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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

I get why this is newsworthy, but I don't get why it's an ethical problem. How is it any different from hiring a really good Bourdain impersonator to read the email? Lots of celebrities have pitch-perfect impersonators; is this a thing we worried about when it wasn't AI doing the impersonation?

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I think the question is about a "documentary" using synthesized voices presented as if they are recordings. You'd have the same issue with impersonation by a human; it is presenting one thing as something it is not.

Getting away from the specifics of this case, cheap impersonation of arbitrary individuals getting easier raises lots of questions... all those TV spy shows "voice print cloning" stuff becoming more real will make a lot of things involving non-face-to-face trust more interesting.

You just described a second, older/easier way of violating the same ethical norm of not lying about someone having said something they didn't.

Has it always been considered an ethical violation to have an impersonator read something a celebrity wrote? This can't be the first time that's happened.

I've no doubt that it's happened before... Maybe what's really changed here is that we no longer need to convince the human impersonator that this is an acceptable thing to do, because we can just have a machine do it.

a documentary presenting an impersonator as the real person has always been unethical, yes. this one is newsworthy because it was done in a new way.

I think the concerns are 1, this is passed off without real buy in from next of kin for a person who would be against it if he were alive. And 2, I think the attention and concern is heightened because this shows it can be done at scale to anyone with ease instead of having very talented people individually read off scripts into a mic.

Consider getting a voicemail from your dead grandmother tomorrow. Public figure or not, we need to have a line somewhere where it’s no longer okay to scrape a profit from every little thing we can think of. Can we let dead guys just be dead?

People would pay for that. To get a voicemail from someone you loved would be great. Even better a conversation.

We hang photos to remember. A voicemail or more would help our kids hear grandma.

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