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

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

#161

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…

They don't need that - they already have enough data to generate plausibly human voices that don't sound like anyone in particular. Voice cloning is a special case, these models are equally good at making new voices.

I’ve found it’s not actually as easy to get this stuff to sound different to the specific someone it’s trained on.

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

#162
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, this is a very one sided view on the world I'd say. From personal experience, I can surely tell you that I was much happier in countries where productivity was lower. The people there are just so much more pure of heart.

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

#163
post #83

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I haven’t used windows in a while but I thought it supported some form of cross-volume symlink? Or at least mounting an image stored on another volume to an arbitrary path.

Links in windows are a thing, but not well known. I must have been using Windows for close to 20 years before I realized they were in there. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/fileio/hard-... https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/administrat...

So not-well-known that several tools that really should know better don't check for junctions with occasionally disastrous results in a fs walk. (Using junctions sounded really clever to me until this had me up all night figuring out why the backup system crashed.)

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

#164
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Voices are uncopyrightable, but impersonation isn't legal (see Midler v. Ford, for a notable case), so I don't think the situation is totally clear.

It's always funny to me when people cite old American case law and try to wrangle their heads around how that can apply to a situation which the case's participants couldn't have possibly imagined. Shouldn't the correct way to do this be new legislation being created after consulting interest groups to answer the modern problems which exist due to modern realities, like what the EU is doing? It seems much more sensib…

Your government class didn’t cover common law versus case law?

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

#165
post #2

I did not know about this: "The center of the A.I. cover songs community is a massive 500,000+ member Discord called A.I. Hub, where members trade new tips, tools, techniques, and links to their original and cover songs."

Something I think we're slowly coming to terms with is that the current generation of techies (the ones who can afford to spend hours upon hours tweaking models and sharing results) really prefer Discord over our Web 2.0 forum type communities like this one. Even reddit on, which is lagging in popularity amongst Gen-Z when compared to Discord or TikTok, you can immediately tell upon reading /r/LocalLLMs that a really…

I kind of disagree? I am gen Z myself, and have used reddit extensively. While I like Discord a lot, I strongly disagree with using it to host content, essentially gating non-members from getting what they want (which is what leads to these communities with ludicrously inflated member counts). And this sentiment definitely isn't just me, a lot of the techie "CS major" people I know lean towards using slightly older services - which is also probably why the aforementioned /r/localllama community still has more than 60 thousand members.

That being said, Discord does have some advantages over older forum-type communities - it's usually way better for cultivating smaller communities, and its no-effort-required chat systems means that you can always hop on and discuss things that are on the cutting edge. This is quite important in a field like AI, where it feels like something revolutionary happens every other week.

(Also, I don't know if that implication was intentional, but gen Z and "underaged" haven't meant the same thing for many years now)

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

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this community was available for crawling then LLM would crawl it and there would be no value in participating in the community because you can just ask the LLM about all that, no?

If the value your community provides is low enough that it can be effectively replaced by a general purpose LLM, then it should be. The value of a community should be pushing the boundaries of knowledge, not gatekeeping it. C'mon, this is hacker news, what happened to "information should be free"?

"Information should be free" doesn't work when you have Microsoft inserting itself as a middleman of information.

The community is not gatekeeping knowledge, anyone can join. It merely tries to keep certain corporations out...

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

#167

This article only covers the musical aspects of AI voice cloning, but there's another dynamic to AI voice cloning that's more complicated: replacing general voice actors in movies/video games/anime (example: https://www.axios.com/2023/07/24/ai-voice-actors-victoria-at... ) Unlike musicians who can't be replaced without significant postprocessing, have enough money to not be impacted by competition, and have legal mus…

I have a different take on this. AI voice is cheaper, but it's also a more boring and generic performance. There is zero progress made towards any sort of creative AI that produces good unique work. The market for this then is small businesses who can't afford a professional voice actor. AI is opening up new markets, not killing the jobs of the truly talented.

The MVP might have the free "good enough" AI voiceover, it takes less money to bootstrap a new product that way.

The real product would have a real voice over actor paid for with VC money.

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

#168
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always funny to me when people cite old American case law and try to wrangle their heads around how that can apply to a situation which the case's participants couldn't have possibly imagined. Shouldn't the correct way to do this be new legislation being created after consulting interest groups to answer the modern problems which exist due to modern realities, like what the EU is doing? It seems much more sensib…

Your government class didn’t cover common law versus case law?

You probably mean common law, also sometimes known as case law, vs civil law which traces it's origins to the Napoleonic civil code, and which is used in all of the world outside of the former British colonies.

My law classes did cover common law, yes, but not favourably(can you guess I come from a civil law country?). Sounds like a system that made sense in 15th century Britain, but is quite the complex beast with many issues nowadays when it doesn't need to be.

However that still doesn't answer my original question, why is there no new legislation to cover the newly existing scenarios talked about? It seems to me that even the UK does that at least for some things, and they're the original common law country.

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

#169
post #108
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always funny to me when people cite old American case law and try to wrangle their heads around how that can apply to a situation which the case's participants couldn't have possibly imagined. Shouldn't the correct way to do this be new legislation being created after consulting interest groups to answer the modern problems which exist due to modern realities, like what the EU is doing? It seems much more sensib…

Interest groups == lobbyists in this case. Which might explain some of the American hesitation.

Well yes, you need to ask representatives of the people that will be impacted by a law what the impact will be, assess expert opinions, etc. Lobbying isn't only the American political bribery system, there's legitimate reasons behind it.

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

#170
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what I was expecting but that isn't Hurt, it's Surfin' USA with Hurt's lyrics that sound extremely jittery and grainy. I'm curious though if some AI soon could in fact synthesize the Beach Boys' style with the actual chords and melody from the NIN song, possibly with some of the pathos of Johnny Cash as well.

I agree. The "x words over y music" can be fun, but isn't really impressive as a true genre parody. The one that always comes to mind for me is this video of an Eminem interview done from scratch as a Talking Heads song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfl3N9nesRg This is potentially something that generative AI could be good at doing (at least recreating vocals), but this parody of the Talking Heads required a lot o…

More evidence that AI is an artistic tool of new media and not a replacement of the old.
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