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They stole my voice with AI

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: They stole my voice with AI

#51

Post by visarga »

meiraleal wrote: post #18
azinman2 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But they should owe you for stealing your likeliness without your awareness to promote their products. This isn’t for satire purposes.

How much? This IP/copyright mentality is so 90s/2000s. Brings back memories of Napster. This Jeff Geerling which I have never heard of will cry until some Spotify of AI appears and pay him some pennies. Maybe he wants to be the James Hetfield/Metallica of this generation. This guy doesn't have 1/10000 of the relevance Metallica had at the time tho.

> This IP/copyright mentality is so 90s/2000s. Brings back memories of Napster.

The trend has been going against copyright ever since internet was invented. We used to go for passive consumption - radio, TV, books, print magazines. But now that age has passed. We have changed. We prefer interactivity - games, social networks, web searching the billions of contents online, youtube clips commented and shared around. In this age copying is like speaking.

Now comes AI and pushes this trend even deeper - more interactive, more remixing and adapted to the user. We should take a hint - the idea of owning content doesn't make sense anymore. Any content can be recreated in seconds now, or similar content was already posted online years ago. Protecting expression is useless and protecting styles would destroy creativity. Quite a catch-22.

We should take a look instead at new models that popped up in the last decades - open source, creative commons, Wikipedia, open scientific publication. Maybe we need to decouple attribution from payment, like scientific papers, they cite each other without monetary obligations. In social networks comments respond to each other, it would not work if we had to pay to read. Even in real life, people don't pay to hear others speak, and are reusing ideas without issue.

I am aware this sounds bad for copyright, but I am trying to state the reality, not propose my own views. There are deep reasons we prefer interactivity to passive consumption. Copyright was fit for a different age.

Re: They stole my voice with AI

#52

Post by XorNot »

Barrin92 wrote: post #44
XorNot wrote: post #32

The idea that stolen voice tones are going to matter at all is one of the shortest sighted bits of AI investment - powered by Hollywood "never make anything new" thinking. In about 5 years AI voices will be bespoke and more pleasant to listen to then any real human: they're not limited by vocal cord stress, can be altered at will, and can easily be calibrated by surveying user engagement. Subtly tweaking voice output…

Stolen voices matter because what's being stolen here is the authors likeness, his reputation that he's build in the YouTube tech space and used for commercial products he had already reviewed. They chose exactly his voice for that reason. While AI voices will aesthetically be indistinguishable or even preferable they aren't going to carry any reputation or authenticity, which by definition is scarce and therefore va…

Again: this literally only matters currently in people trying to steal a voice.

There's already VTubers who's whole visual identity is synthetic. Why wouldn't the same happen in any other space where performance can affect the perception of content, but you can now simply engineer the performance?

Like I said: give it 5 years and you'll have influencers who no one has ever heard the voice of, because they don't make content with their own.

Re: They stole my voice with AI

#53

Post by at_a_remove »

More and more I am starting to wish I had gone ahead with the novel I had sketched out in the 1990s. The backdrop was a kind of post-imitative-AI collapse of trust in society, because it had become effortless to fake up, say, your least favorite political candidate talking about the merits of eating babies, so the various echo chambers bore a kind of ghastly fruit, each stance finding its own "evidence" for its beliefs, right down to the flat earth types. Paranoia runs rampant, and so on.

It looks like we're heading in that direction.

Re: They stole my voice with AI

#54

Post by arendtio »

XorNot wrote: post #32

The idea that stolen voice tones are going to matter at all is one of the shortest sighted bits of AI investment - powered by Hollywood "never make anything new" thinking. In about 5 years AI voices will be bespoke and more pleasant to listen to then any real human: they're not limited by vocal cord stress, can be altered at will, and can easily be calibrated by surveying user engagement. Subtly tweaking voice output…

I am not convinced that it will be even 5 years. Have you tested elevenlabs[1]?

They offer different voice cloning techniques today, starting from 30 seconds of audio input (sounds somewhat like the cloned voice but definitely not exactly the same) to multiple hours of voice input (sounds like the actual person). In addition, you can adjust the voices with a few parameters or simply create one by defining parameters.

The voice from the video could be an 'instantly cloned' voice based on a few seconds of voice input (judging from the quality). If you want to do y more advanced clone, you have to proof that it is your own voice.

[1] https://elevenlabs.io

Re: They stole my voice with AI

#55

Post by m463 »

XorNot wrote: post #32

The idea that stolen voice tones are going to matter at all is one of the shortest sighted bits of AI investment - powered by Hollywood "never make anything new" thinking. In about 5 years AI voices will be bespoke and more pleasant to listen to then any real human: they're not limited by vocal cord stress, can be altered at will, and can easily be calibrated by surveying user engagement. Subtly tweaking voice output…

"This call may be monitored or recorded for quality assurance and training purposes"

> training <

Re: They stole my voice with AI

#56

Post by salawat »

lokar wrote: post #25
meiraleal wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much? This IP/copyright mentality is so 90s/2000s. Brings back memories of Napster. This Jeff Geerling which I have never heard of will cry until some Spotify of AI appears and pay him some pennies. Maybe he wants to be the James Hetfield/Metallica of this generation. This guy doesn't have 1/10000 of the relevance Metallica had at the time tho.

Your inability to look even few decades into the future to see the impact of this is depressing. You only seem to care about yourself and your current grift.

Welcome to Hacker News/YCombinator. It's what they do here. Ever since joining the community, it's been a speedrun of things explicitly covered as unethical during my CS Ethics course. Mainly stay here to keep a finger on how far things have slid down the "man made horrors beyond comprehension".

Re: They stole my voice with AI

#57

Post by hysan »

donatj wrote: post #19

Maybe I am crazy but I don't really think it sounds that much like him. It's a little similar but different. It's slightly higher pitch, more nasal, and the intonation is a little different.

As some who has watched all his videos and livestreams, I think that it very much sounds like him.

Re: They stole my voice with AI

#58

Post by diffxx »

XorNot wrote: post #32

The idea that stolen voice tones are going to matter at all is one of the shortest sighted bits of AI investment - powered by Hollywood "never make anything new" thinking. In about 5 years AI voices will be bespoke and more pleasant to listen to then any real human: they're not limited by vocal cord stress, can be altered at will, and can easily be calibrated by surveying user engagement. Subtly tweaking voice output…

I'm long on humans and suspect that many people will begin to prefer imperfection in reaction to the overproliferation of ai generated content.

Re: They stole my voice with AI

#59

Post by nextaccountic »

mbrumlow wrote: post #24
toomuchtodo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

California recently signed some legislation into effect. It’s a start. Congress is working on “No Artificial Intelligence Fake Replicas And Unauthorized Duplications Act.” Still in dev in the House, but has bipartisan support. Call your congressperson, ask them to co-sponsor and/or vote for it. https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/california-bills-pro... https://salazar.house.gov/media/press-releases/salazar-intro…

Seems silly. What if I train my model on somebody who sounds like a somebody?

That's what happened with Scarlett Johanssen's voice in the OpenAI thing, right? Or at least I think it was a claim at the time.

Re: They stole my voice with AI

#60

Post by visarga »

Barrin92 wrote: post #44
XorNot wrote: post #32

The idea that stolen voice tones are going to matter at all is one of the shortest sighted bits of AI investment - powered by Hollywood "never make anything new" thinking. In about 5 years AI voices will be bespoke and more pleasant to listen to then any real human: they're not limited by vocal cord stress, can be altered at will, and can easily be calibrated by surveying user engagement. Subtly tweaking voice output…

Stolen voices matter because what's being stolen here is the authors likeness, his reputation that he's build in the YouTube tech space and used for commercial products he had already reviewed. They chose exactly his voice for that reason. While AI voices will aesthetically be indistinguishable or even preferable they aren't going to carry any reputation or authenticity, which by definition is scarce and therefore va…

> Stolen voices matter because what's being stolen here is the authors likeness

There is not enough voice space to accommodate everyone. Authors would like to fence off and own their little voice island. For every voice there are thousands of similar ones.

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