Actor Stephen Fry says his voice was stolen from the Harry Potter audiobooks and replicated by AI—and warns this is just the beginning::The actor told an audience in London that AI was a “burning issue” for actors on strike.
Don’t judge me too much but I have to admit I really like the Warhammer 40k Attenborough channel and there is no way that dude is allowed his likeness
https://www.youtube.com/@AttenboroughLore for the curious and yes, it’s fantastic.
I was watching “him” talk about Tyranids when my kid said, “Isn’t that the voice of the guy who does the animal documentaries?”.
I watched something similar except they did an entire Top Gear episode about Dark Souls 2.
Theft of others’ creative works (and to an actor their voice is part of their creative work) has been going on via Big Tech for decades now. My first view of it was years ago when Google started stealing books it hadn’t purchased and wasn’t licensed and adding them to public spaces on the internet. I remember the big publishing houses and a lot of authors up in arms, but obviously they weren’t able to truly reverse any of that.
well lets be real there is a undefinable unique quality to true Original work that most people somehow can pick up on. i dont think ai will ever trully be able… idk whatvim talking about anymore sigh
I’m sure it wasn’t just the HP audiobooks. He’s been on television for 40 some odd years. There’s hundreds and hundreds of hours of recordings of his voice to train an AI model on.
Hours of monologue with zero background noise is absolute gold for training the model though. You’d have to chop up and edit a lot of footage to get an inferior result with the television footage. Still, it’s entirely possible and it may possibly have been trained on both.
I mean humans can do and have been doing this exact thing forever. Computers make it faster and easier, just like everything else. This isn’t AI, this is training a speech model using machine learning techniques.
A few humans imitating other humans is not even comparable to the scale that computers imitating humans can reach though.
True. I think the main difference is that a computer has no moral compass and won’t remember the large scale criminal operation it was a part of. I don’t think it’s worthwhile to fear or regulate this kind of ml application, the cat is out of the bag and the best we can do is implement security controls like passwords with our important relationships.
It needs to be regulated though. The potential to mislead is immense.
This isn’t AI, this is training a speech model using machine learning techniques.
… That’s AI. AI is a subset of ML. Machines Learn to gain Artificial Intelligence.
Maybe, I think of AI as requiring intelligence rather than being controlled by an operator, translating a human voice or text from one style to another. Maybe I’m wrong, it’s just a name after all.
Well, if you think about it, being able to morph an input text into the voice of someone is the job that some voice actors do, and the task of doing such a thing is something that I would define as intelligent.
In any case, it’s not you or me who define the AI term, in CompSci AI is used to mention recommendation systems (which include search engines that do smart ranking, which nowadays is all of them), translation systems, NLP (chatbots, spam filters), Image processing (auto labelling stuff, object tracking, …) and so forth.
Most of these systems weren’t considered “ai powered” before neural networks and deep learning (high layered neural networks), but nowadays most of those are: NLP uses NNs that convert words / text to vectors to then operate around those and decide on stuff (this includes search and translation), Image processing uses NNs too to be able to “learn” information about several images, to then be able to recognize humans, faces, track objects, generate fake images from an input, deepfakes…
Usually, they are called intelligent systems and thus AI because of the way they are prepared, all of those require that some sort of NN is trained with some dataset to then generate a model with weights that is then fed to the NN alongside some input to archieve the desired result. That trained model, which is a bunch of numbers that decide how the input is transofrmed according to the NN, is the, so to say, “intelligence” that the machine as artificially learnt.
That’s it, that’s literally it, disregard marketing and articles written by salespeople, AI is a system that uses some sort of model trained with a dataset, Usually a NN model although in my opinion, any model (random forests for example) should work too, but it’s true that NN models process data of higher complexity.
Honestly, while these growing pains are unfair, I just have no sympathy for rich actors in this. I’d love to get rid of the ridiculous overpaid class of celebrities and operate with artificial stars. I do not enjoy celebrity culture or the elevation of voices and opinions purely on the basis of connections and/or acting talent.
That’s fine. Totally agree, but this (AI actors/voices etc) would just replace the celebrities with just a smaller, richer, more controlling group of capitalist fucks.
maybe regulating has never been the answer
Where’s the line for you? Stephen Fry is far from your typical “spoiled rich celebrity actor”. He’s relatively famous, very successful, but like, what dollar threshold destroys your sympathy for people having their careers undermined?
