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Comment by whaaaaat | Hacker News Reader

> they’ve got pretty serious potential for letting tech companies get paid for a seasoned voice actor’s unique delivery, tone, inflection, etc rather than the voice actor themselves.

I think you mean "steal the labor of an actor"?

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Sure, and people that already agree with you will feel good reading it, but other people who don’t agree see it as an attack. It’s pretty much impossible to slip a new idea into someone’s mind if your approach made them slam the door before even considering it. So what’s the benefit of saying it like that?

It calls attention to the ethical implications of using a part of someone else's personal identity without their direct involvement.

Indirect involvement can still be ok within the confines of a license agreement for using the actor's voice.

But this requires a legal framework that mandates such licenses and effective emforcement / procecution of violations.

As far as I know, most countries are lagging behind when it comes to updating legislation to set binding rules around that.

> Indirect involvement can still be ok within the confines of a license agreement for using the actor's voice.

This assumes existence of a license agreement or likeness/right of publicity law that prevents unauthorized use. But this is far from the case.

Companies have shown willingness to use actors’ voices to create synthetic voices without permission, compensation, or regard for their livelihoods. [1][2][3]

[1] https://animehunch.com/popular-japanese-voice-actors-band-to...

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/05/eleve...

[3] https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/morgan-freeman-calls-una...

Of course we need laws in place to require such licensing. The fact that people are having their voice stolen now does not mean that there should never be a case where a voice can legally be cloned and used by a third party.

Precisely. We must recognize this as a fundamental issue of workers’ rights and personal autonomy in the digital age, beyond viewing it as a technical challenge. Without proper protections, voice cloning technology risks concentrating power in large companies and undermining creative workers’ economic security.

So does what I said. Someone taking pay for someone else’s work is pretty unambiguously shitty. But when you call taking anything that isn’t a physical item theft, a large percentage of people— especially in the ‘data wants to be free’ crowd— will roll their eyes, think “that’s ridiculous... they aren’t stealing anything. That voice actor still has their voice” and just stop listening. The only people that feel the impact of statements like that are people that already agree. It turns it from an intellectual discussion to a reinforcement of existing tribes. Divisive language works for rallying those who already agree around a specific cause but it’s not even useless— it’s counterproductive— for changing people’s minds. When’s the last time someone you disagreed with changed your mind by being more aggressive towards your stance, and more terse in their portrayal of the dichotomy? If you can even think of one time that it has, you’re in the extreme minority.

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