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

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

#221

Post by code51 »

sinuhe69 wrote: post #102

How authentic is the result compared to what John Mayer did with Steve Job's voice? https://twitter.com/BEASTMODE/status/1637613704312242176

Sounding quite authentic to me. I tried to compare:

Sentence: "Undoubtedly the biggest global event that occurred in 2020 was the COVID-19 pandemic."

- https://soundcloud.com/kynes-0/steve-jobs-cloned-voice-bigge...

Sentence: "we've been working on artificial general intelligence for many years, and we believe that we're on the cusp of a major breakthrough."

- https://soundcloud.com/kynes-0/steve-jobs-cloned-voice-break...

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

#222

Post by JohnFen »

mahmoudfelfel wrote: post #200
phkahler wrote: post #18

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?

Cofounder here, What you see in the above demo is a very rate-limited demo of our upcoming model. We realize how dangerous this technology can be and have built a lot of mitigations on our main product (Play.ht) to reduce possible abuse: - We strictly moderate the generated text of any sexual, offensive, racist, or threatening content. It automatically gets detected and blocked. - We built and are offering for free a…

> haven't had any cases of abuse so far.

How do you know this?

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

#223

Post by JohnFen »

detrites wrote: post #97
phkahler wrote: post #18

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?

It's amazing how many think declaring something illegal will stop criminally-minded people having and using it.

Nobody thinks that.

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

#224

Post by h1fra »

mugr wrote: post #171
jeroenhd wrote: post #54

Listening to the demos I'm not entirely convinced by this ( https://playground.play.ht/listen/189 was pretty funny). I wonder if this company will end up taking down (and subsequently pricing out most people using this tech for fun) arbitrary voice generation just like its competitors have so far. Going to the demo page and hearing a random snippet of Musk-worship was pretty weird. Out of all audio tracks to place at…

Wow, I call to the team behind this. I really STRONGLY think you should at least implement some sort of URL stealthing. I'm not a Web Security expert, but it reminds me of a talk where some company just made medical records 'public' like this.

Oopsie, the infamous id int Auto Increment

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

#225

Post by Pxtl »

twodave wrote: post #185
Dowwie wrote: post #118

I recommend you immediately add identity verification (state-issued identification verification), set up appropriate secrets store for PII, and audit trail EVERYTHING your users are doing, storing the contents in a secure location. Yesterday. This service will be used to harm others, shortly. I do think that there are exciting, honest things that can be done with this service but you need to set up some friction for…

While I agree with you, the problem is far bigger than any one company in my opinion. These tools are already accessible enough to individuals that no audio or video is trustworthy, regardless of its source. I suspect we can still detect whether most faked audio/video is authentic or not algorithmically, but that's going to turn into an arms race eventually. And IMO none of the "answers" are ones that you really want…

I feel like this will be the thing that finally forces digital signing into the public eye. "Wait, is that video real?" "Well, it was signed by a reputable news source."

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

#226

Post by anoonmoose »

JohnFen wrote: post #209
anoonmoose wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm unclear as to what your point is, then...

you said: "This sort of technology literally makes it impossible to trust anything electronic."

we said: "No, because there is also technology that makes it possible to trust anything electronic with very nearly 100% reliability. But no one uses it"

I think your first statement is both technically wrong and generally wrong. Electronic trust is a solved problem...it's just that right now, it's really not as big a deal as some people are worried about it being, so we haven't generally implemented the solution. We could make electronic cars for long time before other things made them commercially viable.

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

#227

Post by Pxtl »

phkahler wrote: post #18

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?

Honestly I'm starting to wonder this about AI in general. I mean realistically, there's a decent chance will be looking at general AI soon. The best-case scenario endgame of that is creating a benevolent God. It might be time to start asking ourselves if that's what we want.

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

#228

Post by peteforde »

notafraudster wrote: post #136
manuelmoreale wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

My Dad died before my kids were born. When he got cancer, he recorded himself reading "The Night Before Christmas", which is about enough audio for the high quality version of this technology. Is it ghoulish on my part to want to hear his voice again or for my kids to hear it? Maybe. Do I really care what you think (or really what _I_ think) about that? No.

People who would tell you not to use your recorded audio to create more simulations of your father speaking are the same sort of folks with strong opinions about what other people do in the bedroom.

I happen to be someone who believes that it's wonderful your dad left you with this artifact. It was a touching sentiment then, and now it can serve his obvious purpose many times over.

He didn't record himself as a side-effect of disease, or because he loved that particular story in the sound of his voice. He wanted people in the future to be able to hear what he sounded like!

Given that he could not have foreseen voice cloning (and therefore not explicitly asked for it) I cannot think of a more obvious example of someone wanting their voice to survive them.

I wish more folks would record The Night Before Christmas.

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

#230

Post by JohnFen »

atentaten wrote: post #156
sva_ wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

20 seconds*

The OP mentioned that for so called, "High-fidelity voice cloning", it would take 20 minutes of training. I think a book author would want the best quality possible to reproduce their voice.

Why reproduce their voice? There's no value-add there.
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