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Voice clone of Anthony Bourdain prompts synthetic media ethics questions

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Re: Voice clone of Anthony Bourdain prompts synthetic media ethics questions

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On which timescale does something become historical? Are the Beatles historical, to you maybe not but possibly to your children? Where is the line you’re drawing? If I’m honest humans have never done the moral thinking, we largely just middle through and hope to get away with it.

Time doesn't matter as much as what is said. Fake Anthony Bourdain voice reading something he wrote seems fine to me, especially in the context of, say, a documentary. John Lennon's voice doing an ad for Vox amps seems in poor taste.

The change of medium is significant IMO. Rarely in spoken word do we expect a citation of when/where the words are spoken (barring for example, famous speeches/addresses), but in written form it often is. In this case, Fake AB Voice was reading part of a bigger piece of text - but it's not obvious what that underlying text is, making further analysis of the context in which it's spoken a bit more difficult.

Re: Voice clone of Anthony Bourdain prompts synthetic media ethics questions

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

we gain immunity in the sense that we no longer accept every image as representing absolute truth GPs whole point about body image is that, as a society, we don't have that immunity. Basically no one has a healthy ideal of what a good body image is because we never even get to see them.

The fact that media can so effectively influence our view of an ideal body has little to do with our awareness about photo manipulation. We know full well photos are touched up and fake. In fact we're at the point now where millions of people are so aware of it that they are routinely editing their own photos to match whatever the ideal being pushed at us in the moment is. Maybe that's "instagram face" or giant asses…

I disagree! photo manipulation plays a starring role in how pervasive and insidious these ideas are... I can turn off the TV and avoid movies, but I can't avoid ads, billboards, grocery stores, direct mail, you name it... it's everywhere.

I live alone, and if I go into town there's a good chance I'll see more doctored photos of people than I see actual people (depending on how busy things are, which is usually not very).

Re: Voice clone of Anthony Bourdain prompts synthetic media ethics questions

#114

My brother and I had a running joke that Tom Araya from Slayer died in the mid 90s, based on his ashen appearance in the Divine Intervention sleeve. Our “theory” was all of his vocals after then were bits of previous recordings reassembled into new songs. It sounded technically possible with manual editing back then, but it has already gone so far as to automatable. In this case, for a documentary, I see how that’s a…

I mean it's be nice for remastered songs at least.

Re: Voice clone of Anthony Bourdain prompts synthetic media ethics questions

#115
post #107

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Cool, great to get that clarified but also good to see I didn’t invent the fact they claimed to have asked.

That wasn't the fact that you stated.

>As I understand it (I read this on Twitter so massive grain of salt etc.) the family concented to this explicitly.

This is the "fact". Half of it is a caveat to take it with a grain of salt.

Re: Voice clone of Anthony Bourdain prompts synthetic media ethics questions

#116
post #104

Out of all the celebrities, Bourdain would have viscerally despised this. He hated fake phoney people, or food. He hated when his production crew would stovepipe his bits. He hated a scene in Greese (I believe) where crew went out and bought squid, and threw them into the water to made the shoot better. I really liked Bourdain. He was one of the few celebrities that didn't seem to change with fame, or money. I watche…

>Out of all the celebrities, Bourdain would have viscerally despised this. I would just like to point out the irony in this comment. You're speaking on behalf of a dead person in objection to someone else speaking on behalf of that person. We can debate the ethics of this whole thing without trying to lay claim to what Bourdain would have thought.

The comment also includes examples of his stated beliefs that allow us to postulate somewhat closely.

Re: Voice clone of Anthony Bourdain prompts synthetic media ethics questions

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be interesting to see if recreating songs is possible, if so i would like to hear the voice of Jim morrison and Curt Cobain.

I have a machine with two GPUs and a frozen OS with a tensorflow python app that clones voices, and I'd say the quality passes if you run it through a phone bandpass filter. I've had an idea to use propellerhead recycle to chop the output cloned voice into syllables, and then "play" the chopped parts in rhythm, through autotune. The issue is you get Eifel 65 sounding autotune if your base vocals are monotonic or way…

How much time of audio or data do you need on average to train up something? I guess I'm wondering if I only had a few minutes of someone speaking, would that be enough?

Re: Voice clone of Anthony Bourdain prompts synthetic media ethics questions

#119
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time doesn't matter as much as what is said. Fake Anthony Bourdain voice reading something he wrote seems fine to me, especially in the context of, say, a documentary. John Lennon's voice doing an ad for Vox amps seems in poor taste.

>John Lennon's voice doing an ad for Vox amps seems in poor taste. the Bourdain documentary we're talking about was created in order to generate profit; it has box-office showings and advertisement campaigns. A documentary is nice , but I fail to see how it's less of a product than Vox amplifiers, aside from some shallow altruism like "We're spreading the ideas of Bourdain", which could be done entirely without a pro…

Good point. I suppose I'd say I'm comfortable with some combination of appropriately compensating the heirs/estate and some sort of 'respect for the dead'.

Re: Voice clone of Anthony Bourdain prompts synthetic media ethics questions

#120
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand it (I read this on Twitter so massive grain of salt etc.) the family concented to this explicitly. Would you feel better if it was a voice actor who could read Bourdain’s email in a perfect mimic? What about historical recreations, would you object to computers being involved in, say, recreating Abraham Lincoln’s voice? Does the age of the subject matter? I think the squeamishness about AI as it becom…

Historical recreations are fine. Creating a digital voice model of abraham lincoln and then using it for ??? is not. All of this is being done for profit means (the orville redenbacher, fast furious, star wars). Just because we can doesn't mean we shouldn't stop and think if we should.

Just about every Presidents’ Day I’ll hear car deals with voice actors pretending to be Clinton or Bush and also on TV people dressed up as Lincoln… so I dunno.
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