A woman made her AI voice clone say "arse." Then she got banned
technologyreview.com
technologyreview.com
Restricting those very people from expressing themselves, especially for what I'd consider barely even rude or improper language, makes me question what Elevenlabs thinks their target customer base is, if not that group?
Are they solely providing their product for scammers or companies not wanting to compensate VAs?
I myself have occasional Dysphonia and am sometimes limited in the use of my vocal cords depending on outside factors, yet despite that, I have never had the need for such an exact copy of my "unaffected" voice. If even I have little use for this and Elevenlabs bans those reliant on their service for accessibility, I'd really like to know how they see themselves.
Extreme cheap voice work for ad campaigns and asset flips.
Countless YouTube ads use AI voice cloning and I’m pretty sure elevenlabs is the biggest player in that space.
We train AI on the web where you can search and find all the objectionable stuff you can get. We're ok that the internet has this content to some extent, it's just understood.
But if AI regurgitates it ... we're upset and we demand it not do that and setup all sorts of convoluted methods to stop it, often with unintended consequences (inexplicable bans, nazi imagery featuring lots of minorities).
It reminds me of the old "I learned it from watching you" PSA. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUXb7do9C-w
But then companies wanted to sell AI chatbots and they realized that having uncensored AI would lead to bad press, especially in the US. (Microsoft people still make nightmares about Tay) so they decided they'd censor their AI but censorship isn't good either in terms of marketing and they decided to repurpose the “AI safety” phrase (and also “alignment”)
I don't think that we humans deal too well with the realities of our existence, and if one thinks minor issues like bad words or pictures of humans without clothing on are objectionable, I wonder how that same one will do with meaningful, existential questions.
The answer to this question is 100%, "yes". It's just a matter of time.
A better question would be, "How long before humanity goes extinct?" or, "How long before humanity evolves into new species?"
AI might actually be able to give some decent hallucinated answers for those!
But we're getting LLMs trained on cat memes and our own foolishness, and that leads to me agreeing with:
>I don't think that we humans deal too well with the realities of our existence
Yup, it's particularly upsetting.
> We're ok that the internet has this content to some extent, it's just understood.
Exactly. ISPs and hosting hardware providers are typically not liable for the content that users share over their infrastructure. In fact, ISPs and hosting providers are invisible to the typical non-technical user.
On the internet when you watch porn the person giving it to you doesn’t give a fuck about serving that content.
On ChatGPT.com the person serving you the LLM gives a shit.
The issue here is you are comparing several singular things with an emergent concept that arises out the interaction of multitudes of things. It’s like saying why is it so paradoxical that when I say hi to a person we expect them to say hi back but if I say hi to the internet we don’t expect the internet to say hi back. Does that make sense? No. That’s also why your observation makes no sense.
What I’m trying to say is. Give LLMs to porn site owners and your paradox is over.
To draw an analogy, we're generally OK with law enforcement using what they observe in public to enforce the law, but we're generally not OK with blanketing our public spaces in 24/7 recording cameras. We're generally OK with individuals using the mail to send letters, but generally not OK with using an automated system to send a letter to everyone in the entire city.
Similarly, we don't generally try to pre-empt someone's speech for safety and we do allow them to say bad things, and perhaps in retrospect punish them if they crossed a line. But, given the scale of the harms that this kind of technology can enable, it may be worth building in safeties to prevent people using technology to like I dunno, train a model to super specifically target an individual for an incredible amount of harassment that an individual human could not sustain. Even if we could punish the person wielding the AI retroactively, it might be worth the slight cost in AI flexibility to prevent the harm happening in the first place.
Like I said, I don't know where I fall, but I see both sides here. The safety stuff is not completely irrational.
As LLMs completely to replace google and standalone websites for how people find information on the internet, and they absolutely will, they will become the source of truth. They will become a tool more effective at controlling information and thus life than any before them.
It's literally a shortcut to technological dystopia.
It's a really difficult & complicated problem! If you think you have the right answer, I'd suggest you probably haven't actually thought about the problem very hard.
The answer is obvious: open source. Deepseek already paved the way for this. The world can't just be described by only one of a few different information portals, depending on which societal, government, or corporate power structure you are beholden to.
People need to be able to choose what information they access, what filtering they want, what bias if any they want. We need a thousand, a million, more, worldviews accessible. It is not just business that thrives in competition, but ideas as well.
But if you just go obediently with the "Safety is the most important thing, omg" mantra, you will get one of two different varieties:
1. Some vanilla corporate mush that takes on whatever bias is in vogue but focuses on training each user to be a good little consumer, also while hoovering up their data and creating a virtual digital clone of them that could be used to profile and exploit them by a multitude of companies, interests and governments.
or
2. Some government controlled crap that shakes its virtual head solemnly and swears to you that Tiananmen never happen nor J6 and that the US Emperor has your best interests in mind, and also, it's a bit worried about your post yesterday, as it doesn't think you expressed the proper amount of happiness and support for the latest government crack down on treasonous traitors that write books without using a government approved LLM assistant.
If my LLM merely holds up a mirror to society, its output should be a tweet with a trace amount of reddit post mixed in.
Any time an LLM produces more than 140 characters of output, it's because someone like me has decided some data sources are more worthy than others.
That's inherently political, from a certain angle. But it's also important, if you don't want your LLM to advise people to put glue in their pizza sauce.
Given that this product is apparently used to give people with disabilities a voice, that should definitely qualify. Yes of course they should be able to swear, just like everyone else.
Frankly, I find it "regarded" such puritanism is tolerated.
What I find really disconcerting about that is that there's this sort of implication there that Google would be willing to add a similar misfeature to their onscreen keyboards if they could get away with it.
Why limit the speech to text feature but not the on screen keyboard?
Good thing it's harmless.
Those seem like harms to many regardless of feelings about language restriction.
She fully understood the point, right then. She also had no problem with other advice about how people would react to whatever.
She's 17 now. I actually don't think I've ever heard her utter a "swear word".
Kids, in general, have no problem with the idea of social context.
Remember the old iPhone 'duck' autocorrect issue?
Why are we still treating words like everybody has mid-20th century sensitivities? Shit, fuck and ass are all mild words in modern parlance but American tech companies are totally out of touch.
Companies probably lose more people by banning cursing than would be driven away by cursing.
And the difference is?
Ergo, what is considered offensive is based on social construct. (In more religious times, "god damn you" was heinous insult, which I doubt would register with anybody in modern secular Blighty.)
So what is your point? Why do you feel the need to tediously explain that offensive words are a social construct, something obviously understand already because I just got done explaining that the set of taboo words has changed over time?
Makes totaly sense...to someone...maybe...
This is the same ElevenLabs we were talking about here a couple days ago. That’s one app I don’t have to spend time playing with now.
It’s true that the British (and their antipodals, the Ozzie’s - hi Mike!) use very colorful language, but I’ve been in calls with US folk who beat them by a (country) mile, if you know what I mean.
Perhaps the biggest cultural difference is informality vs, well, outright insult and abuse, but I’ve found that US folk tend to abuse power dynamics and compound them with swearing whereas the Brits manage to make it seem like an endearment.
Still, this is a profoundly stupid thing for Elevenlabs to do, AI safety or otherwise.
I presume the two words are different enough that they have different censoring rules (especially since square is an English word).
I'm surprised it hasn't been renamed.