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

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

#111

Post by nurple »

DeIlliad wrote: post #83
nurple wrote: post #72

Even though it is going to be extremely painful, one thing that excites me most about AI is the distinct possibility that it obliterates the concept of artificial scarcity that so much of the world relies on to create money these days. IMO, AI is exposing the frail and unnatural aspect of this legally-protected rent seeking. No, I don't think the legal system will be able to keep up, and I also don't think the infoli…

Using the phrase "artificial scarcity" to describe someone's skills is ridiculous. A voice actor or artist being paid for their skills is not rent seeking.

Sure, their creation is held behind legal walls in order to create, by definition, an artifical scarcity from which it derives its monetary value. If it was not protected by such a wall, and was not scarce, it would have no monetary value.

No, I don't think the inherent value in their talent is artificial, but I _do_ think that the monetary system we've built around such things as a necessity to survive in our modern world is abberant and bound to fail.

ETA: Just to give some flavor. Do you realize how much human energy is expended in finding ways to build these walls of artificial scarcity? It's frankly sad.

I was watching a showmatch that a streamer I enjoy watching was invovolved in (ShahZaM a Valorant pro). For nearly an hour in the leadup to the showmatch we got treated to a realtime negotiation between him an the player organizing his team. From comments like "no I can't use that graphic because I'm sponsored by another PC builder", to "every dollar I get I'll increase the size by 1px", and the piece de resistance "Whaaaat?! we have casters?? I'm not even getting paid for this!", followed by a streamer-initiated 10(!) count roll of twitch ads.

When the match was over, Tarik, the guy who organized the allstar team, was supposed to do an interview with the casters but had accidentally kicked off his own 10-pack of ads and they had to embarrasingly stall until his viewers were done watching them so they could see the interview live.

It was a repugnant view behind the curtains of the rediculuous amount of work a lot of people go to in order to profit behind the artificial scarcity put in front of their skills. This is usally hidden from the viewer behind production, but happened to leak in this instance due to the slapdash nature of the event.

Frankly, we can, and we must do better.

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

#112

Post by Diris »

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.

They also have code to finetune the model

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

#113

Post by squeaky-clean »

lioeters wrote: post #70

One area where this kind of technique would be a game changer, I imagine, is for blind people to have their surroundings narrated in real time. For example, through a pair of glasses with a camera for input, and an earphone to listen to the continuous narration. I heard about an online service where people can sign up to help the blind by describing visual scenes that they capture on their mobile. There must be compa…

> I heard about an online service where real people can sign up to help blind people by describing visual scenes that they capture on their mobile

For anyone curious, it's called "Be My Eyes". When there's a request, it will send a notification to a batch of people. I get about one notification per month, often I'm unable to answer it right then, and when I do I occasionally get a notice that someone else answered first. Tasks I've helped people with were things like going through an unsorted stack of bills and telling them the denominations, holding up a few T shirts and asking me which is the blue one, reading a pressure valve.

Would recommend signing up. It feels good and there's no pressure to answer since it sends out the request to many people at once.

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

#114

Post by martinclayton »

seanhunter wrote: post #104
mechhacker wrote: post #56

When I see a lot of this voice replication I am reminded of something. (Dune series spoiler) For example, Duncan Idaho keeps being brought back with cloning tech, over and over, for centuries, because Leto II just likes him. Over and over, the same man keeps being put by the (nearly) immortal emperor's side... I ask: are we stuck as a monoculture, not making new, interesting things, but simply replicating older ones?…

> I ask: are we stuck as a monoculture, not making new, interesting things, but simply replicating older ones? I really don't understand how you go from this story to that question. There are two, new, interesting things here: 1. The dev has made something which narrates their life. That's new and interesting 2. David Attenborough actually is still producing new (and amazing) nature documentaries. Planet Earth III ha…

I fear an AI narrating my life would be less Attenborough and more Sir Robin's minstrels in "Monty Python and the Holy Grail".

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

#116

Post by latexr »

gosub100 wrote: post #98
ljm wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd actually find that quite disappointing. If you can generate practically infinite variations of a show using AI, it completely eliminates scarcity and makes the result meaningless. It's not even unique to AI really. The whole genre of games that depend on procedural generation are similar. Who cares if there are a thousand planets in Starfield if they're all just the output of RNG? There's no actual handicraft inv…

> There's no actual handicraft involved to set one environment apart from another one of the reasons I don't like modern animation is the lack of effort in the actual animating. South Park looks like it was drawn by 5-year-olds who traced the outline of a salt shaker for the characters. Inb4 "it's supposed to be that way, it's all computer assisted and has been for 20 years", yes I know that. The point is there's no…

> one of the reasons I don't like modern animation is the lack of effort in the actual animating.

The new Ninja Turtles and Spider-Man movies certainly contradict that, as do plenty of animations from Japan such as anything by Satoshi Kon.

Yes, there’s a lot more garbage today but that because there’s a lot more of everything. The good stuff is going strong and there’s innovation still happening.

South Park is a bad example because it’s atypical in many ways. They do the whole episode in under a week, including the writing and animation, and the cast is basically the creators.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teenage_Mutant_Ninja_Turtles:_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider-Man:_Across_the_Spider-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Kon

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6_Days_to_Air

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

#117

Post by spacebanana7 »

afavour wrote: post #108
mechhacker wrote: post #56

When I see a lot of this voice replication I am reminded of something. (Dune series spoiler) For example, Duncan Idaho keeps being brought back with cloning tech, over and over, for centuries, because Leto II just likes him. Over and over, the same man keeps being put by the (nearly) immortal emperor's side... I ask: are we stuck as a monoculture, not making new, interesting things, but simply replicating older ones?…

> I ask: are we stuck as a monoculture, not making new, interesting things, but simply replicating older ones? I've been thinking about this a lot lately. It's such an interesting side effect of the streaming era that some of the biggest TV hits with teenagers are Friends and The Office. Not to knock either show but I'm fascinated by what it means for culture.

Content creators now need to compete with the best that's ever been created, not just the best that happens to be broadcast at the same time.

This will increase the inequality amongst general purpose evergreen content, the winners will be bigger than ever before and continue to be watched for decades - but getting into that winning bracket will be hard.

Conversely it's easier than ever to get views on perishable content, that which has short relevancy to current affairs or rests on a particular cultural trend. Live streaming too, by it's nature resembles the rivalry dynamics of broadcast television.

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

#118

Post by optimalsolver »

mechhacker wrote: post #56

When I see a lot of this voice replication I am reminded of something. (Dune series spoiler) For example, Duncan Idaho keeps being brought back with cloning tech, over and over, for centuries, because Leto II just likes him. Over and over, the same man keeps being put by the (nearly) immortal emperor's side... I ask: are we stuck as a monoculture, not making new, interesting things, but simply replicating older ones?…

I've always though that "Duncan Idaho" is the silliest name in all of science fiction.

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

#119

Post by spacebanana7 »

Lord-Jobo wrote: post #52
curiousObject wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Courts and lawyers will do a bad job, and also the best job out of every option available. As it has been for 100 years.

Voice cloning seems much harder to regulate with copyright than most other issues because 1) there's a continuous spectrum of vocal similarity 2) the tools of voice cloning are available to hundreds of millions of people 3) there may be several real individuals who could claim a voice similar to David Attenborough was also similar to theirs.

Using trademarks seems like a more realistic means of regulation. Allowing David Attenborough to sue anyone that falsely and publicly credits him as a narrator seems feasible within existing law, and extending this to cover anti-avoidance tactics like "narrated in the style of David Attenborough" wouldn't be that much of an overreach.

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

#120

Post by optimalsolver »

gosub100 wrote: post #85
petepete wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or Attenborough attributing the wonders of the planet to a god.

A great SaaS idea! It subtly injects "glory to the creator" type messages in existing science documentaries, for consumption by faith-based institutions.

God no.
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