The people that killed my fam used this to maintain the illusion they were alive for like 4 years and extract informaton etc. On one hand it was nice to see them but on the other a very odd feeling talking to them knowing they were dead (will for sure get down voted but idk trippy interesting skynet moment the usual crowd on HN will never experience)
VASA-1: Lifelike audio-driven talking faces generated in real time
161–166 of 166 posts
Re: VASA-1: Lifelike audio-driven talking faces generated in real time
#162Anyone have any good ideas for how we're going to do politics now? Today a big ML model can do this and it's somewhat regulate-able, tomorrow people can do this on their contact-lens supercomputers and anyone can generate a video of anything. Is going back to personally knowing your local representative the only way? How will we vote for national candidates if nobody knows what they think or say?
Same way we've always done it; largely ignorant and apathetic masses that only care about waving their team's flag and don't give a damn about most of their teams' policies as long as they can still say X,Y and Z things at the Christmas dinner table.
Democracy is already an illusion of choice anyway; just look at democratic candidates. It's gonna be Biden V Trump _again_. For London mayoral elections Sadiq is pretty much guaranteed to get in _again_. For UK main election it's gonna be the typical Tories V Labour BS _again_, with no new fresh young candidates with new ideas.
Democracy is rotting everywhere it exists thanks to the idea of parties, party politics and the human need to pick a tribe and attack every other tribe.
Re: VASA-1: Lifelike audio-driven talking faces generated in real time
#163Anyone have any good ideas for how we're going to do politics now? Today a big ML model can do this and it's somewhat regulate-able, tomorrow people can do this on their contact-lens supercomputers and anyone can generate a video of anything. Is going back to personally knowing your local representative the only way? How will we vote for national candidates if nobody knows what they think or say?
DNS? Might be that we need a radical (for some) change of viewpoint. Just as there's no privacy on the internet, how about 'theres very little trust on the internet'. Assume everything not securely signed by a trusted party is false.
A large number of people don't really care about verifying what they've heard is true or not before repeating it, eventually making it fact amongst themselves.
Hell I've been guilty of spouting BS before, just because I've heard something from so many people. Then find that when I look it up, it's not true.
It's not really a tech problem, it's more of a human problem imo, like so many others. But there is literally nothing we can do about it.
Re: VASA-1: Lifelike audio-driven talking faces generated in real time
#164Wow. Just...wow. I watched one of the videos very carefully. Absolutely natural movements of eyes, eyebrows, lips, even the hair resting on the woman's shoulders. The text even contained a double entendre, and the facial expression was exactly right.
Of course, I'm sure that whoever put these demos together also invested time in getting them right. Still: so would anyone seeking to put words in another person's mouth.
Imagine your favorite (or least favorite) politician coming out with a speech promoting something awful. Even if the video were immediately debunked, people would remember it. And many people would never believe the debunking.
This is the world we now live in: you literally cannot trust anything you see online.
Re: VASA-1: Lifelike audio-driven talking faces generated in real time
#165I see lots of comments wondering what the use-cases for this technology are. It is scary, and it can and will be abused. However, there are a lot of genuine applications. We may or may not like these applications, but they are going to happen. Here are a few, just off the top of my head:
- Advertising. Where I am, there is a pervasive commercial with (very realistic) talking goats. Why not do the same thing with people? No need for actors, when you can just tell the computer what you want.
- Cinema and television. Especially for bit parts and extras, just create the characters, instead of rounding up a bunch of extras.
- Video games and alternate realities. They've been getting more and more realistic - this is just the next step.
- Pornography. Again, why trouble yourself with real actors? Sell premium videos customized to each customer.
- Politics. Give "live" speeches in different venues, without all the bother of travelling. It's a very small step to answering questions live - just train up an LLM with the responses you want it to give.
Lots more applications as well - those are just a few that come to mind.
Re: VASA-1: Lifelike audio-driven talking faces generated in real time
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
If that is really the reason then this is insane and everyone involved should put their keyboards down and stop what they are doing. This would be as if we invented and sold nuclear weapons to dig out quarry mines faster. The inconvenience it saves us quickly disappears into the overwhelming shadow of the enormous harm now enabled.
> This would be as if we invented and sold nuclear weapons to dig out quarry mines faster. ”Project Plowshare was the overall United States program for the development of techniques to use nuclear explosives for peaceful construction purposes.” [0] 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Plowshare
Finding a mundane benign use for a terrible tool is good. Creating a terrible tool for a mundane benign purpose is reckless insanity.