This is the first startup here where I think the tech should essentially be illegal. It's cool tech, yes I'm impressed at the achievement. Nuclear weapons are impressive too. OTOH this kind of thing is getting easier and easier to do, so what's a realistic way forward?
Our only hope is that politicians and celebrities get sick of their voices and likeness being used to scam people or sell crypto or viagra and get laws passed against this type of impersonation.
This is the first startup here where I think the tech should essentially be illegal. It's cool tech, yes I'm impressed at the achievement. Nuclear weapons are impressive too. OTOH this kind of thing is getting easier and easier to do, so what's a realistic way forward?
I'm with you on this. I can't honestly think a good use case for the average user to generate audio this way. Maybe some niche use case in like movie or tv production where you can generate a missing line without flying in an actor or something. Or maybe for generating dialogues for videogames. But those are business use cases, not things for the genral public.
Artificially generated but faithful to the original voice for people losing theirs or being unable to speak for various medical reasons. Obviously the fun/deceiving use-cases are much more numerous.
This is the first startup here where I think the tech should essentially be illegal. It's cool tech, yes I'm impressed at the achievement. Nuclear weapons are impressive too. OTOH this kind of thing is getting easier and easier to do, so what's a realistic way forward?
Serious question. What is the difference in implications between this and a professional voice impersonator? I don't think it's as dangerous as we think it is. All of the consequences that Play.ht bring to society are already possible today and have been for some time. The difference is that it will be easier, but I don't think that makes it any more dangerous.
there's a massive higher bar in effort and costs in getting an impersonator
whilst this is cheap and easy - increasing the potential for scams in big way - even to the point of automating the scam
This is the first startup here where I think the tech should essentially be illegal. It's cool tech, yes I'm impressed at the achievement. Nuclear weapons are impressive too. OTOH this kind of thing is getting easier and easier to do, so what's a realistic way forward?
I'm with you on this. I can't honestly think a good use case for the average user to generate audio this way. Maybe some niche use case in like movie or tv production where you can generate a missing line without flying in an actor or something. Or maybe for generating dialogues for videogames. But those are business use cases, not things for the genral public.
When my sons were young, I would tell them elaborate stories where they were the main characters. I recorded most of the stories, but it is full of verbal fillers (um,ahh), since I was making it up as I went. I would love to convert the audio to text with Whisper, filter out fillers and then output the cleaned up version in my own voice. I could see this type of workflow being very popular with podcasters.
I'm having a hard time coming up with a non-nefarious use case for this.
Anything written can be listened to with this tech. Any news article, any short story, a draft of a piece of writing you're working on. There is too much text for human beings to read it all.
> There is too much text for human beings to read it all.
so your logic is that all that text should be audio and people will consume more? Because I got news for you, reading is faster than listening.
https://play.ht/app/voice-cloning > Clone a voice now Pops a modal: Try Voice Cloning for Free! Enter a credit card for $0.00/mo with no other information on screen Bounce. Why not let me play around with it a little without asking for a credit card?
It's an effort to prevent abuse. We previously asked users to pay upfront but most people want to try it out first.
Do you accept anonymous Visa/Mastercard/etc. gift cards in this payment method? If you do... are you actually preventing abuse or just making it slightly more complicated to pull off?
This is the first startup here where I think the tech should essentially be illegal. It's cool tech, yes I'm impressed at the achievement. Nuclear weapons are impressive too. OTOH this kind of thing is getting easier and easier to do, so what's a realistic way forward?
Serious question. What is the difference in implications between this and a professional voice impersonator? I don't think it's as dangerous as we think it is. All of the consequences that Play.ht bring to society are already possible today and have been for some time. The difference is that it will be easier, but I don't think that makes it any more dangerous.
> The difference is that it will be easier
Seems like you know what the difference is, you just haven't assigned it the proper weight.
Is there any positive use case for this technology? YC, care to comment?
I'm honestly a bit baffled at the lack of thought here. Anything written can be listened to with this tech. Any news article, any short story, a draft of a piece of writing you're working on. There is too much text for human beings to read it all. Translating from one medium to another is extremely useful.
> I guess eventually people will go back to only meeting face to face for important communications This seems to be the only realistic future. This sort of technology literally makes it impossible to trust anything electronic. People were worried about the balkanization of the internet, but now they look like optimists.