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Voice clone of Anthony Bourdain prompts synthetic media ethics questions

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Re: Voice clone of Anthony Bourdain prompts synthetic media ethics questions

#91

Out of all the celebrities, Bourdain would have viscerally despised this. He hated fake phoney people, or food. He hated when his production crew would stovepipe his bits. He hated a scene in Greese (I believe) where crew went out and bought squid, and threw them into the water to made the shoot better. I really liked Bourdain. He was one of the few celebrities that didn't seem to change with fame, or money. I watche…

As I understand it (I read this on Twitter so massive grain of salt etc.) the family concented to this explicitly. Would you feel better if it was a voice actor who could read Bourdain’s email in a perfect mimic? What about historical recreations, would you object to computers being involved in, say, recreating Abraham Lincoln’s voice? Does the age of the subject matter? I think the squeamishness about AI as it becom…

Any of those are fine - with disclosure. It seems pretty clear that in this case, they were less than transparent.

> “If you watch the film, other than that line you mentioned, you probably don’t know what the other lines are that were spoken by the A.I., and you’re not going to know,” Neville told the reviewer, Helen Rosner. “We can have a documentary-ethics panel about it later.”

...or we can have it sooner, on Twitter, and you'll get excoriated, and rightly so. I don't care if they train an AI to imitate Bourdain rapping the third verse from Modern Major General, it's a free country, but you have to be honest about it. You can't call yourself a documentarian and get cutesy about the authenticity of the material.

Re: Voice clone of Anthony Bourdain prompts synthetic media ethics questions

#92
post #47
post #7

A deepfake audio + video with mask of the mayor of ethekwini was used to encourage people to continue looting during recent riots in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. It’s scary.

Googling "Deep fake ethekwini" brings up... this comment.

Looks like we have the first recorded instance of a metafake here.

Re: Voice clone of Anthony Bourdain prompts synthetic media ethics questions

#94
I get why this is newsworthy, but I don't get why it's an ethical problem. How is it any different from hiring a really good Bourdain impersonator to read the email? Lots of celebrities have pitch-perfect impersonators; is this a thing we worried about when it wasn't AI doing the impersonation?

Re: Voice clone of Anthony Bourdain prompts synthetic media ethics questions

#95
post #47
post #7

A deepfake audio + video with mask of the mayor of ethekwini was used to encourage people to continue looting during recent riots in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. It’s scary.

Googling "Deep fake ethekwini" brings up... this comment.

This is all I could find... https://www.facebook.com/eThekwiniM/posts/4359537737429640

I don't know what the referenced video is, or if it is a deepfake though.

Re: Voice clone of Anthony Bourdain prompts synthetic media ethics questions

#96
post #94

I get why this is newsworthy, but I don't get why it's an ethical problem. How is it any different from hiring a really good Bourdain impersonator to read the email? Lots of celebrities have pitch-perfect impersonators; is this a thing we worried about when it wasn't AI doing the impersonation?

You just described a second, older/easier way of violating the same ethical norm of not lying about someone having said something they didn't.

Re: Voice clone of Anthony Bourdain prompts synthetic media ethics questions

#98
post #96
post #94

I get why this is newsworthy, but I don't get why it's an ethical problem. How is it any different from hiring a really good Bourdain impersonator to read the email? Lots of celebrities have pitch-perfect impersonators; is this a thing we worried about when it wasn't AI doing the impersonation?

You just described a second, older/easier way of violating the same ethical norm of not lying about someone having said something they didn't.

Has it always been considered an ethical violation to have an impersonator read something a celebrity wrote? This can't be the first time that's happened.

Re: Voice clone of Anthony Bourdain prompts synthetic media ethics questions

#99
A lot of people don't realize, all high quality voice models are clones. The network is trained to mimic your voice as close as possible.

Alexa, Cortana, and Siri are all real people. That's someone's voice, synthetically preserved.

Listen for yourself.

Siri: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=z2bTymnb1uE

Alexa: https://www.wral.com/is-this-alexa/19676920/

Cortana and Siri https://vocalboothtogo.com/meet-voices-behind-cortana-siri/

Creepy but it feels like the future. To be able to copy a unique part of someone we consider so important. Its just strange

Re: Voice clone of Anthony Bourdain prompts synthetic media ethics questions

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've had Photoshop for 3 decades and airbrushing for even longer and it's had far-reaching impacts across society... no one is really immune to it because it isn't obvious and it has arguably poisoned realistic ideals around body image. IMO we need to mandate disclosures around deepfakes. It's impossible on a peer-to-peer level, but commercially it should be clearly disclosed.

We don't get immunity to photoshop in the "I can tell from some of the pixels" sense, but we gain immunity in the sense that we no longer accept every image as representing absolute truth. Plenty of people today still think that video manipulation more sophisticated than an instagram filter takes a Hollywood budget or a lot of expertise. Once people get more experience seeing and creating deepfakes on their own they'…

I think your hypothesis is defeated by how people take screenshots of text (captions, headlines) at face value on Reddit, Twitter, and other social media. You can scroll through all the comments and you won’t find a single person asking for a source, just people reacting to some text. If people don’t have an immunity to a screenshot of text that claims something, how are they going to have an immunity to Photoshop and deep fakes?
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