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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

#241

Post by code51 »

code51 wrote: post #221
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-br…

adding another example to reflect the high influence of style and why either contextual awareness or voice-to-voice guidance is essential for these tasks:

Steve Jobs (cloned voice) reading: "Do not go gentle into that good night"

- https://soundcloud.com/kynes-0/steve-jobs-cloned-voice-do-no...

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

#242

Post by palata »

sroussey wrote: post #141
bitL wrote: 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.

About the blockchain comment… For years, I’ve been expecting camera makers (including phone makers) to offer image hash verification on blockchain at the moment of image capture. I’m surprised it’s not routine.

I guess a mix between impractical and completely useless?

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

#243

Post by hammadh »

Natfan wrote: post #186

This is already being used for scams. https://playground.play.ht/listen/1079 ( https://archive.ph/HKjue ) How exactly do you expect to combat this type of content?

The intention for this playground was to let people try the model. We actually have auto moderation on the user facing platform (https://play.ht/) and malicious text gets blocked and the user get flagged.

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

#244

Post by [deleted] »

gamblor956 wrote: post #217
buu700 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm sure programmers would love to expand their business opportunities by offering deeply discounted rates for creating AI-generated code. No? Then why do you assume that someone else would want to do the same in their profession? As AI-generated content is not protectable under IP law, it's a non-starter for games, film, TV, or music for anything except background filler.

[deleted]

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

#245

Post by palata »

anoonmoose wrote: post #128
JohnFen wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's called signing.

I send you a bunch of bytes signed with my private key (which somehow you have to verify in a trusted way) and you can be sure that I am the person who signed those bytes (unless I was compromised).

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

#246

Post by mahmoudfelfel »

jascii wrote: post #53

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

We have been seeing some of these genuine use cases: youtube creators, audiobooks, elearning videos, podcasts, commercials, dubbing, and gaming.

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

#247

Post by nkrisc »

VoodooJuJu wrote: post #35
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?

>Introducing the National Postal Service - send a letter to anyone for a nominal fee. No need for a personal courier, armed escort, or patrician status. >This is the kind of thing that should be illegal. Now, any Plebian could essentially write a letter to anyone, impersonating anyone. Forged letters could drag us into a war with Persia - for Jupiter's sake!

No, it's more like those "stress tester" services that you're definitely-certainly-fingers-crossed supposed to only point at your own servers.

Sure, this is marketed as generating your own voice to read scripts for you YouTube channel, but are they actually verifying who's voice you're generating?

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

#248

Post by anigbrowl »

mahmoudfelfel wrote: post #207
anigbrowl wrote: post #33

Hey HN, we are Mahmoud and Hammad Are you though? You might just be computer-generated. While I'm very impressed with this technically (and as a pro-audio person I feel validated to see my predictions of a few years back coming true so dramatically), I don't see anything about risk management in here. Your tech absolutely will get used by scammers, given the overabundance of voice data on the open internet. How are y…

We have many mitigations in place to increase the safety of this service, I mentioned some of that here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35331310

That's interesting. But I think it's a mistake to focus on relying on price to prevent abuse at scale. The use case for abuse of this technology is in highly targeted frauds, not broad-spectrum scams like insurance robocalls. Additionally, this will be zero deterrent to deep-pocketed actors like political action committees that generate fakery to influence elections and the like.

I'm trying not to be reflexively dismissive, and I know the technology is evolving so fast that your individual company can't necessarily pre-empt it, any more than an email software supplier is responsible for the existence of phishing. But I work adjacent to the security space (studying violent extremists) and I can think of a ton of ways to abuse this where economics would be absolutely zero deterrent.

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

#249

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

bitL wrote: post #214
burkaman wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Expensive 2. Requires internet 3. What image do you verify? Between auto-retouching, manual retouching, compression, filetype conversion, an image file might be invisibly transformed 10 times in between capture and Instagram upload. 4. Useless for disproving fake images until every camera manufacturer in the world has implemented this. 5. Hostile to customers, now your picture doesn't get the green verified badge…

Ad 3) all of them. They will be recorded in a cryptographically recorded chain and you'll be able to backtrack all steps.

I'm now wondering how many images are generated a second that would all need to be recorded. How much is it going to cost to take a photo?

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

#250

Post by throw10920 »

oceanplexian wrote: post #39
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?

Making then the illegal would accomplish nothing since it's already out in the wild. You can generate audio with high quality on fine-tuned versions of Tortoise TTS, which was originally trained on a cluster of NVIDIA 3090's, so it's within reach for any smart person to train a from-scratch model on consumer hardware. Realistically? We have to accept that this tech exists and there will be both positive and negative…

Scale matters. The difference between 50K smart and dedicated criminals being able to use this technique vs anyone with a web browser is significant.
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