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Comment by buf | Hacker News Reader

Murf.ai has also been around for a few years.

I own a creator platform (with 500k or so Voice Actors) and have been very interested in AI Voices so I've been watching this develop for a bit.

IMO, Murf's marketing page has better results than their product.

I think the VAs on my platform are in trouble, but they still have a little ways to go.

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Do you mind sharing a link to your creator platform too?

https://www.castingcall.club/

I'm an indie entrepreneur, so it's just me on this project, but it's been great fun.

I'd work on that as a intern for free

You can try some really really really interesting things with half a million users

Just curious - have the worlds collided yet, with people asking voice actors to record data for training TTS models with their voice?

Currently, projects asking for TTS model training are banned on the platform, but only because there was outrage amongst the users.

My company has hired some people for TTS voice training on Upwork. About 90% of the voice actors resented the implications that someone else could make their voice say stuff that they disagree with. But some of them also found the idea of becoming digitally immortal very attractive.

The same way some people like to put up a marble statue of their heroic deeds, others like to record themselves for the internet. In my opinion, both types of people want to avoid being forgotten and surely if you become a famous TTS voice, you'll have a Wikipedia entry...

Cool platform! Thinking about using it for a game project I'm working on – at least for temp V/O. I was noticing that the player for voice acting doesn't play reliably on the search page – you have to go to the profile first. Might be a quick fix.

thanks for the bug report!

Is there an error on the page or just it just not play anything?

Trying to reproduce.

Edit: figured it out. Will fix!

AIs are never going to get the tone and emotional context right. TTS from Google and Samsung running locally on a phone is already listenable so I don't think minorly better AI is going to eat the audiobook market if it hasn't already.

Yes, just like they'll never be able to write poetry, or paint.

They still don’t do either very well. It’s more obvious with poetry and prose, but AI art is pretty vacuous as well once you get past the wow-effect.

"Your dog can sing?!" "It's not as impressive as it sounds, he's pitchy".

Yea, that’s a pretty good analogy. A singing dog is impressive but not able to replace human singers. From what I’ve seen so far, AI tools create technically impressive but generic and derivative works, and on their own, can’t do what a human artist does in terms of understanding the context of what they are requested to do.

It’s possible that doesn’t matter to most people, and the art world will have to realise that mass-produced schlock is all the public really wants. We’ll see.

There's also the possibility they'll get better, possibly much better than humans. Given how much they've improved recently, that's a very very big possibility.

I’m not sure what it would mean for AI to get “better” at art than humans. I expect we couldn’t understand the work it creates at that point.

Well, if AI is worse at art than us now, it means that we currently have a quality metric, otherwise "worse" means nothing. For an AI to get better than humans, it means that the humans are now the group that's worse at art.

You mention "better than humans" like its some profound realization.

It's like saying: for hammering, a hammer is better than my pinky finger.

That's kind of the point of tools.

This "art is just a job we need done" take comes right after a comment about how voice acting is a uniquely human thing that AIs will never be able to do, and I'm finding the disconnect interesting.

Are you saying you're not impressed by what we have acomlished so far?

Do you assume it will stay the way it is?

I am impressed with the technical level of the various AI tools, absolutely. I just think they are learning the surface of art - reproduction of reality and stylisation thereof - but not the point of art, which is orthogonal to the technical skill of an artist.

Never is a long time.

Most actors have no ear for what the context requires. They randomize their performance until they hit something the director likes. So whether AIs will be able to replace actors or directors are two different questions.

The director has a conversation with the actor about what the director wants and hopefully the actor is quick to learn and event anticipate it.

That's what the AI model needs to do to get a similar level of performance.

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