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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

This is simultaneously impressive and pretty gross.

Why do you think it is gross? Also, what does gross mean in this context? It's a very ambiguous term. Would it be less gross if this was a meme video where someone does an impression of Attenborough and just narrates what the person being filmed is doing in a comical way, there are a million of those probably.

Yes, it would be different if this was an Attenborough impersonator.

Why?

A pitch perfect Attenborough impression by a human would be an expression of talent and itself a kind of artwork. We understand intuitively that perfect impressions of famous people are scarce. When we watch something like this, we see that those impressions will be cheap, instantaneous and universally available; there is only the negative aspect, and none of the wonder at what it took to pull off.

Perhaps for a few minutes we're going to be marveling at the achievements of developers who make these things! But most people here, and, in the near future, everybody else, understand that a programming accomplishment today is a boxed up SKU next year. Most likely, in a very short period of time, the overwhelming majority of people making use of this technology will have had no hand in the accomplishment of building it.

So, yeah. Impressive. Creepy.

This is a good thing. It democratizes access to a product that very, very few could afford when it required a lot of human talent and time to produce. In my experience, I only marvel at impressions done as an unexpected party trick and the novelty quickly wears off. If I hear a voiceover that sounds very much like some famous person I'm not imbued with wonder I just perceive that the audio was well produced and don't give it a second thought. I think this kind of automation may even be very good for people with unique voices who are looking to get into voice acting, they should be able to pay some service to clone their voice and then offer it on demand for a small fee. The amount of work they would have to put into this is greatly reduced compared to if they had to do all of the voice acting themselves and they are able to take more customers since the work can be done in parallel. It's like digital publishing for voice acting with the same benefits and detriments e.g. your voice can be cloned like your ebook or song can be torrented but you also get a much bigger market and it's much easier to enter it.

No, because the underlying thing has mostly bad uses. The higher bar towards accomplishing it prior to AI mitigated the downsides.

Do we have a word for this yet? I feel like it's becoming common enough that we'll soon need one.

CreePT

Repugnificent.

Imgrossive

generative impersonation, I suppose

But for something simultaneously impressive and gross?

grimpressive? improsse?

grosspresionist?

Uncanny vallAI

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