Stephen Fry says his voice stolen from Harry Potter audio books,replicated by AI | Hacker News Reader

Stephen Fry says his voice stolen from Harry Potter audio books,replicated by AI

fortune.com

26 pointsthunderbong26 comments

If this is just the beginning, where will it end? Will we all have artificial voice boxes installed so that we all speak like Stephen Fry? Will every toaster, every fridge be speaking to us as Stephen Fry? Will there be no place on earth to escape his dulcet timbre?

There are worse fates. Our appliances could sound like Brian Blessed.

Gilbert Gottfried

OMG! 'The Talkie Toaster from Red Dwarf' with Brian Blessed's Voice!!

Obviously we need a new Ask Jeeves with Fry’s AI rendered voice. Maybe what we ask of Jeeves can be played back in Hugh Laurie’s Wooster persona.

Although I’d really want Fink-Nottle answering questions about newts, and Madeline Basset about gnomes and stars.

https://archive.is/yqHrY - https://archive.ph/yqHrY - https://archive.vn/yqHrY - https://archive.md/yqHrY

For starters expect to see updated classics—Bogart and Bergman et al in a wide-screen color version of Casablanca. After movies anything will be fair game.

Seems to me we're powerless to stop it. Those who want laws to stop impersonations of others, especially the famous, may get those laws but enforcing them will be another matter altogether, it'll likely be a nightmare.

I'm not much of a film fan so I'd doubt that I'd deliberately seek out a revamped Casablanca but if an easy opportunity arose to watch it then I'd do so. No doubt, those with much greater passion for movies will be driven with a similar passion to seek them out.

Past updated and cloned movies, the scenarios seem almost endless, even with little imagination one can see some of which are horrific.

Celebrity impersonators/impressionists have been doing this since forever. Remember Rich Little? Of course what's different now is the automation, but I expect there is existing legal theory that will be brought into play to cover this.

Bit of a contrast between an impersonator and an actual, perfect clone of someones voice though, right?

Strangely enough, the impersonators are out of a job now...

At work, we make AI recordings of co-workers from Webex meetings. I don’t hear anyone complaining their voice was “stolen and replicated.” This all just seems a little dramatic given the times we live in.

You don't make your living from your voice or face.

One day in the future this comment might just date the way comments from 1950s advertising executives talking about what they do to their secretaries did.

> "tech is not a noun, it's a verb"

We don't know yet where and how AI, consumers, business and regulation will all come together and what the next thing will be after every AI milestone.

Although the AI artistic doom is underway, there will definitely be winners, ie I can imagine Tom Cruise signing off on his AI "action figure" for the rest of his life (and of his heir) and studios who profit indefinitely from content they own in ways we can barely imagine now.

And there will be losers. I can also picture more elaborate, undetectable AI derivatives that do not pay royalties to no one: writers, actors, even directors - AI will learn from their work and replicate indefinitely every aspect as a new product.

AI in art will take Walter Benjamin's 1935 philosophy to the next level, both in meaning and depth: the mechanical reproduction of art alters the very nature of art - AI robs art from its aura of existence in time and space, art becomes soulless. The consumer will not rebel though, but adapt to this new AI reality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Work_of_Art_in_the_Age_of_...

fantasy projections while human creative content makers essentially-starve in overpriced rental units, with cellphone bills

Can it say "He pocketeteted it"?

I doubt 1 to 1 cloning an actors voice without their consent to replace them is even a threat to actors as they have such an easy recourse. I see the future much more in actors that aren't modeled on anyone specifically. That would be a big cost saver for studios imo

Interesting that your position is that the OP assertion of something that already happened isn’t a problem.

It’s also quite literally at the root of the current entertainment union strikes.

And in my experience: we cloned my sons voice for an AI podcast experiment. It’s vaguely similar to his voice but you could also claim it’s not his voice. But the more we listened to his AI voice the less we could stand it. It captured enough characteristics to be an uncanny valley version of him, but also remained plausibly not him. We erased it.

Has there been any voice cloning in any big commercial projects yet? It's mostly private people running models on their own machine/ doing it on 11 labs for fun. I don't see Hollywood doing this at all

These guys claim Intel and Peloton use them: https://wellsaidlabs.com/

Discussion in a recent Planet Money episode: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1178290772

What is this easy recourse?

I feel like if you're already such a big celebrity that people could legitimately make money from your voice then you're already set for life. That is, I would happily trade not being rich and famous, to being rich and famous enough for people to want to clone my voice.

Now on the other hand, if you're a nobody and nobody cares about your voice, you've got other things to worry about, like earning a salary and paying for your kids college.

what if it's not about money ?

Then he's a fortunate man that he can focus on concerns like this I think and probably doesn't realize how lucky he is. People are dying all over the world due to climate change, natural disasters and war. We have boats full of migrants sinking and killing hundreds of children in the British channel, trucks full of dead people who died over overheating trying to move to a better life.

My point is, there are major issues happening in the world that could lead to war, mass migration, and societal collapse. Worrying about your voice being cloned is a luxury and IMO, not a priority honestly.

It's a bit ridiculous to bring these issues in such a discussion.

So let's just let companies do what they want as long as you're making a salary and can pay for college?

oh it was stolen does that mean he doesnt have it anymore

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