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Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

This isn't really an AI issue. You can't use someone's likeness for commercial gain without their consent. This is well-established. It's true for actual footage. Being AI-generated changes nothing.

You'll see the same thing in defamation cases. Someone will no doubt use AI to create someone's likeness to say something that person finds reprehensible and whoever created that AI may try to argue it's just an AI. It won't matter then either.

Where this gets more interesting is if whoever created the AI gets held responsible for what people do with it. The kneejerk reaction in the tech community will be to say "no, it's just a tool" but there's such a thing in legal terms as a reckless disregard for the consequences making you culpable.

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It does raise the question that if it becomes cheap and easy enough to do, could a celebrity even afford to protect their brand? You can sue a company for doing this. You can't really sue 10,000 companies. This could result in a massive shift downwards for the value of a celebrity endorsement.

As much as I hate it, so many problems will be solved by a lack of anonymity on the web, and by gatekeepers preventing unauthorized access.

Yes, I know. There are enormous upsides to anonymity. But at the same time, so much harm would vanish, if every word written, and every deed done, was indelibly linked to the entity responsible.

I think, sadly, this is where all this will end up.

> so many problems will be solved by a lack of anonymity on the web

Honestly, I can't think of very many problems that would be solved by removing anonymity. There are a few, mostly related to to reducing actual criminal activity, but not enough to compensate for what we'd lose.

Well you'd immediately get rid of all spam...

And hate speech/fraud/scams could be punished.

I think spam levels would be unchanged. Cases of fraud are indeed one of the kinds of crime that would be reduced -- but absolutely not eliminated.

The first company I saw that offered ai voice cloning was essentially pitched as an entity just to protect a celebrity's likeness. They'd sell to celebs and become eg the exclusive vendor of authorized Taylor Swift AI voice cloning, never license it to anyone, and sue anyone else who cloned her voice or image. Seems like a reasonable plan.

Exactly. It's not hard to imagine cloning agencies buying avatar/voice of people dirt cheap before they get famous and reselling the rights.

> This could result in a massive shift downwards for the value of a celebrity endorsement.

We should also expect large numbers of authorized AI endorsements. Imagine you're some actor and a foreign company wants to make a TV advert advertising yogurt and pay you $1000. Might as well say yes - as long as they use AI, you don't even need to lift a finger. In fact, you can authorize thousands of ads across the world and pull in a nice million dollars, while becoming 'the advert guy', all without doing any actual work.

Once you race to the bottom, you'll find that those million $ deals turn into 500k deals, etc.. celebs can do a lot more work than they do today. They protect their brand in part by saying no to the shit brand partnerships that would drag down their reputation. Hey Daniel Craig's AI likeness endorses Bob's oil and lube, it must be good!

Is that what the whole Hollywood strike is about though?

re: this film -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_(2013_film)

> there's such a thing in legal terms as a reckless disregard for the consequences

Lots of tools can be dangerous if misused. We hold the people who misuse the tools responsible, not the people who made the tools. Why would AI be any different?

That's not true in all situations, is it? If someone constructs something dangerous like an explosive and then hand it off for someone else's use they'd be culpable as well, wouldn't they?

It all depends. If I sell bottles of arsenic for the purpose of killing rats, I won't be held culpable if someone uses it for murder. If I sell bottles of arsenic for the purpose of murder, I would be.

> If someone constructs something dangerous like an explosive and then hand it off for someone else's use they'd be culpable as well, wouldn't they?

As others have commented, it would depend on the person's intent. If an explosive making company sells some explosives to a construction company for use in excavation, but then the construction company misuses the explosive and kills people, the explosive making company wouldn't be liable. But if person A makes some homemade explosives and gives them to person B to put into a bomb, and the bomb kills people, yes, we would hold person A liable. But even in that case the basis wouldn't be "reckless disregard for consequences", it would just be straight up murder.

Manufacturing and selling explosives in general is restricted, but assuming you follow the regulations you are not culpable for what people who legally purchase them do with them afterwards.

We hold tool makers responsible all the time. It all depends on how the tool is meant to be used and how it's marketed.

For example, a voice cloning AI that's marketed and sold for people diagnosed with ALS to clone their voice in case they lose their ability to speak that is misused will not have any legal liability. However, if that same tool is marketed and sold to clone celebrity voices for commercials, then that company is going to have a bad time in court.

> if that same tool is marketed and sold to clone celebrity voices for commercials

That wouldn't be "reckless disregard for consequences", though. It would be straight up fraud.

Regarding that knee-jerk reaction: one clear difference here is that the company does not just sell the tool, as in hardware, they sell a model that already contains an impression of the likeness of Johannson's voice derived from training data that was built by the supplier, not by those who created the ad. If they'd sold a blank slate to the ad-maker who then fed it with Johansson content until it was able to create the fake, the situation would be very different.

I've seen it asserted a lot, but I'm not clear on the exact mechanism in play here.

Is it copyright?

Is it some protected legal mechanism encoded in law, or is it agreement(s) between parties (Broadcasters/TV/Film producers)?

Is it only in play if you explicitly say it's a particular person? Can you use an impersonator to voice over something without referencing the person in question/give no grounds to suggest it's a particular person? What if you hire a good lookalike? A soundalike?

You're looking for the "right of publicity" (and "misappropriation) [1][2].

[1]: https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/misappropriation/

[2]: https://www.inta.org/topics/right-of-publicity/

> This isn't really an AI issue.

Whether a sound-alike produced with AI voice cloning with the specific explicit disclaimer on the material containing the use in this case is, under existing law, a use of protected likeness is an AI-specific question in the application of the existing right of personality laws.

It won't be the last such question, I suspect.

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