Robin Williams’ daughter Zelda slams AI for recreating her father’s voice | Hacker News Reader

Robin Williams’ daughter Zelda slams AI for recreating her father’s voice

english.elpais.com

33 pointsc42074 comments

This is just my cynical opinion, but I think humanity would be better off if we all just agreed to throw our AI research in the garbage. What is the upside to all of this? Worker A does less work, Worker B loses their job, and Worker A continues to make the same salary and work the same hours they did before. And on the other end, customers and consumers get more SEO spam, more low-quality art, music, tv shows, and books. As if we need more of anything. I'm not against all technology, this just feels like a particularly dangerous development.

We should throw out photo copiers and cameras in the garbage as well. After all, people have used them to reproduce the work of others since their inception.

AI isn't creating faithful reproductions of artwork. It's creating strange remixes of prior work without the artist's input or consent.

I thought it's blatant copying that is objectionable in the artistic industries where remixing is everywhere. Also, where does consent go into this? Do I need permission to produce a disrespectful satire (a remix) of the Nike logo?

> Do I need permission to produce a disrespectful satire (a remix) of the Nike logo?

We have developed Fair Use laws over many years and many court cases to answer these kinds of questions. AI tools presently don't understand or care about that.

I don't see why ML tools need to understand this from the law's perspective. The publisher & content producer already has responsibility to verify. There are already tools that allow an author or artist to sue if the work is too similar, or to request a publisher to do a takedown. If generative ML cannot sufficiently distinguish itself from a blatant copying machine, then we already have a system in place to deal with that problem.

But there seems to be the real possibility that ML tools can create art that's sufficiently different, and the degree to which they can generate sufficiently new art is the degree to which they warrant a new policy framework.

IMO the question of an artist's copyright ownership is the wrong framing here with regards to fear of ML. If self driving technology gets better, taxi and truck drivers do not have any informal or formal ownership over the art of driving, but they have the same fear.

Ironically, published remixes of original works (specifically, music remixes) pay a large portion of their revenue to the original artists.

> Do I need permission to produce a disrespectful satire (a remix) of the Nike logo?

You'd probably be fine, but Nike's lawyers could bleed your pocketbook dry to find out. Fair Use being a subjective thing and all.

Sounds like the everyday job of a club DJ!

Which is even better, and not at all a problem.

I don't have to consult with Walt Whitman to write a poem in his style, and nor should I.

I don't have to get consent from Slash to shred on my guitar in his style, and nor should I.

All of human endeavour has been the result of one ape looking at what another ape is doing, saying, "Me like! Me do too!" and then a third ape looking at them both and saying, "Me also like! Me do too, but do little different!"

We're entering the next era of our evolution, people... and its going to be guided and shaped and molded by our technology, just like every other major era of our evolution... from fire, to metallurgy, to the printing press, to the transistor... we're just in the next phase, and like every other phase, a lot of people stand to lose - but many more stand to gain.

Under this framework, all labor saving devices should be thrown out. Guess we'd go back to the days of 90% or whatever of the population being employed in agriculture.

What labor is it saving though? Seems like the bulk of what we can do with AI is create inferior creative works, since we can't trust it to do anything important for the foreseeable future.

There's a growing sentiment among the youth that I'm calling Luddism-Nouveau.

My brother is a public school teacher and he's telling me that the kids really like talking about Ted Kaczynski...

All of this to say; your opinion, while cynical, is not unique.

I don't agree with any of it, by the way. I like that we have modern medicine.

I'd call it Butlerian Jihadism or just Butlerism, but then again, it's kinda niche :p

It's not as niche as you'd think. The kids are talking about the unabomber's manifesto. I'm pretty concerned by that.

Here's[0] an article Bill Joy wrote at the turn of the millennium wherein he quoted the unabomber and spent a lot of time thinking about the power of then emerging technologies. Kaczynski was obviously intelligent (with academic creds too) and had thought through many of the implications of tech long before most others had. His actions were insane, but his malcontentment with technology perhaps was not.

[0]https://www.wired.com/2000/04/joy-2/

I'd be more concerned at any point if kids stopped taking things to extremes and missing out on the nuances of things. It's what kids do.

It's more concerning when in their mid twenties, early 30s, they don't grow up. Which seems to have more to do with the general infantilization arising from a variety of factors, perhaps most notably crippling debt for which they themselves are the pledged collateral, by which of course I mean student loans, which stops them from starting families, owning homes, and generally getting the experience of actually having responsibility for various systems that require having an intimate experience with nuance.

Like I say, I'm not against developing technology. Conflating AI and medicine seems nonsensical. As another example, what about nuclear weapons? Does anyone think that giving humans the ability to self-annihilate was a good development? We did it because we feared other humans would do it first. We would be better off if such weapons simply didn't exist, IMO.

So I understand progress can be good, but sometimes we ought to take a step back and reflect. Unfortunately our societies haven't really developed mechanisms to do that.

>As another example, what about nuclear weapons?

Mutually assured destruction have so far prevented the worst.

It's yet to be seen if nuclear electricity generation is a net positive for humanity, but it could be.

Except that AI is being used to develop drugs right now. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7577280/

None of this exists in a vacuum.

I almost can't believe what I'm reading. Every single leap forward in human history has been because people could literally just do more stuff. The entire industrial revolution happened because what took one person a week could now be done by that same person in a day. AI should hopefully do the same for many things. Sure, there will be people who will have trouble adapting. Just like when we get cars or when the industrial revolution happened.

I don't think it's worth it to leave the future society stunted. I'm very happy I don't live in a cave warmed by some burning dry wood and I don't have to go out tomorrow in freezing rain to hopefully catch the next thing to eat.

you say "loses their job" I say "doesn't need to work".

The world has survived many a technological advancement but, if AI were to make it so Worker B "doesn't need to work" going forward, our society is not structured to support Worker B in any meaningful way, and that's something to be concerned about.

Yeah, if somehow Basic Income works out, this will be less concerning. But I think that's the harder problem to tackle.

Not really, we'll do what we already do - leave them to die.

"But oHhHHh noOooOOo, that's sooo awful, cbozeman! We can't do that!"

Bullshit. We do it every single day. Every single day, someone, somewhere, starves to death because they have no marketable skills whatsoever, and because no one cares if they live or die. This is just going to accelerate the process. We'll either get Star Trek, or we'll get that Matt Damon movie.

Maybe not, but they might still need their health insurance.

Not cynical at all. Nobody asked for this and it's being forced on us by bigcorps who don't give a shit about people, backed by asocial amoral people who don't give a shit about people.

The upside is that in the end, humanity only needs to consist of the 1%. There is no upside for the 99%. But they do not matter.

What if they had the voice of someone who was no longer living, no estate, or living relatives? Who would own that voice?

In most states in the United States, if someone dies without a will and without anyone ascertainable in the line of intestate succession, the assets of the decedent escheat to the state.

So, if the person lived in California when they passed, California would own the intellectual property associated with the voice. Why or whether the State of California would ever enforce or even seek to perfect those rights is a different matter.

Intellectual property owned by the state is in the public domain, isn't it?

I don't think anyone would care enough to sue or otherwise make a ruckus, so they'd probably get away with it.

Anyone here who has seen the 2013 movie 'The Congress', loosely based on the Stanisław Lem novel 'The Futurological Congress'? I wonder why it's not being mentioned when it comes to copying and replacing actors by AI..

This makes me think of something Nancy Sinatra said about life after her father died. There was no escaping it. She'd be shopping and one of his songs would start playing.

AI aping your dead father has to be super creepy.

Thought perhaps that needs to be outright illegal.

Good luck owning a voice in an infinite house of voices.

It's illegal to use someone's likeness without their knowledge in a lot of places.

Headline actors are inevitably going to be (already are?) selling the rights to their voice and likeness, setting up perpetual revenue streams for their estates, and in the next few years the parameters of those rights will almost assuredly be in every contract.

It might be inevitable but they're currently on strike in part to avoid selling those likeness rights.

That could be amended in an explicit contract or quit the union. Say you are very sick/old/whatever/dontcare and need some money and have not had a gig in 10 years? I am will to bet we see a few of those soon. Then soon after the rise of the 'scanned' actor with no such contract but one that gives away those likenesses. They will be bought in packs like game assets.

What's the timeline on that sort of thing?

Like I'm sure that some relative of Elvis Presley was paid for the Elvis movie that was recently released, but is anyone going to get paid for those new Napoleon movie/miniseries?

> is anyone going to get paid for those new Napoleon movie/miniseries

At some point things enter the public domain, and facts aren't copyrightable.

That is correct, we are talking about when things enter the public domain, specifically the likeness of an individual.

>It's illegal to use someone's likeness without their knowledge in a lot of places.

It's illegal to use their likeness claiming that it is actually them. I fail to see how AI voices are legally any different at all than using a human impersonator.

They're not.

Imagine getting mad at an inanimate object.

It's pretty easy, go stub your toe on a coffee table...

In related news, Nintendo sues Zelda Williams for copyright violations for being named after the character from their video game. /s

The name Zelda existed long before the game, or Nintendo.

Of course it existed long before, but that doesn't stop people from claiming ownership.

Voices aren't unique or under copyright.

I understand her grief over this, but I also understand why people are pursuing this technology. It could be revolutionary in media generation.

> positioned herself in favor of the Hollywood strike, saying her dad ‘definitely would’ve been out there fighting the good fight for art and artists’

“fighting the good fight for people with skills the market doesn’t value as much as they thought”

can someone explain it a different way to me

The writers won the strike so clearly the studios value their labor.

For now, with the existing state of the industry and the fact that AI tools have not been fully used by most studios, you are correct.

Studios can't just change their whole process overnight.

Revaluate this in a couple years, though, when new studios have popped up that can do the same work for a 10th the cost.

I've said this here before but I think a lot of people on hackernews are confused about how the market for creative industries actually works. Productivity alone is not necessarily correlated to profitability or potential success.

It isn't the first time either.

Depends what you mean by "won?" It is ending, but I'm not exactly hearing gnashing of teeth from the studios, here.

The studios held out and eventually caved on pretty much every single demand. Not sure how that’s not a gnashing of teeth.

The studios were clearly going to have to give in eventually. I won't really argue against that. I'm not entirely clear that this was a battle to be "won," though. It isn't like they've never left bargaining in the past thinking that they did well, only to find out that things changed later. Or that they just misunderstood stakes.

To be clear, my main doubt in that post is that this is a battle that can lead to a winning war. I am not at all opposed to it happening. Indeed, I support those that were striking. I can't but feel that there is a higher up meta battle that will be more high stakes.

I don’t think the studios see it your way though. There were quotes from executives where they wanted to essentially starve out the writers and come to more agreeable terms for the studios.

Just last quarter they were bragging how the strikes were saving them money.

I legitimately don’t think the studios wanted to agree till they saw their next quarter numbers.

And I guess maybe I shouldn’t say “the studios”. They apparently had a couple holdouts in their corner which caused negotiations to take longer than the majority of the studios would have wanted

Could be, for sure. My gut is that most of the publicity and quotes I saw "from studios" were from basically the entry level/grunts of the studio world and combed to find the worst that could be found, quote wise.

Note that I do think studios were more happy with the deal they had before the strike. I just don't think they are gnashing teeth at the agreement.

Many of those quotes were attributed to high level executives, and being very involved in that world, I have no doubt in the veracity of those attributions.

I therefore very much disagree with your gut feeling.

I'm vaguely interested in the quotes you mean. That said, I do still get the impression you are talking passed me. Do I think they would have rather kept more favorable terms for themselves? Almost certainly. Do I think they made silly jabs around this? Again, almost certainly.

But I find the need for mustache twirling villains throughout the entire chain of the studio to be unlikely. (Note that this does not preclude that there could be some ridiculous personalities there.)

https://deadline.com/2023/07/writers-strike-hollywood-studio...

My apologies, I missed this from some other conversations.

I'm not seeing any named sources on these quotes? Such that this doesn't change my prior, yet? To be clear, I fully expect there are some crappy individuals in the studios. But, having worked in big organizations before, it is trivial to get stupid quotes from middle management that somehow thinks they know the landscape completely.

Consider, the "top-tier" producer quoted with "late October, for sure" as what the intention was. And that was just the timeline for supposedly having talks... Clearly overstating their hand, there.

Seriously, they don't have a single named source there. Not even one that has a credible connection to actual leadership. This reads far more like people that have an inflated sense of self worth talking than it does those that are actually involved.

Again, I'm not claiming that they are happy that they are having to renegotiate. They certainly had better terms before. I just don't buy the "gnashing of teeth" narrative.

It's almost like two parties mutually negotiating with each other, each keeping an eye on their own self interest, is a viable way for people with radically different incentives to come to a compromise.

Who would have thought?!

To be fair, that kind of sweeps the gigantic power imbalances at play under the rug. :D

That's why there's a union.

The writers got basically everything they asked for.

Note, I didn't say it was a defeat. And I'm mostly glad for the deal.

That said, I have also gotten everything I've asked for from some deals, only to find I got somewhat taken. There are very real arguments that that is ok, and I confess I still don't feel bad in any of those situations. I can't claim that they don't exist, though.

market valuation depends on the consensual negotiations of all the stakeholders and consumers of a product don’t have 100% power to control the price. movie studios would love to price content creation at 0 if possible.

how about this - you can store "excess valuation" as pieces of printed paper aka financial instruments, recognize the appreciation of their value in trading, but also pull behind-the-scenes moves such as multiple classes of stock, different terms for different purchasers, front-running the trading of them, exchanging them for less than face value in private deals, etc.. they also work well at scale.

OR you can recognize skills development in humans, who are social, who show repeated contributions of skill, talent, looks, actions, insights into written works or other human activity, and then recognize them with payment for their increasingly valued skills. You can also collect together and negotiate with them (publishing side), gather others with skill and negotiate (writers union) collectively, put value into items that only that individual can hold or make (personal items like letters).. and thereby deliver the OBVIOUS value that they bring, with bargained economic instruments.

When one side demeans, disenfranchises, belittles, avoids recognition of, uses dirty tricks to steal from, the other side, it looks pretty bad. Often this behavior is egged on by third-parties with only personal interest in mind, like for example, investors.. who might use their wealth leisure time to engage in some of these anti-social and/or criminal market behaviors.

When an entire class of people in a civilization, like perhaps talented artists, actors, illustrators, writers, and other creative, are threatened for their income and future wealth, and get detracted by investors in public.. that looks pretty bad too.. Perhaps some of that is a little like what is going on now in Hollywood, California and related industries.

A company offers you an $80k salary for a new position, you counter offer with $100k, and they say they'll call you back. A couple days later they call and you both agree to $95k.

Is that you "fighting the good fight with skills the market doesn't value as much as you thought?"

Or is it negotiating to find the true market value that you are willing to accept and the company is willing to pay for your skills?

the true market value can be considerably less, your logic works both ways

If both sides agree to a price then that's a very local market value.

If lots of people on both sides agree to a price then that really is market value.

How about this: in your restatement, "the market" appears to be a neutral objective weighing function that tells the truth regardless of how uncomfortable that truth might be.

But "the market" is often a personification of power, with powerful interests (sometimes hidden) working together to bend the market's behavior to their ends. When that happens, if we don't see that bias, thinking of the "market" as objective is a path to being manipulated by those interests.

In this case, the powerful forces are distributors and financiers who cannot operate without creative talent. The actual customers want the creative output, they have no interest in the logo at the front of the movie. So the distributors are powerful rent-seekers who would like to use technology to increase their share of the rent.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com