Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 195 posts

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

#41

Post by curiousObject »

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…

This demonstration is respectful. It’s funny. It’s obvious parody.

But, the tech can be used to make disrespectful content.

Look forward to: David Attenborough narrates porn.

I don’t know what we can do. Ain’t no easy answers. But do we want courts and $Lawyers deciding what is respectful?

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

#42

Post by Arialonomus »

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…

I think, as often, the truth lies down the middle. SAG/AFTRA and the WGA were right in fighting to not give studios free rein to use AI to own their likeness or replace them in the process. Likewise, people who say using AI tech for lighthearted fun like this is “disrespectful” are just having a kneejerk reaction at this point. I struggle to see a how this is different from say, a song parody.

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

#43

Post by TerrifiedMouse »

orbital-decay wrote: post #22
TerrifiedMouse wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right of publicity. https://www.inta.org/topics/right-of-publicity/

Does fair use apply here? (I don't know) It's not like the author narrates a full-blown wildlife movie with the voice of David Attenborough. It's just a funny demo which doesn't depend on the specific voice (could be anyone), and also makes it clear the voice is synthetic.

If you use a small clip of Brad Pitt in a 10 sec ad without his permission, he will probably sue you and win. So I don't think fair use is going to protect you.

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

#44

Post by dataangel »

alpaca128 wrote: post #25
fotcorn wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The recently released XTTS-v2 model[0] from coqui.ai is coming very close to what ElevenLabs[1] can do. It runs reasonably fast on a recent GPU, and should also work on CPU. Requires a 3 second (!) clip of the voice you want to clone. License does not allow commercial use. 0: https://huggingface.co/coqui/XTTS-v2 1: https://elevenlabs.io/

> Requires a 3 second (!) clip of the voice you want to clone. Sure, if you want a guaranteed uncanny valley experience. There is no way a few seconds are enough to cover all the ways a specific person pronounces things. A person's voice is much more than just the pitch and with a 3 second sample anyone who knows them will be able to tell something's off within 3 seconds.

No I suspect 3 seconds is often enough. It's not learning how you pronounce each word, it's seeing some pronunciations you use and from that guessing how you would pronounce other things based on how those pronunciations are clustered in its training data. In other words if in that 3 seconds it hears you say y'all it has a pretty good shot at inferring how you say a lot of other things.

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

#45

Post by DanielBMarkham »

eli wrote: post #16
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #12

I loved this when he posted it. Taking this a step further, and being facetious, I'm thinking of starting my own network! It's all me, all the time. Sometimes I'll be a nature show, sometimes I'll be in a spy movie, sometimes I'll have the guys from Mystery Science Theater 3000 cracking jokes at how dumb I am. Can't be that hard to do what this guy did, only in twenty-four different genres, one for each hour of the d…

Have you tried to get a GPT to write a joke? It’s got a ways to go.

I read this recently. I can't vouch for the source and I haven't researched it.

https://time.com/6301288/the-ai-jokes-that-give-me-nightmare...

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

#46

Post by empyrrhicist »

devsda wrote: post #33
dcchambers wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ?

That attitude sounds... convenient for people (companies) training these models, but completely untenable at a societal level.

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

#47

Post by asylteltine »

tolmasky wrote: post #37
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.

I agree and the difference is commercial rights and intent. Parody, jokes, etc are fine. Using this to replace him on a documentary, not okay. Fair use already covers this all they have to do is extend copyright protections to peoples likeness and voices

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

#48

Post by asylteltine »

eli wrote: post #16
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #12

I loved this when he posted it. Taking this a step further, and being facetious, I'm thinking of starting my own network! It's all me, all the time. Sometimes I'll be a nature show, sometimes I'll be in a spy movie, sometimes I'll have the guys from Mystery Science Theater 3000 cracking jokes at how dumb I am. Can't be that hard to do what this guy did, only in twenty-four different genres, one for each hour of the d…

Have you tried to get a GPT to write a joke? It’s got a ways to go.

It’s not funny because it’s “aligned”. You can’t be funny with all those restrictions.

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

#49

Post by asylteltine »

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

Humans aren’t special. I wish I could be a cyborg how cool would that be

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

#50

Post by empyrrhicist »

cma wrote: post #31
dcchambers wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)?

Can actors audio-visually mimic their characters with increasingly convincing realism, and can they be artificially scaled, duplicated, extended, and applied for just the cost of a bit of hardware and electricity?

It is not sensible to hand wave the "human like" learning process and ignore economic reality. This area requires careful thought about how our notions of individual rights apply to new technologies, and what kind of economic system can exist as a result.

Post reply on HN