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Comment by Lucadg | Hacker News Reader

At first glance there seems to be more more malicious uses than good ones with voice. Yes, hearing someone dear to me say things he/she never said maybe comforting. Anything else?

Maybe some movies with the deceased actor's voice?

But what if someone who wants to hurt me sends me files (or phone calls) from the deceased person saying horrible things like:

- "I am still alive but left as I was tired of you"

- "oh Jan, I love you" [fake phone call from the past, where Jan is a lover which never existed]

or even from alive people:

- "I am leaving you"

- or my live voice saying stuff which gets me fired or in prison.

We will never be able to believe voice again...how will we adapt?

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People had the exact same concerns when digital image manipulation software became popular, including the "we will never be able to trust an image again" question.

To answer your question, I think the biggest step we took in adapting to the ever-present risk that an image may have been manipulated is acknowledging that it's possible. As soon as people knew that something could be faked, they realized that having a purported photograph wasn't irrefutable proof that it happened and learned to ask for corroboration before making assumptions.

I think we'll learn to deal with this new development too.

Luckily now people don't ever believe photographs as sole evidence in the court of public opinion, and always corroborate that evidence.

Wait. No. I had that backward.

How long has photo manipulation been around? And people still fall for it every minute of every day.

I have zero faith these tech developments will lead to anything good, or that we'll even learn how to deal with them effectively.

Yes. Tech is probably developing faster than our ability to adapt.

These tech developments will happen regardless of you stance on their morality. Either adapt like everyone else or stay behind. Your choice.

I don't think its so much that they fall for it but that people create fake images that confirm what people already believe and the viewers deeply want the image to be true and will not think critically.

Verifying an image is not impossible. You just have to consider:

* Who took the image

* Do they have any reasons for wanting to fake it?

* Was anyone else able to verify they saw or took a photo of the same thing

* Is anyone in disagreement with the content of the image

We don't need image manipulation to fool people on facebook. Recently a random image of a park full of rubbish was used with the caption that this was the result of a recent environmental protest but the image was actually months old from a totally unrelated event. People believed and shared it because they wanted to. You could just as easily write a text post saying you saw a bunch of rubbish after the event and you would have almost the same effect.

> How long has photo manipulation been around? And people still fall for it every minute of every day.

People fall for headlines every minute of every day.

Facebook users buy into doctored photos all the time. It's part of this little known phenomenon called "fake news". Video deepfakes are still time consuming and difficult to develop.

"acknowledging that it's possible" Even then, once the poison of suspicion has been delivered the harm is done.

It doesn't have to be about creating audio of specific text with <specific person>'s voice; it can be much more about creating audio of specific text with a wide variety of believable people's voices.

I could see this, if it becomes commercially viable, potentially being a huge boon to indie game creation, for instance, since hiring a load of voice actors to record the dialogue for an entire game is vastly more expensive than, say, hiring a bunch of different people to record their voices for 5 seconds—or even, if this ever took off, buying a bunch of samples pre-recorded (or networks pre-trained) for the purpose.

This 100%. It's not about impersonating someone, it's about providing natural sounding text-to-speech for games, film, robots etc.

We're currently working on using voice AI to create real products over at https://replicastudios.com

Again this is a good use scenario which seems to bring less benefit than the damage a bad use case scenario.

Cheaper games vs distressing phone calls in this case.

I'm open to better use cases but for now I haven't heard any.

I mean...it's not like we're getting a choice here. The technology is possible, therefore it will happen (and is now starting to happen).

Like so much else in life, we have to take the bad with the good, but not looking for good in it doesn't mean we're less likely to get the bad.

Maybe a little less insidious than your examples, my first thought was being able to generate voice actor lines for videogames. Maybe not main characters, but background NPCs and the such. Might make the VA union a little nervous going foward though!

>We will never be able to believe voice again...how will we adapt?

"Say, Grandma, before I wire the money, what's the name of your cat?"

We can barely trust pictures anymore either.

It seems we'll be going back to judging the likelihood of one's actions based on one's reputation, for better or for worse.

There soon won't be such a thing as unreasonable doubt.

real life interaction is going to be more and more valuable. So, "we won't need to travel again because of videos calls" is not going to happen any time soon, it seems.

And public/private key validation may become invaluable.

I'm looking forward to an AI assistant that can use my voice to make phone calls

I'm sure some people with selective mutism that would like to use text to speech with their own voice

> How will we adapt?

Digitally signing audio clips

Ok mutism is a great use case, thanks. Still, the problem is solved also with normal text to speech software

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