BBC chooses AI over human voiceover artist
twitter.com
twitter.com
It looks to me like an agent has forwarded something from a third party production company working for the BBC.
There are at least five different possibilities here:
1. The production company is working on spec or to develop a proof of concept piece of content that is not going to be broadcast so they are using AI voice to flesh out that proof of concept.
2. A production assistant sending this weirdly formatted email has got the wrong end of the stick and sent an email referencing AI voice having misunderstood something.
3. The BBC is actually using AI voice. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it is for broadcast or public facing use.
4. The BBC is using AI voice for broadcast/public facing use and Equity (the performers’ union) will call out its members to strike.
5. The email is fake.
With no further context it’s impossible to say which of these is most likely. But in the absence of any further detail - particularly context from the author of the tweet or sender info - even partially obfuscated - there’s enough doubt to need that further context before people start screaming and wailing about AI destroying jobs.
If this isn’t happening now, it will happen in six months. And if it doesn’t happen in six months it will happen at some point in the near future.
Voice actors, session musicians, anyone providing a “commodity performance” need to prepare themselves for a world where the majority of work evaporates or changes and only remarkable performances stand out and have value beyond what can be delivered by AI.
Artist's rights, livelihoods, and incentives should all be protected. This protection should probably come from good regulation of AI, and not us merely asking or expecting corporations or entities like the BBC to conflict with their primary goals (without government or industry regulation forcing them to comply to a clearly articulated standard).
The cat detector van can pinpoint a purr at 500 yards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_Un...
Like the wikipedia article says, modern digital signals and flat screens means correlating a set's emissions with a particular licensed broadcast is "difficult"!
I'd say impossible. For a van parked outside to determine you're watching BBC and not something else? Laughably impossible! Unless they peep through your windows?
If you search|scroll down the TV Licence article for "In 2013 it was revealed..." these days they can literally match flickering light seen through the window bouncing off the ceiling against currently broadcasting BBC | Channel 5, ITV, etc broadcasts.
See: Optical detectors
It's remarkable anyone thinks it's okay for a licensing authority to adopt this Orwellian creepiness. The slippery slope is technology increasingly reveals more detail from incidental light and audio coming from private households. We should act now in policy-making to protect this information as we do or should do for biometric data.
You're not allowed to watch "something else" either - it's a national tax on televisions, not a BBC subscription charge.
Historically the detector vans tuned in to the local oscillator frequency generated by the television's "Heterodyne" tuning circuits. In order to tune to different channels, the TV generated different frequencies and used them to shift the broadcast an intermediate frequency to where they would decode it. If you know the intermediate frequency used by the TV (I believe they all use the same one), and can measure the local oscillator frequency, you know the channel being tuned to. You may well still know the frequency being tuned to with a digital TV, but each frequency now carries a multiplex of several TV or radio channels.
But, ultimately the tax isn't on TVs. The tax is applied to people watching broadcast live television and it's used to fund the BBC, ITV, Channel4 and also used to pay OFCOM which regulates all other media.
So yes, it's still perfectly easy to find the Intermediate Frequency oscillator for a freeview receiver.
* During the analog/digital crossover period, the DTV signals were, obviously, at an offset from the associated analog UHF channel, since analog and DTV could not physically occupy the same frequency, but the fact remains that the DTV muxes were associated with one of the 4 existing channels (Ch 5 didn't have an associated DTV mux afaik)
edit:
here's a list of the mux allocations, you'll notice that all BBC programming is allocated to the BBCA and BBCB muxes, even though there's more than 4 overall muxes available these days.
https://www.freeview.co.uk/corporate/platform-management/cha...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_...
For my entire adult life I've never paid for a TV license, and I have never broken the law and watched live content. Many in my generation have no interest in TV anymore.
I do find that infuriating.
"A licence is not required to view user generated content, clips and videos on YouTube. This includes live streamed content that is not part of a television broadcast. Or being broadcast at the same time by other means."
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2024/mar/27/russell...
That's because of the conservative government, imposing ideological cuts on the BBC. The BBC's budget was cut by 30% between 2010 and 2020 because of freezes to the license fee, withdrawing funding for the World Service and the liability for free licences for over 75s being shifted from the government on to the corporation.
Who knows? In my country most of the money given to public broadcasters is spent making absurd low quality entertainment and documentaries which YouTubers do easily better while having a millionth of the budget.
For some reason they feel the need to compete with the rest of the industry, when the sole reason they exist is such that they don't have to do that.
https://support.blinkist.com/hc/en-us/articles/218022708-Why...
TTS systems like ElevenLabs, etc. are going to heavily disrupt the industry in the next few years particularly with voice-to-voice mapping, e.g. regular John Doe quickly records the line in an angry voice, "THESE PRETZELS ARE MAKING ME THIRSTY!", then maps the emotion/inflection onto the desired TTS voice model.
VA licensing will also become a thing but plenty of major studios that would require hundreds of voices for video games and other things don't have to license known voices at all, they can just create generate brand new ones and pay zero licensing fees.
I mean never seen before in human history.
These guys have been at it for a few years now: https://www.replicastudios.com/
And the list is growing quickly.
The biggest (e.g. Copilot) and most hyped (e.g. Devin) tools in the AI space are tools for developing software such that Stack Overflow is dead and the skill floor is rising on being an employable software developer.