What is a legitimate use case for this? I can think of a hundred applications for deceiving others but struggle to come up with a scenario where one would want their voice cloned or reproduced.
You're an indie game developer, and want to have vibrant NPCs with their unique voices and dialogues powered by a LLM.
You're producing a movie, and want to tweak certain lines of dialogue; with the consent of the talent.
You suffer from health conditions and are gradually losing your voice, but you still want to communicate.
There are certainly legitimate use cases of this technology. I personally believe illegitimate use cases overshadow the legitimate use cases, but I don't think it's fair to say there are no legitimate applications.
We should strictly regulate the use of this technology by criminalizing abuse; not by banning it altogether (which is pretty hard in the case of software and small models).
The latest agreement to end the last round of strikes was to prevent this very thing.
Of your list, the medical condition to give someone their real voice instead of a Hawking voice would be the most legit reason. Everything else is a skewed sense of morally acceptable as I think they are shady
Centuries ago, elevators were manned. Today, they're all electronic. It is the inevitable march of progress and productivity.
But if you start that project by making a voice sound like Morgan Freeman because you can't afford Morgan Freeman but you feel entitled then you can go pound sand. So your choice of making a generated voice should be of a voice that someone else isn't already using.
Audiobooks could have voices read by characters rather than a single narrator faking it. (If even)
You have a cold but still want to give a speech without coughing.
Low bandwidth transmission of audio: transmit just the text and use local voice model to replay it.
Talk to your loved ones after they’re gone.
Hilarity and comedy.
Ok, no, that's bad. Have you seen Black Mirror?
It seems the best tactic is to make the caller do as much of the talking as possible.
Or use a generic cloned voice to interact with unknown callers.
Unfortunately I have yet to see something that can do this and provide a voice model that you could plug into Android TTS and/or Windows which are what he uses.
Translation of recorded content with the original voice into new languages.
Comedy as long as it’s obvious that it’s a fake.
Actually intentionally selling your voice to be the voice of some text to speech product. Maybe I want Alexa to have the voice of Danny Devito, as long as he’s ok with it and getting paid.
Voice loss.