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Unauthorized "David Attenborough" AI clone narrates developer's life, goes viral

arstechnica.com

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Re: Unauthorized "David Attenborough" AI clone narrates developer's life, goes viral

#31

Post by cma »

dcchambers wrote: post #13
vbeeaz wrote: post #2

"unauthorized" is a weasel word because it implies that it should be necessary for the developer to ask David Attenborough for authorization to create a clone of his voice using AI.

Disagree. If this could be created without using recordings of his voice to train the model, then sure. I agree a "sound-alike" like that is fair game. But since actual recordings of his voice were used in order to train the model to recreate the sound, inflection, cadence, etc...it should be required to get authorization to use those recordings for this purpose.

Should an actor playing a public figure in a biopic have to get permission to study the subject's voice from copyrighted sources in order to reproduce it for the film (without AI)?

Re: Unauthorized "David Attenborough" AI clone narrates developer's life, goes viral

#33

Post by devsda »

dcchambers wrote: post #13
vbeeaz wrote: post #2

"unauthorized" is a weasel word because it implies that it should be necessary for the developer to ask David Attenborough for authorization to create a clone of his voice using AI.

Disagree. If this could be created without using recordings of his voice to train the model, then sure. I agree a "sound-alike" like that is fair game. But since actual recordings of his voice were used in order to train the model to recreate the sound, inflection, cadence, etc...it should be required to get authorization to use those recordings for this purpose.

One of the popular sentiments here seems to be that training AI should not be treated any different than a human understanding & learning the source material.

Going by that logic, can the AI here be considered a "person" performing mimicry after being "inspired" by Attenborough ?

Re: Unauthorized "David Attenborough" AI clone narrates developer's life, goes viral

#34

Post by throw101010 »

vbeeaz wrote: post #2

"unauthorized" is a weasel word because it implies that it should be necessary for the developer to ask David Attenborough for authorization to create a clone of his voice using AI.

I wouldn't call it a weasel word because it describes accurately the fact nobody gave them the authorization to use the likeness of Attenborough, and there are laws to protect people's likeness in multiple jurisdictions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights) that might require such authorization (whether they could be applied in the case of AI remains to be tested, but apparently most of them do not question the "means" to impersonate but the act of it).

It raises an interesting discussion about this though, how is this different from someone making an impression of him and doing a comedy show of it for example. They also had to listen to him for hours to reproduce the voice correctly, are they now infringing some copyright when they use this voice?

To me, as long as you clearly state that this is an impersonation/parody, and there is no deception, I do not really see a reason to protect this, even for music. But I'd like to hear arguments for a protection and how it would be enforced, how do you judge of the likeness, how do you know/prove which source material was used for training for example.

Re: Unauthorized "David Attenborough" AI clone narrates developer's life, goes viral

#35

Post by losvedir »

Someone at work shared this and I thought it was hilarious and awesome. A number of other people found it disrespectful or gross. I'm sort of fascinated at the values divide.

I can see why SAG/ASTRA, or voice actors, aren't going to like this technology, but it doesn't feel all that different to any other industry swept away by tech, whether that's farming, horses and carriages, mining, etc. In other words, I can see the negative economic impact it will have on some people, which we may (or may not) want to protect via legislation, but I don't see how it escalates to a moral question.

"Disrespectful" to me is flipping off David Attenborough, not getting a computer to amusingly narrate mundane things in a decent facsimile of his voice.

Re: Unauthorized "David Attenborough" AI clone narrates developer's life, goes viral

#36

Post by Ukv »

belugacat wrote: post #8

Right now this requires API tokens and being dependent on third party companies that will cut off your access if they decide they don’t like you. The moment these models can run locally on the kind of cheap hardware that phone scam operations have will be the real Pandora’s box moment. (I give it 3-5 years or so)

Could work for spear-phishing, or impersonating a widely-known trusted figure. I can't really see it working for cold-calls that pretend to be someone the victim knows (like the terrifying ransom calls), since the operations work at a huge scale expecting most people to not even pick up a "scam likely" call. Even if model tuning is free and instant, just having to find a voice clip of the person prior to each unanswered automated call would tank the quantity they're able to make.

Though, for the same reason websites always attribute data breaches to a "highly sophisticated targetted attack", I imagine there will be some unevidenced claims that this is what scammers did to them - people don't want to have been fooled by something simple.

Re: Unauthorized "David Attenborough" AI clone narrates developer's life, goes viral

#37

Post by tolmasky »

losvedir wrote: post #35

Someone at work shared this and I thought it was hilarious and awesome. A number of other people found it disrespectful or gross. I'm sort of fascinated at the values divide. I can see why SAG/ASTRA, or voice actors, aren't going to like this technology, but it doesn't feel all that different to any other industry swept away by tech, whether that's farming, horses and carriages, mining, etc. In other words, I can see…

How is it different than someone making a funny video where they impersonate David Attenborough? Those aren’t generally considered disrespectful, right?

Like, I get the potential scale is different. But this is some joke video, not someone trying to actually replace David Attenborough or something.

Re: Unauthorized "David Attenborough" AI clone narrates developer's life, goes viral

#39

Post by andsoitis »

devnull3 wrote: post #4

These things have suddenly going mainstream and lot of ppl (including me) are having existential question: what does it mean to be a human? PS: It will be fun to do in "damn nature u r scary" voice & style [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vlFHlSm1r4

> existential question: what does it mean to be a human?

One perspective that might be helpful is that humans have for many millennia pondered this question, so it isn't new.

We have a more exacting (but not perfect) definition from a biological perspective. We also have philosophical theories about personhood[1] and mind[2]. One can hypothesized that these, and other characteristics, such as the emergence of culture, etc. also exist in other entities (whether on earth, alien, or technology like AI), so perhaps humans can be though of us as occupying a region across these different dimensions that represent a unique combination. But we don't have exclusivity over a particular dimension (like reasoning, for example).

Another perspective that might be helpful is that even if there are other entities that are very much like humans, it does not take away YOUR and MY experience of being human or the value and joy we derive from it. If anything, it can help us understand ourselves better. This introspection ability is another one of those characteristics that humans have.

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-personal/

[2] https://plato.stanford.edu/search/searcher.py?query=mind

Re: Unauthorized "David Attenborough" AI clone narrates developer's life, goes viral

#40

Post by harshitaneja »

wrp wrote: post #18

I want to have Emma Thompson narrating my life as in Stranger than Fiction (2006).

Little did he know, his life would be as mundane as the one before. (Edit: I wrote this but as soon as I did it sounds rude. Didn't intend it that way)
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