I had a job about a month or two ago on Upwork which was supposedly going to be about a character.ai clone or something similar. After discussing it for weeks,

I had a job about a month or two ago on Upwork which was supposedly going to be about a character.ai clone or something similar. After discussing it for weeks, on the last day they decided it wasn't about personas in general and absolutely had to be impersonation of Trump and Biden. I told them it was a very questionable idea. But I needed the money to be able to make rent. So I took the job hoping that they were still interested in other types of characters and would be reasonable. I had a basic demo with Trump's voice up in about a week. I showed them the first demo and had a phone call suggesting that this might actually be illegal pretty soon. They were sure there was no problem and said they had spoken to lawyers. The next day, Eleven Labs sent out an email explaining that some voices were getting banned. The attempt to clone Biden's was blocked by Eleven Labs. They had structured the contract as a single fixed fee, although what we had discussed was weekly payments. At the last minute without discussion they had thrown in a talking head requirement. So I received the first 451 HTTP status code I have ever seen when requesting that D-ID do a lip sync animation of Trump's head. I ended up using a different video model from replicate that was not a great lip sync but very engaging if you squint. I did not do Biden. Did about three weeks of work and collected around $630 after Upwork took their fee. I'm proud to say I did make my rent payment though since I had another project at the same time which was a low hourly but still helped.