Can someone give me a practical use case where this adds a net benefit to society?
Of course, there's also the preservation of the voice of a loved one. I would probably pay to hear my father's voice again but there"s probably only one or two VHS tapes with his voice on it.
Small, independent film makers can now use a skeleton crew to voice parts.
I can't imagine it would be anything other than a niche service, but hearing the voice and, potentially, interacting with a chatbot/LLM with the voice of a passed love one.
This is off the top of my head. I would also guess that this technology is a stepping stone for other weird, interesting and profoundly helpful uses.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/24/23370097/darth-vader-jame...
Auto non-toxic rephrasing of online chat in video games, let people hear their voice but paraphrase what they said in a manner that doesn't turn the platform into a cesspit.
Cloning your own voice so that you can turn a script into audio without 50 takes and then having to remove a million Ums and errs.
that feels very orwellian
I think this is closer to the direction of Huxley in Brave New World, where a deeper understanding of how to manipulate without brute force creates a very different dystopian society than 1984.
BNW had a similar effect by conditioning, rather than by applying the strong form of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.
Mr Beast talked about translating his videos to other languages to get more reach. This can be done for people with limited budget or just in general so people can watch videos without needing subtitles.
I wouldn't be surprised if we saw this incorporated into YT in the near future.
Outside public speakers, there’s probably other people whose lost their voice or have trouble vocalizing who might want to sound like their old selves. This could help them.
Disclaimer: I think these techs will more often do damage than good. I’m just brainstorming an answer to your question.
Certainly entertainment. Movies / TV. It opens a new opportunity for videogames with generative characters.
Alexa, siri, and similar, are all common place.
Another huge usecase would be anything to do with voice acting. Either in video games, cartoons, or the like.
This would completely democratize voice acting material, and would empower anyone to be able to do this for cheap.
Democratization will always be the enemy of those who profit from preventing others from being empowered.
The real answer is yes, I could probably come up with some contrived examples, like I lost my voice in a freak LLM accident and now want to clone my old voice. But this doesn't (you don't?) really need a net benefit reason to figure it out and publish it. Because why? I assume, because "this shouldn't exist!" which is just a more palatable wa to phrase "won't someone think of the children".
Society doesn't benefit from ignorance, so given it can exist, what's the problem with it existing? Why does it need a practical reason? Because people will do bad things with it? Duh, but I'd rather everyone know then just the bad guys
I was curious to see if anyone could name at the top of their head some practical use cases that they feel net out the potential harms of cloning and misusing someone else's voice.
There's some nice and certainly practical examples, but I don't feel any of them would net out the harms.
Perhaps there's a use case that we can't even comprehend yet that would though!
While you can’t make it go away, you can disincentivize propagation and use which can be the difference between thousands of cases of scams/extortions and millions. Until there’s a stronger argument for voice cloning models (talking to a dead loved one is creepy and not a positive argument) then we shouldn’t encourage tools with overwhelmingly nefarious utility.
Hurting people, lying, that's already illegal.
I think Maybe you misunderstood my argument. My argument isn't that good guy with a voice cloaner is the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a voice cloaner. That's, as you pointed out, stupid. My argument is that no one benefits if how easy it is to make one remains a secret to everyone but the bad guys.
To at least give us something as a consolation for all the havoc all sorts of deep fakes will wreak on societies. It's like asking what a knife can be used for other than murder. It's a valid question.
Scams aren't going away. Will this make it easier to scam some people? Absolutely, so did the internet. I'm not claiming this is anything like the internet. My argument closer to, the reason people get scammed isn't because [thing exists] it's because bad people lie, and kind people trust them. We can all wring our hands in fear over what the new technology might do, or we can solve the problems we care about. Authenticity was hard before this, and it'll be hard after.
> If you look at the enormous fruits of human genius that mankind has developed in the last 50 years, atomic energy and rocketry and flying to the moon and coherent light, and it goes on and on and on -- and then it turns out that every one of these triumphs is used primarily in military terms. So it is not reasonable for a scientist or technologist to insist that he or she does not know -- or cannot know -- how it is going to be used.
-- Joseph Weizenbaum
That is not fear. That is being serious and unflinching, if anything.
> We can all wring our hands in fear over what the new technology might do, or we can solve the problems we care about.
I'm doing neither. I said it's a valid question, with which you agree. The rest is a straw man apropos nothing anyone actually said, here, and wringing your hands about it. It's a way bigger waste of time than asking a simple question and let those who want to answer that, and let those who don't want answer it simply don't answer it, instead of making up this "issue" with the question itself.
> Authenticity was hard before this, and it'll be hard after.
So "nothing changes", but technology is super important? You could say the same about, say, curing cancer. People will live for a while and then die, with or without it. Why since it makes no difference, what'd be the problem with "fearing" it?