the listener talks with the ambient narrator to zoom in/out and focus on details as desired.
- nurple 3y agoEven though it is going to be extremely painful, one thing that excites me most about AI is the distinct possibility that it obliterates the concept of artificial scarcity that so much of the world relies on to create money these days. IMO, AI is exposing the frail and unnatural aspect of this legally-protected rent seeking. No, I don't think the legal system will be able to keep up, and I also don't think the infoligarchs in Silicon Valley will be able to keep a lid on the box. Yes, I'm frightened that my skills in slinging code will be available via a simple query to a model(at least as frightened as a SAG), but I'm also heartened that if these glass ceilings are shattered that we may finally make the evolutional step necessary to break so many of us free of this amoral and inhuman treadmill of misery that simply has no reason to exist with the resources at our disposal.
- bathtub365 3y agoArtificial scarcity of what? Content?
- DeIlliad 3y agoUsing the phrase "artificial scarcity" to describe someone's skills is ridiculous. A voice actor or artist being paid for their skills is not rent seeking.
- nurple 3y agoSure, their creation is held behind legal walls in order to create, by definition, an artifical scarcity from which it derives its monetary value. If it was not protected by such a wall, and was not scarce, it would have no monetary value. No, I don't think the inherent value in their talent is artificial, but I _do_ think that the monetary system we've built around such things as a necessity to survive in our modern world is abberant and bound to fail. ETA: Just to give some flavor. Do you realize how much human energy is expended in finding ways to build these walls of artificial scarcity? It's frankly sad. I was watching a showmatch that a streamer I enjoy watching was invovolved in (ShahZaM a Valorant pro). For nearly an hour in the leadup to the showmatch we got treated to a realtime negotiation between him an the player organizing his team. From comments like "no I can't use that graphic because I'm sponsored by another PC builder", to "every dollar I get I'll increase the size by 1px", and the piece de resistance "Whaaaat?! we have casters?? I'm not even getting paid for this!", followed by a streamer-initiated 10(!) count roll of twitch ads. When the match was over, Tarik, the guy who organized the allstar team, was supposed to do an interview with the casters but had accidentally kicked off his own 10-pack of ads and they had to embarrasingly stall until his viewers were done watching them so they could see the interview live. It was a repugnant view behind the curtains of the rediculuous amount of work a lot of people go to in order to profit behind the artificial scarcity put in front of their skills. This is usally hidden from the viewer behind production, but happened to leak in this instance due to the slapdash nature of the event. Frankly, we can, and we must do better.
- titaniumtown 3y agoOriginal project originally discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38281079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38281079
- mclightning 3y agoOriginal, original, clone
- ryandvm 3y agoI think I'll be using a Christopher Walken clone as my documentary narrator.
- MBCook 3y agoDanny DeVito playing Frank from It’s Always Sunny would be a hilarious narrator.
- jeffreyames 3y agoThis could be used as a consciousness override, replacing your own thoughts in realtime. I can think of some good applications and many terrible ones
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- seydor 3y agoThis would be more fun than many of the videos i'm watching. When will someone make a video generator for this?
- perihelions 3y agoDid Dante get authorization to clone Virgil's likeness—to put words in his mouth, and send him to hell to narrate the damnation of Christian popes? How would one distinguish the two? To me, this is all just a continuation of human storytelling tradition in different media.
- gwd 3y agoYou're correct that this "creative re-application of cultural standards", along the lines of Dante / Virgil, is what's going on here. There are some key differences. For one thing, Virgil and everyone who knew him personally had been dead for 1500 years, while David Attenborough is still alive, and those who know him personally will live for another 50 years. For another, it was absolutely clear to everyone that Virgil didn't actually say the things Dante put in his mouth; whereas as deepfakes improve, it will be more likely that people think David Attenborough actually did say whatever has been put into his mouth with a deepfake.
- perihelions 3y ago- "For another, it was absolutely clear to everyone that Virgil didn't actually say the things Dante put in his mouth;" It was far worse than that! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgil#Legends https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgil#Legends The whole thing's a mess. It'd be hard to draw a bright line between the crazy bullshit medievals* literally believed about Virgil, and the poetic, metaphorical bullshit Dante wrote about him. (*I actually had a Latin professor in the 21st century sincerely advocate that Eclogues interpretation. There's a mode of thinking behind this stuff that, to put it tactfully, confounds people about what's the difference between fiction and reality).
- grej 3y agoWhen I call my bank, they use a "voiceprint identification" that requires me to say a sentence and then matches that to my voiceprint. I am wondering if that is a massive security hole.
- micromacrofoot 3y agoyes, even before this technology
- SpicyLemonZest 3y agoI haven't seen any sort of argument for why it would be secure. I guess it's probably no worse than the other common banking practice, one-factor auth using a 4-6 digit numeric only password.
- totallywrong 3y agoI'd readily switch to another bank.
- davelondon 3y ago"goes viral"
- thrill 3y agoVoices are not copyrighted and do not require "authorization". If my nephew wants to go around sounding like Goofy all the time (as he does) he is free to do so, though it may cost him invitations to dinner - it'd be the same if he was using Attenborough's voice.
- leobg 3y agoInteresting take. The counter argument is that the basic idea behind copyright is that the expression of personality through the way you formulate ideas is a part of “you“. That somebody would start talking like you, or looking like you, and enrich himself by essentially cloning you just has historically, never been a problem serious enough to create legislation. Just as there was probably no copyright law before Gutenberg.
- numpad0 3y agoQuoting another user from an adjacent topic[0]; I for myself believe in 1., it seems generative AI tools is slowly becoming popular as lesser substitute to human arts, wherever there has to be data but any noise will do. No one listened to low-effort Text-to-Speech content pre-AI, some did for high-effort TTS content, and in neither case it was because the quality of synthesis was bad or good. > I think Max Tegmark said there's 3 main camps of people talking about AI: > 1. The people who think AI won't really work (at least in some fundamental way - it might make some stochastic melody but it won't have any creative spark to it). > 2. The people who think AI will be able to do everything better than humans (in every possible way, at least as far as a mere human can tell) and that this will be great. > 3. The people who think AI will be able to do everything better than humans (in every possible way, at least as far as a mere human can tell) and that this will be terrible. 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38289548 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38289548
- dralley 3y agoOption 1b) it will work "well enough", cheaply enough, that it replaces human interaction in a number of places despite making the experience worse.