Hacker News Reader

Comment by scrps | Hacker News Reader

I would argue scale and ease.

Modders going out of their way to find voice actors who can accurately reproduce an out of budget voice actor sounds like a labor of love that would not scale without serious money.

Having a gaming pc with a modern-ish nvidia GPU (not hating on AMD, rocm is just painful right now) scales very nicely when you apply ML to the problem.

Scales to the budget of bored tinkering teenagers with a lot of compute from chasing gaming framerates, gaming put mini ML workstations in a lot of kid's bedrooms if you think about it.

As of right now it is pretty much turnkey as it is.

View on HN

So it should be restricted to someone who has money to blow on a labor like this?

The trouble with this framing is that it obscures the other factors involved.

This isn’t just about who has enough money, but about the ethics of using an actor’s likeness at scale without their permission and without paying them.

I think the fact that other VAs have been hired by mod teams in the past is only relevant if you believe that using AI is somehow equivalent.

A voice is not a "likeness" - voices are not copyrightable.

The definition of likeness extends beyond visual imagery.

Regarding copyright, it was previously not practical to copy a voice, so while it may be true that it is not copyright-able today, this is not a sufficient argument for the ethics of such copies, which may or may not be in sync with current laws. If copying voices was possible when copyright laws were established, the legal landscape would probably look different than it does today, which hints at the necessity of changes going forward.

AI is breaking new ground, and at this stage of the conversation, precedent is interesting in terms of how it reveals the gaps in current legal frameworks, but this should not be mistaken for such gaps being acceptable.

Many of these new conversations will reveal two things:

1) The things happening right now are legal

2) There are legitimate questions about whether or not they should be

I didn't mention anything about restricting it, the law will eventually get around handling this type of thing, probably in a DMCA-ish manner would be my guess.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com