Hacker News Reader

Comment by jordanab | Hacker News Reader

Give it another decade or so, and I can see Lucasfilm/Disney making full feature films starring only deepfake 'clones' of the original trilogy characters in their younger/O.T. forms.

View on HN

The implications for the entertainment industry are massive.

When I was working in indie game development, I wondered if you could use deepfakes as a voice actor. Basically get someone famous/good voice with infinite voice lines, without having to pay for studio time. Obviously, you would need them to sign-off on using their voice for commercial purposes.

How would you get the acting part of the voice acting right? I can’t imagine you wouldn’t still need a skilled voice actor for that.

A markup language for voice that tells the generator how to inflect everything. It's not on the horizon yet, but anything that our voice can do, a computer will do someday.

I believe that's already out there, since services like Alexa will do certain inflections depending on the context of what they're saying. I think.

Yup exactly. Anything you would tell a voice actor to do you have in the markup. Obviously, the voice actor can still produce higher quality, probably for a long time to come.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/sp...

https://cloud.google.com/text-to-speech/docs/ssml

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/polly/latest/dg/ssml.html

Neat! Looks like I'm behind the times already.

Then the person doing the markup becomes the talent you have to pay to make things good.

It's a lot easier to write "cries like a baby" or "screams in terror" than it is to actually do it on command, over and over again, for take after take.

And one can even imagine a program with emotional slider bars that lets a person listen to how a line sounds with different levels of inflection and then automatically inserts the appropriate markup for the settings the user selects.

That percon can be replacable. Or it can be team. And you don't need to worry about the AI tiring or damaging their vocal cords after trying out different intonations all day. And eventually the there will be good enough automation to generate the intonattions too - either entirely or with minimal input from a voice director.

Yeah, the acting part is a valid concern. A mod for The Witcher 3 does this to give the main character voiced dialogue[1], but it doesn't really sound.... right. I mean, it is voiced and some lines feel authentic, but some lines also just feel odd.

[1]: https://www.gamesradar.com/witcher-3-mod-uses-ai-to-create-n...

Not if you're going to voice the Elcor from Mass Effect.

"With barely contained terror. You drive a hard bargain."

There's a post on Hacker News for this, by a company called Sonantic.

I'm working on https://vo.codes

The new version is almost ready to launch.

I've also got voice to voice conversion working, and I'm trying to make it real time. It's pretty close.

I met someone a few years back who apparently worked in the field of ‘digital persona management’ which is basically an agent for actors’ likeness after they die. It sounded like families and estates were very interested in the concept as long dead actors could potentially become movie stars again in theory.

That sounds like a fairly big ethical dilemma that Disney will happily ignore if making a puppet show out of people's corpses earns them a few extra bucks

This will only be a thing for a while. Why pay somebody's grandchildren when you can create a new face that's yours?

I suspect it will also lead to essentially "real" fantasy characters that totally replace real human actors. We already have many comic/drawn characters that people associate and identify with in a similar way they associate and identify with human actors; there is no reason why you would not be presented with "actors that don't actually exist in person. I cannot recall what it was called, but the industry has already produced a fully CGI movie that tried to push this very thing by essentially making a real like manga movie.

This is the plot of _The Congress_:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_(2013_film)

See the Harrison Ford vid linked at the end of the original article. Billy Dee Williams also gets inserted. There’s no doubt that this technique will defeat CGI Youngface.

https://collider.com/james-dean-digital-cgi-performance-in-n... (2019)

> James Dean, an iconic movie star who died in 1955 at the age of 24, has been cast in a new Vietnam-era action film called Finding Jack.

Other way around. Real actors' likenesses won't be used as often.

That's a good thing. More actors can now work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com