10 ms·

OpenAI says it can clone a voice from just 15 seconds of audio

47 points by notRobot 3y ago

maceyhawkins 3y ago
[dead]
ShamelessC 3y ago
Isn't that true of approximately every voice cloning model released lately? I've seen as few as 3-5 seconds as a matter of fact...
- rany_ 3y ago
  They're just saying anything to bump up their value.
  - ShamelessC 3y ago
    Certainly what it seems like. They have a model they can't release without backlash, but still want the credit and don't want to wait to receive accolades until they can figure out how to prevent abuse (which I assume is just impossible).
olesya1979 3y ago
[dead]
vouaobrasil 3y ago
FTA: > OpenAI says they see this technology being useful for reading assistance, language translation and helping those who suffer from sudden or degenerative speech conditions. Of course they would. They are manipulating others by appealing to accessibility. Who can argue with that? Accessibility has become the "but think of the children" appeal of the AI world. Yes, it can help those who suffer from degenetative speech conditions, but it can also deceive and push propaganda to whole new heights. This sort of manipulation is characteristic of antisocial personality disorder. In fact, if you look up the symptoms of that disorder, technology companies like OpenAI exhibit quite a lot of them...
- jsheard 3y ago
  As a wise man once said: "drunk driving may kill a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people get to work on time, so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not"
  - vouaobrasil 3y ago
    Sounds like a fool. We have the ability to weight costs and benefits. We have advanced linear models and computers. We have the math to split the fucking atom, but when it comes to even thinking about the social costs of technology, suddenly everyone is impotent. What a joke.
    - consumer451 3y ago
      I agree with you entirely. I could not have said it better myself. However, for context, the comment you are responding to is a quote of a very sarcastic poaster known as "dril."
- e40 3y ago
  Don’t a lot of companies exhibit symptoms of ASPD?
  - vouaobrasil 3y ago
    That is true, but there are two replies: (1) First, most large companies are essentially tech companies in some way, at least in that they exist to advance technology. Therefore, your observation is good reason to abolish large companies. (2) (Direct) tech companies often exhibit one symptom that other companies don't, at least in not such a strong way. Tech companies lie more often directly to the public: car companies, drink companies, etc. don't lie about making the world a better place, they just try to appeal to basal desires. Tech companies actually are deluded enough to think they are making the world a better place, and use manipulation to convince us that this is true.
    - 3y ago
bruce343434 3y ago
I think it's plausible that it can roughly clone the timbre that my exact vocal and sinus geometry produces, then apply that to its internal representation of a "baseline human voice". However, I don't believe that it can capture exactly every nuance in articulation, emotional expression, intonation. I simply can't imagine even a voice actor iterating through "the full range" in merely 15 seconds. And what about mannerisms, like pronouncing "you all" as "y'all"? Ending every sentence by affixing the "uh" sound to the last word-uh? Or how they sound a sigh or laugh? In Dutch for instance, there's 3 ways to pronounce the R, and everyone has a certain combination of when they use which kind.
- jstummbillig 3y ago
  Sure. Edge cases will be infinite.
- xbmcuser 3y ago
  A lot of people miss the forest for the trees. They can clone a voice using 15 seconds of audio. So how good the clone will be when they have 10 min, 30 min or larger sample size. And it will probably keep getting better
- marcusverus 3y ago
  > And what about mannerisms, like pronouncing "you all" as "y'all"? In the US this is highly determined by location, to the point where the New York Times even built a cool quiz [0] that can guess where you're from pretty accurately based on a few dozen vocab questions. So there's a dataset out there that would allow you to handle most of this variance by simply plugging in a ZIP code for the person you're spoofing! [0]https://archive.is/yodpA https://archive.is/yodpA
- criddell 3y ago
  Does it really matter if they have not produced a perfect clone but merely a convincing clone?
- numpad0 3y ago
  It's often not necessary to sample all keys on a piano to make a passable piano sound generator, though that will have its own limitations. A lot of these generators rely heavily on the base model and are worse at generating e.g. Dutch accented English and/or Dutch accented Dutch. But it works great for e.g. Californian accented English with unique voice.
olesya1979 3y ago
[dead]
23B1 3y ago
Altman and OAI – and their investors, more importantly – have already proven over decades and decades that they're in it for the money and at any cost to people including their own paying customers. This generation is making the same can-kicking mistakes as their parents and nobody wants to admit it.
nonoesp 3y ago
> When the product officially rolls out there will be a “no-go voice list” that detects and prevents AI-generated speakers that are too similar to prominent figures. Should they then let anyone register their "voice id" to prevent others frok generating similar voices? What if your voice happens to resemble the voice of a "prominent figure?"
- testacpwoek 3y ago
  It's insane that this protection exists for "prominent figures" but nobody else. The same damage that can be done to prominent figures can be done to regular people, they acknowledge the damage can be done, and yet they're still rolling this out? The more OpenAI does the more it's clear they don't give a single damn about the consequences of their technology.
  - xandrius 3y ago
    That's what for-profit and investors do to morality.
    - TrueGeek 3y ago
      If you had just worked harder and become a billionaire you too could have been safe from the AI apocalypse
  - zoky 3y ago
    The “Open” in OpenAI refers to, uh, a certain part of your anatomy…
  - MrNeon 3y ago
    It is very obvious that the amount and type of damage is not the same if you clone any random person's voice or clone a political leader's voice. It is not the same damage.
    - testacpwoek 3y ago
      Murdering a random civilian and murdering a public official are also very different levels of damage, but we still outlaw and prosecute both of them. This is the same thing. Not to mention, what constitutes a political leader? Just the upper echelon? What about local civil servants? Mayors, cops, judges? Are they gonna have a database of every public or political figure in the country? No they won't. This is absurd.
nonoesp 3y ago
Descript acquired Lyrebird years ago and already have a product that can synthesize your voice. They require training data longer than 15 seconds, which could lead the out out to resemble more the actual voice. I've seen weird behaviors where the AI voice forces a British accent to pronounce certain words which I don't have. Descript also uses voice synthesis to regenerate edited portions of conversations with a noticeable cut to smoothen the transition, which is pretty useful.
sherburt3 3y ago
I would imagine if I lost my voice that I would prefer a standard TTS voice as opposed to paying a subscription to have an unholy digital facsimile voice that OpenAI owned.
lr4444lr 3y ago
First text, then images, soon video and speech. It feels like OpenAI is mostly concerned with developing proofs of the untrustability of every digital medium, creating a convincing case either for doing everything in person again, or necessitating cryptographic signatures on absolutely everything.
- tomjen3 3y ago
  Honestly cryptographic signatures being more widespread does not seem a bad thing to me. Obviously not everywhere: I don't need a reddit worldnews comment or a recipe for blueberry muffins signed.
- reaperducer 3y ago
  It feels like OpenAI is mostly concerned with developing proofs of the untrustability of every digital medium Agreed. I'm still waiting for the part of AI where it's supposed to benefit mankind. So far, it's 10% entrainment, 20% employment elimination, and 70% crypto-grade hype. The next AI winter can't come soon enough so the tech industry can get back to doing useful things.
  - Asraelite 3y ago
    > 20% employment elimination How is this not benefiting mankind? If you're concerned with unequal distribution of the generated wealth then that's a political problem, nothing to do with AI.
    - anileated 3y ago
      When I hear “ML-based generative tools pushing people out of their jobs is just a political problem”, that I hear is “ClosedAI and Microsoft definitely had nothing to do with choosing to not license and compensate original creators whose works they have acquired in order to build their commercial products, it’s all the government’s fault”. Often the same people will cry over-regulation about ML tech rollout potentially being suppressed and controlled via policy, even though that is literally the implication of their position.
notRobot 3y ago
I am not sure why this is being developed. The potential for misuse is so much greater than any possible beneficial use cases I can imagine. Text to speech is cool, why do you have to introduce technologies that allow for voice cloning, which will inevitably be used (more than it already is) to commit fraud and hurt people? Society is not ready for all of these "intelligences", heck, we can't even figure out what to do about all the drawbacks of social media and we've had it for decades.
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  > I am not sure why this is being developed. The potential for misuse is so much greater than any possible beneficial use cases I can imagine. It's being developed because for decades, tech companies have touted the supposed benefits of new technology and hidden the costs. It's been an avalanche effect of greater and greater technology for greater and greater costs. Only now, the costs are so great that people are starting to wake up. When we look back in time to see the devastation wrough by technology, we won't look at AI as the starting point. It will be the smartphones, the 4G internet, and the 8K video that we so blindly accepted without ever considering the immense changes to society that they implied. AI may be the start of the end of reasonable society, but it is only the APEX of a phenomenon that has been happening ever since we accepted fossil fuel use without considering the implicates of climate change. It's an entire societal attitude.
- MyFedora 3y ago
  I feel like I'm missing smth here? Voice cloning has a good benefit to drawback ratio compared to many technologies. Threat actors with enough resources could always clone your voice. Everyone can hire voice actors. Costs more time and money sure, but it was always possible. Beneficial use cases: * Accessibility: Give people that lost their voice their voice back. * Personalized Digital Assistants: More humane voice. * Voiceovers: Sick content creator can let the AI do the voice, filmmakers can fix mistakes in post and so on and so forth. * Language Learning: Learn an accent by mimicking how the AI voices yourself in the target accent. * Audiobook Narration: Make a good audiobook out of a textbook. * Preservation of Cultural Heritage: Preserve an accent that's about to die out. * Corporate Training: Believe it or not, a robotic voice sucks to listen to after a while. * Interactive Gaming: Entire virtual DND campaign based on a prompt with AI generated world, story, and characters drawn and voiced by AI with quality control by AI. Now compare that to guns, tanks, flamethrowers, chemical weapons, atomic bombs, hydrogen bombs, killer drones and bombers. Yeah uh... death. Made to kill people.
testacpwoek 3y ago
Making AI-voice videos of Trump and Biden playing Minecraft is one thing, they clearly sound overly robotic and that makes it funny, but being able to perfectly replicate voices is a realistic way is a technology that has very little real-life utility and so, so many real-life downsides. Literally what is the point of this tech? To eliminate voice actors? I don't buy for a second their supposed use-cases of accessibility or assisting people with disabilities. We're gonna enable people to fake voices realistically off of 15 seconds of for example a voicemail just so media companies can save a few bucks? This is actually madness.
- CatWChainsaw 3y ago
  The only "legitimate" use I can think of is making call center AI agents sound like people. And all the other ones involve getting enough of someone's "voiceprint" to impersonate them to get money or ruin reputations.
Plankaluel 3y ago
VoiceCraft, which has been released open source a week or so ago, can do the same with 5-10sec audio and is pretty convincing. It's pretty fun to play around with: https://github.com/jasonppy/VoiceCraft https://github.com/jasonppy/VoiceCraft
- washadjeffmad 3y ago
  Thanks. TorToiSe has been feeling a long in the tooth, and this looks a little more digestible.
- bijoo 3y ago
  Submitted multiple times in past few days. Here's a link to the most upvoted one as of now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39865340 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39865340 VoiceCraft: Zero-Shot Speech Editing and Text-to-Speech in the Wild (jasonppy.github.io)
Jayakumark 3y ago
Why is this big news, there are open source models that can do this for quite some time , including recently released https://github.com/jasonppy/VoiceCraft https://github.com/jasonppy/VoiceCraft
tanepiper 3y ago
That scene from Sneakers takes on a whole new level of meaning - we're actually there now...
helsinkiandrew 3y ago
"All things are lawful, but not all things are beneficial or advantageous" St Pauls Letter to the Corinthians 10:23
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
ChrisArchitect 3y ago
[dupe] Some more discussion on official post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39866493 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39866493

47 points by notRobot 3y ago

[dead]

Isn't that true of approximately every voice cloning model released lately? I've seen as few as 3-5 seconds as a matter of fact...

rany_ 3y ago
They're just saying anything to bump up their value.
- ShamelessC 3y ago
  Certainly what it seems like. They have a model they can't release without backlash, but still want the credit and don't want to wait to receive accolades until they can figure out how to prevent abuse (which I assume is just impossible).

olesya1979 3y ago

[dead]

vouaobrasil 3y ago

FTA: > OpenAI says they see this technology being useful for reading assistance, language translation and helping those who suffer from sudden or degenerative speech conditions. Of course they would. They are manipulating others by appealing to accessibility. Who can argue with that? Accessibility has become the "but think of the children" appeal of the AI world. Yes, it can help those who suffer from degenetative speech conditions, but it can also deceive and push propaganda to whole new heights. This sort of manipulation is characteristic of antisocial personality disorder. In fact, if you look up the symptoms of that disorder, technology companies like OpenAI exhibit quite a lot of them...

jsheard 3y ago
As a wise man once said: "drunk driving may kill a lot of people, but it also helps a lot of people get to work on time, so, it;s impossible to say if its bad or not"
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  Sounds like a fool. We have the ability to weight costs and benefits. We have advanced linear models and computers. We have the math to split the fucking atom, but when it comes to even thinking about the social costs of technology, suddenly everyone is impotent. What a joke.
  - consumer451 3y ago
    I agree with you entirely. I could not have said it better myself. However, for context, the comment you are responding to is a quote of a very sarcastic poaster known as "dril."
e40 3y ago
Don’t a lot of companies exhibit symptoms of ASPD?
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  That is true, but there are two replies: (1) First, most large companies are essentially tech companies in some way, at least in that they exist to advance technology. Therefore, your observation is good reason to abolish large companies. (2) (Direct) tech companies often exhibit one symptom that other companies don't, at least in not such a strong way. Tech companies lie more often directly to the public: car companies, drink companies, etc. don't lie about making the world a better place, they just try to appeal to basal desires. Tech companies actually are deluded enough to think they are making the world a better place, and use manipulation to convince us that this is true.
  - 3y ago

bruce343434 3y ago

I think it's plausible that it can roughly clone the timbre that my exact vocal and sinus geometry produces, then apply that to its internal representation of a "baseline human voice". However, I don't believe that it can capture exactly every nuance in articulation, emotional expression, intonation. I simply can't imagine even a voice actor iterating through "the full range" in merely 15 seconds. And what about mannerisms, like pronouncing "you all" as "y'all"? Ending every sentence by affixing the "uh" sound to the last word-uh? Or how they sound a sigh or laugh? In Dutch for instance, there's 3 ways to pronounce the R, and everyone has a certain combination of when they use which kind.

jstummbillig 3y ago
Sure. Edge cases will be infinite.
xbmcuser 3y ago
A lot of people miss the forest for the trees. They can clone a voice using 15 seconds of audio. So how good the clone will be when they have 10 min, 30 min or larger sample size. And it will probably keep getting better
marcusverus 3y ago
> And what about mannerisms, like pronouncing "you all" as "y'all"? In the US this is highly determined by location, to the point where the New York Times even built a cool quiz [0] that can guess where you're from pretty accurately based on a few dozen vocab questions. So there's a dataset out there that would allow you to handle most of this variance by simply plugging in a ZIP code for the person you're spoofing! [0]https://archive.is/yodpA https://archive.is/yodpA
criddell 3y ago
Does it really matter if they have not produced a perfect clone but merely a convincing clone?
numpad0 3y ago
It's often not necessary to sample all keys on a piano to make a passable piano sound generator, though that will have its own limitations. A lot of these generators rely heavily on the base model and are worse at generating e.g. Dutch accented English and/or Dutch accented Dutch. But it works great for e.g. Californian accented English with unique voice.

olesya1979 3y ago

[dead]

23B1 3y ago

Altman and OAI – and their investors, more importantly – have already proven over decades and decades that they're in it for the money and at any cost to people including their own paying customers. This generation is making the same can-kicking mistakes as their parents and nobody wants to admit it.

nonoesp 3y ago

> When the product officially rolls out there will be a “no-go voice list” that detects and prevents AI-generated speakers that are too similar to prominent figures. Should they then let anyone register their "voice id" to prevent others frok generating similar voices? What if your voice happens to resemble the voice of a "prominent figure?"

testacpwoek 3y ago
It's insane that this protection exists for "prominent figures" but nobody else. The same damage that can be done to prominent figures can be done to regular people, they acknowledge the damage can be done, and yet they're still rolling this out? The more OpenAI does the more it's clear they don't give a single damn about the consequences of their technology.
- xandrius 3y ago
  That's what for-profit and investors do to morality.
  - TrueGeek 3y ago
    If you had just worked harder and become a billionaire you too could have been safe from the AI apocalypse
- zoky 3y ago
  The “Open” in OpenAI refers to, uh, a certain part of your anatomy…
- MrNeon 3y ago
  It is very obvious that the amount and type of damage is not the same if you clone any random person's voice or clone a political leader's voice. It is not the same damage.
  - testacpwoek 3y ago
    Murdering a random civilian and murdering a public official are also very different levels of damage, but we still outlaw and prosecute both of them. This is the same thing. Not to mention, what constitutes a political leader? Just the upper echelon? What about local civil servants? Mayors, cops, judges? Are they gonna have a database of every public or political figure in the country? No they won't. This is absurd.

nonoesp 3y ago

Descript acquired Lyrebird years ago and already have a product that can synthesize your voice. They require training data longer than 15 seconds, which could lead the out out to resemble more the actual voice. I've seen weird behaviors where the AI voice forces a British accent to pronounce certain words which I don't have. Descript also uses voice synthesis to regenerate edited portions of conversations with a noticeable cut to smoothen the transition, which is pretty useful.

sherburt3 3y ago

I would imagine if I lost my voice that I would prefer a standard TTS voice as opposed to paying a subscription to have an unholy digital facsimile voice that OpenAI owned.

lr4444lr 3y ago

First text, then images, soon video and speech. It feels like OpenAI is mostly concerned with developing proofs of the untrustability of every digital medium, creating a convincing case either for doing everything in person again, or necessitating cryptographic signatures on absolutely everything.

tomjen3 3y ago
Honestly cryptographic signatures being more widespread does not seem a bad thing to me. Obviously not everywhere: I don't need a reddit worldnews comment or a recipe for blueberry muffins signed.
reaperducer 3y ago
It feels like OpenAI is mostly concerned with developing proofs of the untrustability of every digital medium Agreed. I'm still waiting for the part of AI where it's supposed to benefit mankind. So far, it's 10% entrainment, 20% employment elimination, and 70% crypto-grade hype. The next AI winter can't come soon enough so the tech industry can get back to doing useful things.
- Asraelite 3y ago
  > 20% employment elimination How is this not benefiting mankind? If you're concerned with unequal distribution of the generated wealth then that's a political problem, nothing to do with AI.
  - anileated 3y ago
    When I hear “ML-based generative tools pushing people out of their jobs is just a political problem”, that I hear is “ClosedAI and Microsoft definitely had nothing to do with choosing to not license and compensate original creators whose works they have acquired in order to build their commercial products, it’s all the government’s fault”. Often the same people will cry over-regulation about ML tech rollout potentially being suppressed and controlled via policy, even though that is literally the implication of their position.

notRobot 3y ago

I am not sure why this is being developed. The potential for misuse is so much greater than any possible beneficial use cases I can imagine. Text to speech is cool, why do you have to introduce technologies that allow for voice cloning, which will inevitably be used (more than it already is) to commit fraud and hurt people? Society is not ready for all of these "intelligences", heck, we can't even figure out what to do about all the drawbacks of social media and we've had it for decades.

vouaobrasil 3y ago
> I am not sure why this is being developed. The potential for misuse is so much greater than any possible beneficial use cases I can imagine. It's being developed because for decades, tech companies have touted the supposed benefits of new technology and hidden the costs. It's been an avalanche effect of greater and greater technology for greater and greater costs. Only now, the costs are so great that people are starting to wake up. When we look back in time to see the devastation wrough by technology, we won't look at AI as the starting point. It will be the smartphones, the 4G internet, and the 8K video that we so blindly accepted without ever considering the immense changes to society that they implied. AI may be the start of the end of reasonable society, but it is only the APEX of a phenomenon that has been happening ever since we accepted fossil fuel use without considering the implicates of climate change. It's an entire societal attitude.
MyFedora 3y ago
I feel like I'm missing smth here? Voice cloning has a good benefit to drawback ratio compared to many technologies. Threat actors with enough resources could always clone your voice. Everyone can hire voice actors. Costs more time and money sure, but it was always possible. Beneficial use cases: * Accessibility: Give people that lost their voice their voice back. * Personalized Digital Assistants: More humane voice. * Voiceovers: Sick content creator can let the AI do the voice, filmmakers can fix mistakes in post and so on and so forth. * Language Learning: Learn an accent by mimicking how the AI voices yourself in the target accent. * Audiobook Narration: Make a good audiobook out of a textbook. * Preservation of Cultural Heritage: Preserve an accent that's about to die out. * Corporate Training: Believe it or not, a robotic voice sucks to listen to after a while. * Interactive Gaming: Entire virtual DND campaign based on a prompt with AI generated world, story, and characters drawn and voiced by AI with quality control by AI. Now compare that to guns, tanks, flamethrowers, chemical weapons, atomic bombs, hydrogen bombs, killer drones and bombers. Yeah uh... death. Made to kill people.

testacpwoek 3y ago

Making AI-voice videos of Trump and Biden playing Minecraft is one thing, they clearly sound overly robotic and that makes it funny, but being able to perfectly replicate voices is a realistic way is a technology that has very little real-life utility and so, so many real-life downsides. Literally what is the point of this tech? To eliminate voice actors? I don't buy for a second their supposed use-cases of accessibility or assisting people with disabilities. We're gonna enable people to fake voices realistically off of 15 seconds of for example a voicemail just so media companies can save a few bucks? This is actually madness.

CatWChainsaw 3y ago
The only "legitimate" use I can think of is making call center AI agents sound like people. And all the other ones involve getting enough of someone's "voiceprint" to impersonate them to get money or ruin reputations.

Plankaluel 3y ago

VoiceCraft, which has been released open source a week or so ago, can do the same with 5-10sec audio and is pretty convincing. It's pretty fun to play around with: https://github.com/jasonppy/VoiceCraft https://github.com/jasonppy/VoiceCraft

washadjeffmad 3y ago
Thanks. TorToiSe has been feeling a long in the tooth, and this looks a little more digestible.
bijoo 3y ago
Submitted multiple times in past few days. Here's a link to the most upvoted one as of now: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39865340 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39865340 VoiceCraft: Zero-Shot Speech Editing and Text-to-Speech in the Wild (jasonppy.github.io)

Jayakumark 3y ago

Why is this big news, there are open source models that can do this for quite some time , including recently released https://github.com/jasonppy/VoiceCraft https://github.com/jasonppy/VoiceCraft

tanepiper 3y ago

That scene from Sneakers takes on a whole new level of meaning - we're actually there now...

helsinkiandrew 3y ago

"All things are lawful, but not all things are beneficial or advantageous" St Pauls Letter to the Corinthians 10:23

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

ChrisArchitect 3y ago

[dupe] Some more discussion on official post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39866493 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39866493