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Comment by goodmachine | Hacker News Reader

The malign applications of this technology greatly outweigh the benign. Discuss.

Yes, I think there are almost no legitimate uses for the Farnsworth Device. https://theinfosphere.org/A_Device_That_Makes_Anyone_Sound_L...

My personal hell: My mother has dementia and a land line telephone.

Scammers call all the time. All day long. (Although the last few days have been pretty good, I assume somebody somewhere is doing their jobs. The scammers will adapt.) One thing they do is spoof their number to have the same area code and prefix as the one they're calling, so it's like "Oh, is this a neighbor?" or something, but of course it's not. It's an automated machine abusing the telephone network to try to steal money from a little old lady with dementia.

Evil men with robots are attacking my mom. Another one called while I was writing this post!

This is a goddamned sci-fi dystopia.

And now the robo-thieving bastards can imitate my voice!?

I'm going to have to get her one of those satellite-linked walkie-talkies or something. Thank God she doesn't use the internet.

Back when I worked as a telemarketer in high school a long time ago, we sold paper subscriptions, and usually the people that didn't cuss us out and hang up right away are the lonely old people who just wanted to chat. I lasted two months and had to quit; felt like we were just taking advantage of them.

I wonder if there is a market for proxying your mom's calls to you, allowing you to approve/deny each one before it gets to your mom?

One consistent trend in HN comments is young people complaining about their parents' naivety / incapability to understand the modern scamming world, and wishing they could install something or use some service to keep them from falling into these expensive traps. I know this is a big reason why people get their grandparents iPads instead of full blown laptops, because laptops are much easier to inadvertently install malware on.

Land-line telephones are awful because the majority of people who will pick up the phone during the day on Monday-Friday are old or disabled, i.e. easier to manipulate. I don't think I have received a single legitimate phone call during that time. In fact, legit callers know this and know that if they do call for a good reason, the person at the other end will distrust them.

Con: It's now easier than ever to fake someone saying something outrageous, and have that lie spread across the world long before the truth can get its boots on.

Pro: Humphrey Bogart can direct you to your destination!

I admit, it's a hard choice.

I'm currently working by myself on a game that will likely launch without voice acting (text only) because I don't have the money or skill to find and pay voice actors.

If I could act out the dialog myself and then purchase or generate voices other than my own to overlay on top of those performances, the quality and accessibility of my finished product would go up dramatically.

That would also open up the door for more people to be able to mod the game and add additional dialog options. A big complication with voice acting is that it's essentially static. Even though a big focus of my game is modability, if I do voice acting no-one else can add additional levels or areas or expand on the characters without breaking the recorded dialog.

It would be amazing if I could ship some kind of compiler so that modders could record themselves talking through new/changed dialog, and then insert it seamlessly into the game with the correct character's voices.

Exactly. I was working on an Air Traffic Control mod for Kerbal Bpace Program, but the work has gone on hold due to having to find enough people to record all the lines (to have a decent number of airport voices). Being able to record everything once, and only having to find people willing to let me record five seconds of speech rather than a lengthy recording session, would make this much more feasible.

Hypothetically, if we were interested in donating some voice samples, where would we look to see what lines were needed?

I haven't uploaded the list of lines; I should add that to the github repo.

Have you tried out Replica? I can hook you up with a beta account to see if it'll help with your voice acting.

https://replicastudios.com/

This looks really interesting!

That being said, because mod support is such a huge part of the design of this specific game, I have a policy that I won't use any tools or libraries that aren't either owned by me, that are Open Source, or that are exporting to common, open formats that can be freely read, manipulated and written by Open Source programs.

If I used a licensed product to generate my voices, I would be in the same position as if I hired a voice actor -- I wouldn't have a tool that I was free to ship with the game that any modder could use to edit or add dialog, or to even create new characters with new voices.

The few exceptions for proprietary tools I'm willing to tolerate for this specific game are things that generate MIDI output, sounds, fonts, and PNG files. Everything else is either Open Source or completely owned by me. Even for the final assets like mp3 files and fonts, nothing can be licensed, because I want to have full control over when players have the ability to remix and distribute game assets in their mods. I need to know that 20 years from now players will still have access to everything in the game.

I don't want to derail, so to bring that back around to the current discussion on AI-generated fakes, I believe these kinds of AI techniques should be freely available. A world where AI-fakes are considered so dangerous that only a few select guardians can control them is a world where, to me, this technology stops being useful. I'm not saying Replica is in that position -- I'm just speaking to a broad trend in the conversation around AI.

I think we'll start to see more calls to have single companies controlling AI under the guise of being able to ban bad actors or prevent abuse. I think that would be a mistake -- if anything, ubiquitous technology makes it easier for society to adapt to that technology. A purely SaaS, licensed model for AI generated faces, voices, and text would be all of the negatives of this technology with none of the positives that come from Open access and creative usage.

Gatekeeping won't work, we just have to adapt.

I think there are many benign applications, and definitely a massive potential for abuse. In practice, it will be used mostly for benign applications, I think, but due to the outsized impact, you could still say the malign applications outweigh.

However, what I found reassuring is that the paper actually addresses these concerns:

"However, it is also important to note the potential for misuse of this technology, for example impersonating someone's voice without their consent. In order to address safety concerns consistent with principles such as [1], we verify that voices generated by the proposed model can easily be distinguished from real voices"

This doesn't mean it won't fool humans, especially when used in a carefully crafted setting (low-quality phone call with distressing content).

I'm guessing this will just be used as an excuse by Google to prevent this technology from being easily or fully accessible to others.

On a benign level, many VO artists will find themselves out of work now that we can have Don LaFontaine back.

On more positive outlook, perhaps this, along with deepfakes, propels us faster towards an evidence-based society.

On a related note, I can definitely foresee a lot of voice actors having their voices cloned for uses they wouldn't really intend. Seems like a big legal grey area as many countries have personality rights.

Here's an outlandishly optimistic take on the possibilities.....as the internet and media is flooded with increasingly convincing but false representations of reality, a widespread habit of greater skepticism of "the facts" starts to spread throughout society, leading people to alter the speed at which they form new opinions on various issues (possibly degrading confidence in preexisting opinions), and the manner in which they construct their personal mental model of reality. As the frequency with which an individual's brain is fed data inconsistent with directly observable reality increases, might a tipping point be eventually released where it refuses to continue making snap decisions, and instead delays judgement until a later point in time when more information is available?

Perhaps loosely similar to being forced into a stature of "noting" in meditation: https://www.insightmeditationcenter.org/books-articles/menta...

I doubt that. I think that as we have to have more skepticism of 'facts' we'll see more and wider splintering of viewpoint based on preferred communication/news agency.

If you KNOW Fox News won't lie to you, just go there, and only there. Everything else is a lie. If you KNOW NPR won't lie to you, just go there, but only go there. Everything else is a lie.

I think it will only make things worse, because that's the simplest, least 'change' solution for the most people. Society is like water, it always seeks the lowest point.

I imagine, but I feel like there's a point of absurdity where people just aren't buying it anymore. The whole Epstein thing sure seemed to get a lot of coverage and outright bi-partisan mocking just as one example. /r/politics and the "organic" front page of reddit aside, it seems to me the number of people waking up to the possibility that the whole thing is an utter and complete farce is growing.

> Society is like water, it always seeks the lowest point.

Let's not forget these things are analogies, not laws. A trend remains in place until it doesn't.

Imagine we are actually a product of some advanced civilization bored with its capabilities where nothing seems real anymore, so they constructed us as a reality show to experience something that feels real.

There is the obvious, using this technology to put words in somebodies mouth. The more nefarious though, is that certain people who lie all the time can easily claim that a lie you recorded them saying wasn't them and now you can't prove otherwise. Certain people can say whatever they want and just deny it later. "Fake News" indeed..

Con/Pro, depending on perspective: people will have to give up the illusion that they ever really could definitively tell truth from fiction.

Are you asking about cordite or gunpowder in genneral?

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