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Launch HN: Play.ht (YC W23) – Generate and clone voices from 20 seconds of audio

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121–130 of 471 posts

Re: Launch HN: Play.ht (YC W23) – Generate and clone voices from 20 seconds of audio

#121
post #53

I'm having a hard time coming up with a non-nefarious use case for this.

Generating audio for an audio book: If an author could speak for 20 minutes and then generate audio for an entire book from the book's text and the model, I think that would be very useful.

Re: Launch HN: Play.ht (YC W23) – Generate and clone voices from 20 seconds of audio

#122
Some part of me views this moment in history as such a force multiplier that it seems myopic to squabble about the nickels and dimes we'd get for our bird sounds and cave paintings. I wish I was smarter and already caught up enough to take advantage of all of this.

I tried resisting the urge to stop myself from even posting this comment, but I'm willing to make an ass of myself so that somebody who knows more about this than me can try to steel-man this for me.

What do we do? The penny is the smallest bit of USD we have, and hyper-fractional parts that incrementally make up an unimaginably large whole are now the world we live in. It's difficult to imagine a world where you receive 175 billion royalty transactions of 1/1,000,000,000th of a $0.01 in a given year, but maybe that's a reasonable scenario to think about when it comes to the couple of bucks an average teen or adult should get from their presumed default contributions to large language models.

Remember trying to hit that minimum threshold payment for Google Adsense with your Blogspot, then finally getting your check after 15 years? If nothing else, we shouldn't blithely tolerate that again, because we didn't sign up for this. (We signed up for stuff even worse than this, technically, but in those cases at least we clicked "I Agree.")

Re: Launch HN: Play.ht (YC W23) – Generate and clone voices from 20 seconds of audio

#123

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?

Right on the top of their page is the example: "good afternoon sir, I will just need your credit card number and security code to proceed." Wow.

Re: Launch HN: Play.ht (YC W23) – Generate and clone voices from 20 seconds of audio

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Massively reducing costs for Voice Over in Video Games. This should make it even feasible to create mods with audio which would be great :)

I would consider studios taking voice actors' voices and using them to generate new content beyond their contract to be abuse. I'm sure big corporations are rubbing their hands in anticipation, but I'm sure killing the VA industry will make the world just a tiny bit worse for everyone else. Mods are more difficult to attach a moral judgement to. I don't think I'd really consider them malicious, as long as they're not…

On the other hand, why shouldn't voice actors benefit from this tech?

I can easily imagine a future where AI-generated impersonations are deemed by courts or new legislation to be protected by personality rights. In that world, voice actors could expand their business by offering deeply discounted rates for AI-generated work.

Alternatively, if/when tech like Play.ht is consistently good enough, maybe it just becomes a standard practice for all voice acting work to include a combination of human- and AI-generated content, like a programmer using Copilot or a writer using GPT.

Re: Launch HN: Play.ht (YC W23) – Generate and clone voices from 20 seconds of audio

#126
post #26

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?

But what is a realistic way forward? Do you think that scammers won't have this technology in 2 years? Can we really prevent any illegal use of neural networks at this point? With weapons that you actually have to physically buy, you can intervene on a country level (to some degree). But already with those 3D printed ones, we are basically doomed. Of course it's a tragedy of the commons type of situation. But banning…

[deleted]

Re: Launch HN: Play.ht (YC W23) – Generate and clone voices from 20 seconds of audio

#127
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some cool uses like dubbing movies in foreign languages while keeping the original "voice styles" or having your long dead relatives talking to you in some memorabilia etc. It could also cause unexpected creativity explosion e.g. in games or fan fiction movies. To avoid misuses we might perhaps find the only good use of blockchain.

>long dead relatives talking to you in some memorabilia etc. It seems a bit weird to me though. I mean, looking back at old records can still pass as mere nostalgic behavior. Wanting new sentences pronounced in disguise of lost relative voices is not great in term of respect for these people to share my own feelings. Also I guess that now there is not much preventing completely new songs with whatever lyrics staring…

It is weird, and as usual there is a Black Mirror episode with this exact premise. The unforeseen consequences in the episode even seem pretty realistic based on current GPT behavior.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back

Re: Launch HN: Play.ht (YC W23) – Generate and clone voices from 20 seconds of audio

#128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PGP exists, it is just no one uses it

PGP doesn't help you with phone and video calls.

not really the point. a PGP-style tech could easily exist for phone or video tomorrow, if it doesn't already. but PGP-style tech for email (called "PGP") has existed for 32 years and basically no one uses it. whether or not the tech exists doesn't matter nearly as much as whether or not people actually use it.

Re: Launch HN: Play.ht (YC W23) – Generate and clone voices from 20 seconds of audio

#129
post #53

I'm having a hard time coming up with a non-nefarious use case for this.

Generating audio for an audio book: If an author could speak for 20 minutes and then generate audio for an entire book from the book's text and the model, I think that would be very useful.

20 seconds*

Re: Launch HN: Play.ht (YC W23) – Generate and clone voices from 20 seconds of audio

#130
I think this tech is super cool, but why is the API priced with subscription tiers rather than just some per-word rate? It would make it easier to develop with and budget for if the cost was based on actual usage (like the OpenAI API is, for example).
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