Hacker News Reader

Comment by slackstation | Hacker News Reader

Their ethics don't seem to be something they take seriously as the video they use to promote their own site is an impersonation itself.

Seems from right out of the gate, they are breaking their own ethical guidelines as a cheap promotional tactic. If they care that little about themselves and a former president of the United States, what do they care about your likeness.

It also doesn't help that you give them a universal perpetual license to do whatever they want (including selling your likeness for someone else's use) by uploading.

This just seems like a slimy team that put up an ethics page as a CYA.

I'm willing to eat my words if they had Barak Obama's consent to use his digitized voice for this but, it's highly doubtful since there's also the coat and seal of the President of the United States on the flag in the background which would be a massive ethical breach of a former President just to promote a silly little startup.

View on HN

They have a giant banner at the bottom disclaiming it. I don't think that's unethical.

I'll agree. The ethics here seem very wishy-washy. It's not nearly as well-defined as, say, Twilio's Nine Values[0] or ThoughtWorks's Pillars[1], and those are generic values, not ethics. Hell, Google's "Do No Evil" is better than their two bullet points: 1) raise public awareness, 2) your voice is yours (except these Presidents), ???) Imagine if someone bad invented this first!

[0]: https://www.twilio.com/company/nine-values

[1]: https://martinfowler.com/bliki/ThreePillars.html

> Seems from right out of the gate, they are breaking their own ethical guidelines as a cheap promotional tactic. If they care that little about themselves and a former president of the United States, what do they care about your likeness.

We state in our blogpost that we make an exception for Obama/Trump in order to raise public awareness. Both of them are regularly used in Machine Learning benchmarks (for example [0] [1]). Note that we don't allow users to generate from Trump/Obama's voice.

Once again, we care a lot about these issues and that's why we only allow users to copy their own voice.

[0] http://www.washington.edu/news/2017/07/11/lip-syncing-obama-... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohmajJTcpNk

These issues are challenging and suggestions about how you think the technology should be introduced/regulated are very welcome.

It's still hypocritical and insulting to the reader's intelligence.

You could make Obama say anything. He could say something humourous, something that he's never said before. You would have just as impressive of a demo if you had Obama say "I'm a little teapot short and stout..." and then used overlay text to promote yourself. You chose instead to make a video where he promotes your startup.

That is both hypocritical and immoral and not only using his personal likeness but, also the seat of the Presidency of the United States.

This fast and loose way that Lyrebird treats their technology only makes me think that they don't really think about the massive negative potential of the technology and just want to get scale / profitability as fast as possible.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com