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Weird A.I. Yankovic: a cursed deep dive into the world of voice cloning

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Re: Weird A.I. Yankovic: a cursed deep dive into the world of voice cloning

#41
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me neither. That’s what’s so weird about the internet. Imagine half a million people out in the streets together. You’d definitely notice that. Meanwhile, we can have these massive online communities and you’d never know unless you accidentally stumbled across it or someone told you about it.

more accurate to say that, while 500,000 people joined the discord by clicking a link, some much, much smaller number are actually active on any sort of a regular basis

Yeah, one of the "worst" (good for metrics, bad for legibility) parts of the trend of moving to discord for any sort of online community is that you have to "join" the community to even view any of the resources ensconced within. Meaning it's poorly indexed (discord search is okay, but not great) and not available at all to external crawlers.

Re: Weird A.I. Yankovic: a cursed deep dive into the world of voice cloning

#42
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Me neither. That’s what’s so weird about the internet. Imagine half a million people out in the streets together. You’d definitely notice that. Meanwhile, we can have these massive online communities and you’d never know unless you accidentally stumbled across it or someone told you about it.

more accurate to say that, while 500,000 people joined the discord by clicking a link, some much, much smaller number are actually active on any sort of a regular basis

So to continue the analogy comparison, 500,000 people walked in that street at some point. Some unknown percentage of that number is made of unrecognized duplicates (same person new username).

Re: Weird A.I. Yankovic: a cursed deep dive into the world of voice cloning

#43
post #2

I did not know about this: "The center of the A.I. cover songs community is a massive 500,000+ member Discord called A.I. Hub, where members trade new tips, tools, techniques, and links to their original and cover songs."

I poked around there for a while, and my takeaway was "sub-par" all around, which might be the reason for it's relative obscurity? The thing is, I can't tell to what extent it's the tech, and to what extent it's just "very uninteresting source material."

Like, there's a whole lot of "classic song done by presently popular rapper," and I'll be the first to insist that there is nearly nothing vocally interesting at all coming from todays popular hip-hop artists (and I say this as an extreme long-time hip-hop aficionado)

Re: Weird A.I. Yankovic: a cursed deep dive into the world of voice cloning

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We bought the $300/month plan for a few months earlier this year... and you'd only get 40 hours of audio generation for that. It wasn't really sufficient to our needs. How many audio books is 40 hours? Also, while its voice cloning was truly amazing, every once in awhile the voice would get a little nutty and sound like an insect just flew down their throat, or maybe they had an LSD flashback. Normal normal normal th…

>How many audio books is 40 hours? Are you reading War & Peace or Cat In The Hat?

I always assume 200.to 250 pages per book when someone talks about large quantities of books.

Re: Weird A.I. Yankovic: a cursed deep dive into the world of voice cloning

#45

This article only covers the musical aspects of AI voice cloning, but there's another dynamic to AI voice cloning that's more complicated: replacing general voice actors in movies/video games/anime (example: https://www.axios.com/2023/07/24/ai-voice-actors-victoria-at... ) Unlike musicians who can't be replaced without significant postprocessing, have enough money to not be impacted by competition, and have legal mus…

> and their voicework is owned by their clients who may not be as incentivised in protecting the VO. The work product produced by their voice for fulfilling the contract is owned. No corp owns someone else's voice.

They don't own the voice, but they own the vocal performance, which ends up being a meaningless legal distinction in practice.

It's one reason why VAs rarely take fan requests for a character they voice.

Re: Weird A.I. Yankovic: a cursed deep dive into the world of voice cloning

#46

This article only covers the musical aspects of AI voice cloning, but there's another dynamic to AI voice cloning that's more complicated: replacing general voice actors in movies/video games/anime (example: https://www.axios.com/2023/07/24/ai-voice-actors-victoria-at... ) Unlike musicians who can't be replaced without significant postprocessing, have enough money to not be impacted by competition, and have legal mus…

> and their voicework is owned by their clients who may not be as incentivised in protecting the VO. The work product produced by their voice for fulfilling the contract is owned. No corp owns someone else's voice.

Porperty is a bundle of rights, and often hard to pin down. In the case of voices, if a company owns enough of your data to train a good simulacrum, and they have the right to do it, then they kind of do own your voice -- or more precisely, a damn good substitute.

Re: Weird A.I. Yankovic: a cursed deep dive into the world of voice cloning

#47
post #13
post #5

AI song covers are incredible, from Goku singing "Don't Stop Me Now" to the cast of Spongebob singing "Ocean Man".

My favorite is the Mr. Krabs cover of "Billie Jean" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CkQ-44PvTs8

Mr Krabs rapping Lose Yourself by Eminem [1] is all the evidence I've ever needed that Clancy Brown should have been a rapper.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d7N6jOziN4E

Re: Weird A.I. Yankovic: a cursed deep dive into the world of voice cloning

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and their voicework is owned by their clients who may not be as incentivised in protecting the VO. The work product produced by their voice for fulfilling the contract is owned. No corp owns someone else's voice.

Porperty is a bundle of rights, and often hard to pin down. In the case of voices, if a company owns enough of your data to train a good simulacrum, and they have the right to do it, then they kind of do own your voice -- or more precisely, a damn good substitute.

Case in point, Luke Skywalker / Darth Vader in the D+ series: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2022/09/darth-vaders-vo...

> Belyaev is a 29-year-old synthetic-speech artist at the Ukrainian start-up Respeecher, which uses archival recordings and a proprietary A.I. algorithm to create new dialogue with the voices of performers from long ago. The company worked with Lucasfilm to generate the voice of a young Luke Skywalker for Disney+’s The Book of Boba Fett, and the recent Obi-Wan Kenobi series tasked them with making Darth Vader sound like James Earl Jones’s dark side villain from 45 years ago, now that Jones’s voice has altered with age and he has stepped back from the role.

Re: Weird A.I. Yankovic: a cursed deep dive into the world of voice cloning

#49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>How many audio books is 40 hours? Are you reading War & Peace or Cat In The Hat?

I always assume 200.to 250 pages per book when someone talks about large quantities of books.

That's fairly short. I read about 100 books a year and it includes thousand page tomes like The Count of Monte Cristo.
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