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Weird A.I. Yankovic: a cursed deep dive into the world of voice cloning

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131–140 of 207 posts

Re: Weird A.I. Yankovic: a cursed deep dive into the world of voice cloning

#131
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+1, I would also like to read it

I would as well. It isn't that I'm unsympathetic, it is just that we haven't outlawed technology that put others out of work, and I'm curious why we would decide as a society this time should be different. If there are good reasons I want to know.

Putting people out of work is one thing, that's bad enough and societies should take care to guide change and support those affected.

The danger behind AI and other manipulative technology is that it erodes trust. We already have serious issues with trust in media, and not just the obvious cases of Russian/Chinese propaganda, but also stuff like kids getting anorexia from extremely photoshopped advertising.

Add AI on top and no one can be certain about anything anymore. Say someone distributes a fake "recording" of the US President calling for glassing Moscow, or the Serbian President declaring war on Kosovo? That has the potential to actually cost lives on a massive scale.

Re: Weird A.I. Yankovic: a cursed deep dive into the world of voice cloning

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I find interesting is this aspect that eventually, these companies will hire some college kids who needs a couple thousand bucks and a free pizza. Have them read the right scripts. Sign the right 'give everything away' contract and just forever use their voice. Or do it sneaky. Have a voice assistant and in your ToS 'we can use a copy of your voice for anything'. The existing voice actors will be just out of wor…

I have said this will initially be sold as a feature on things like Audiobooks. Pick your book, pick your reader and away it goes. The Diary of Anne Frank read by Gilbert Gottfried.

I still like getting surprised when a new or unorthodox narrator knocks it out of the park but I’d really enjoy a “salvage this purchase” exit hatch with a AI voice alternative. I’d even pay a buck or two on top of an existing purchase to automatically fix a bad narration.

Head over to Audible reviews, some books are widely considered to be great books as written but the audiobook is reviewed as one to be avoided because it was recorded poorly, the narrator paced it wrong, they had an annoying voice, they couldn’t do a voice of the opposite gender, whatever.

Plus it seems like a great accessibility feature. Many books are recorded for the vision impaired community by volunteers and that’s admirable, but some of the AI today does a much better job.

Re: Weird A.I. Yankovic: a cursed deep dive into the world of voice cloning

#133
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. If you're not using a cloud provider bandwidth is extremely cheap. In fact locally I can get a 10 gbps home internet unmetered connection for $300/mo. I'm not sure how they'd react if I transferred 1 PB/mo though :)

Is my math wrong here? 10 gbps -> 8s per 10 GB -> 800s per 1TB -> 80,000s per 1PB -> 22.3 hrs at full speed for 1 PB?

800,000s per 1PB, off by a 10 factor

Re: Weird A.I. Yankovic: a cursed deep dive into the world of voice cloning

#134
post #3

It's kind of wild that these tools just transfer a copy of these models every time they're spun up (whether it's to a Google Colab notebook or a local machine.) This must mean Hugging Face's bandwidth bill must be crazy, or am I missing something (maybe they have a peering agreement? heavily caching things?)

Huggingface has a strategic partnership with AWS. 1. AWS is far behind Azure and GCP in AI, so they gotta partner up to gain credibility. 2. Huggingface probably does face insane bills compared to github. But AWS can probably develop some optimizations to save bandwidth costs. There's 100% some sort of generalized differential storage method being developed for AI models.

One doesn't usually opt for AWS when their goal is to reduce transfer costs.

Re: Weird A.I. Yankovic: a cursed deep dive into the world of voice cloning

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would as well. It isn't that I'm unsympathetic, it is just that we haven't outlawed technology that put others out of work, and I'm curious why we would decide as a society this time should be different. If there are good reasons I want to know.

Putting people out of work is one thing, that's bad enough and societies should take care to guide change and support those affected. The danger behind AI and other manipulative technology is that it erodes trust. We already have serious issues with trust in media, and not just the obvious cases of Russian/Chinese propaganda, but also stuff like kids getting anorexia from extremely photoshopped advertising. Add AI on…

Yeah, all that is bad, but those consequences are already here aren't they? Restricting further research just means it will be done in clandestine government labs like chemical or biological weapons except with equipment costs orders of magnitude lower. I can imagine policies that would save the jobs of voice actors, but none that would prevent the wave of deepfake propaganda that is coming.

Re: Weird A.I. Yankovic: a cursed deep dive into the world of voice cloning

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replacing voice actors with text-to-speech is good because it lets you do things voice actors can't: * Create dynamic new voice lines at runtime, for example game characters reacting to new situations. * Operate at a scale that's infeasible for humans, for example turning every ebook into an audiobook.

Which are, in my view, really minor advantages when compared to the disadvantages. Not only in terms of putting people out of work, but in terms of increasing the artifice of the world around us and decreasing its humanity.

There's little nothing more important to the happiness of humanity than increased productivity per capita. That sounds crazy but when you think about it it's true.

Re: Weird A.I. Yankovic: a cursed deep dive into the world of voice cloning

#138
post #125
post #4

My absolute favorite application of this tech so far is The Beach Boys singing 'Hurt'. It's the first time I seriously didn't notice any artifacts, and it just works so well even though it really shouldn't. Enjoy: https://youtu.be/gmNSFqyg_Z8

Where is my mind by Sinatra - https://youtu.be/BO4cKQ8DxYU?si=uzF_TdrQoZOAOlEc

That's... Really nice.

Re: Weird A.I. Yankovic: a cursed deep dive into the world of voice cloning

#139
post #20
post #3

It's kind of wild that these tools just transfer a copy of these models every time they're spun up (whether it's to a Google Colab notebook or a local machine.) This must mean Hugging Face's bandwidth bill must be crazy, or am I missing something (maybe they have a peering agreement? heavily caching things?)

You can do a lot of these fully locally with things like RVC web ui or https://tryreplay.io/

https://fakeyou.com has unlimited free RVC without an account. The UI needs work, though.

Re: Weird A.I. Yankovic: a cursed deep dive into the world of voice cloning

#140

What's the best open source text to speech? Eleven Labs and others are interesting but closed source. I want to use them mainly for audiobooks as I have a lot of ePubs and I'm just using the basic Google text to speech voices on my Android, via Moon+ Reader. It works fine but it's still more robotic than state of the art.

We bought the $300/month plan for a few months earlier this year... and you'd only get 40 hours of audio generation for that. It wasn't really sufficient to our needs. How many audio books is 40 hours? Also, while its voice cloning was truly amazing, every once in awhile the voice would get a little nutty and sound like an insect just flew down their throat, or maybe they had an LSD flashback. Normal normal normal th…

> We bought the $300/month plan for a few months earlier this year... and you'd only get 40 hours of audio generation for that. It wasn't really sufficient to our needs.

All of these AI as a Service (AaaS?) API companies are going to race each other to razor thin margins. Immediately after ElevenLabs raised, five other TTS services raised nearly the same amount of money.

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