Hacker News Reader

Comment by geuis | Hacker News Reader

Once the generation times get to real-time, I dunno what's going to happen. I follow the voice acting community a lot and this is a big existential threat level of worry in that community.

But I also see some positives for the narrative voice field, but at the expense of actual actors.

The latest sequel to a favorite audio book series has the professional narrator pronouncing different character names and town names entirely different than the previous 7 books.

In another book the narrator completely changed the character voices in the sequel compared to the first.

The positives for listeners is eventually we can guarantee that voices are completely consistent between narrations. An editor will soon be able to describe the emotions of a character and nuance how the AI performs certain scenes.

It's really sad but I think the end of human audio storytelling is coming to and end quite rapidly.

View on HN

On the upside, I can now narrate my own life and thoughts as Morgan Freeman.

I re-read this comment in the voice of Morgan Freeman. Noticed only mild artifacts.

Nothing beats “Good news, everyone!”, though.

/Nelson works for me every time.

What will happen is humans redefine their role in society, and keep iterating literally on their survival.

We’ve been here before evolving what we call each others roles; priest, cleric, “people name Farmer must be farmers”; they’re arbitrary labels (in that “we don’t know why we exist”, not immutable obligations of reality way), and there’s no reason we to have see this as “the end of human storytelling”; software isn’t lobotomizing us, but changing who can reach us. If info distributed via technology cannot be trusted, good; past has shown there’s no reason to trust technology corporations anyway. Make it explicit.

Death of commercial figurative identity is not literal death and language is not the only source of understanding.

Why only the end of human storytelling?

The bots will get all the capital as well as humans get laid off.

What will humans have to offer each other, let alone the corporations?

Next year they are coming out into the real world and replacing your manual labor… and they will never freak out and attack an old lady or lose their patience. And they will be perfectly tailored to everyone’s individual preferences and needs

https://www.axios.com/2023/03/17/robots-humanoid-figure-tesl...

it’s already here. People on the chans are using a alexjones model to sing anime songs and it worked really well.

Alex Jones has been made to sing anime songs for over a decade: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODZE5peUfWQ

You've piqued my curiosity. Got any links?

You can search for it given the keywords... https://desuarchive.org/g/thread/92190669/#92191245

Relevant speculative fiction that tops the current /wsg/ thread: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gGLvg0n-uY

My guess would be for voice actors to copyright their voices. I am not familiar with the voice generation ML but i guess for things like dramatic pauses a voice actor might still be needed. Also I'm guessing it should be fairly straightforward to detect such copyright violations.

I would really like to see it implemented for heavy text driven rpgs. But overall yeah things look bad for voice actors in general

You already have the right to your likeness, which includes the things you say in your voice profile (especially when attached to your name, and not said in a manner like that of a parody or an impersonation for laughs).

The threat is that, supposedly, pretty much all of the media companies that need Voice actors have a clause that allows them to use generative voice AI after the VA's death or if they're otherwise incapacitated to the point where they would be physically unable to get the voice actor back in the studio to record more lines. This is not outlandish for voice actors since they probably couldn't care less about their voice being used after they are dead, but it does mean we'll be hearing a lot more of it as more and more decade-long franchises use it to avoid hiring a good-enough impersonation or voice replacement once the old one dies.

SAG created a rule after Crispin Glover’s face was used without permission via a prosthetic in Back to the Future 2 to ensure it never happened again.

I could easily see a similar rule being added by an appropriate union to their contracts to prevent AI copies of voices that weren’t approved by the original actor.

Video game voice actors are famously not unionized.

Conceivably, anyone who uses his or her voice for spoken word or singing could, in theory, cryptographically sign each master copy of the recording, and therefore certify that they were present and active in its creation. Of course any post-processing would lose this attestation. So it's practically useless, I suppose. But it would be a first-line of defense in copyright cases, at least, by being able to say "I did indeed say that, and here's the signature." or "You can't prove that I said and signed that."

This is a thing I've started at pretty hard. Embedding a signal that survives basic postprocessing isn't that hard, but doing it in such a way that it stays well below the noise floor and survives extensive editing is not easy. If anyone is interested I could be convinced to put my work on GitHub, highly doubtful that it will go commercial unless I get a huge raft of free time.

Are you saying that a cryptographic signature could survive postprocessing? Well, it may, but when you post-process a sound clip, that sound changes itself. I mean, imagine playing cutups with a dialogue track; that actor may or may not want to attest that the final result is theirs. That's the whole thing. If you cut out three words of dialogue, it is no longer cryptographically signed.

Maybe a use case for NFTs hah.

It's a use case for merkle trees. Since the mere existence of the hash at a reasonably well-attested time is sufficient, you don't need the rest. A handful of central roots of various trees is fine, morally equivalent to announcing things with an ad in the newspaper.

Now that I think about it, it seems to be a great idea - a verifiable record that some digital artifacts have existed at certain times. Of course it wouldn't be able to "prove ownership" or "prove being original" or other stupid ideas tokenbros throw around, that's impossible. But it wouldn't be profitable for the tokenbros and actually all the distributed attribute is not a requirement. We can probably set up a centralised append only DB which will periodically publish it's own hashes to attest that it wasn't tampered. Probably a useful tool for our deep fake future, the only question is how to scale it, who can be trusted and relied upon to input hashes in the system.

The idea predates bitcoin IIRC.

Trademark of the voices, not copyright...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com