from the who-are-you-going-to-believe-me-or-your-lyin'-ears? dept.
Sure, there's been a lot of attention being paid to deep fakes of celebrities and major public figures. Still, with the advent of free or cheap AI-based voice synthesization software, anybody who has had their audio uploaded to the internet runs the risk of being deepfaked.
Vice first reported that voice actors and other, ordinary folks are being targeted with online harassment and doxxing attacks using their own voice. Specifically, these attacks targeted people with YouTube channels, podcasts, or streams. Several of these doxxing attempts also hit voice actors, some of whom have been especially critical about AI-generated content in the past.
[...] A few of the reported posts explicitly said they were generated using tech available from ElevenLabs. The company's Voice Lab software lets users clone voices and then generate new audio based on a text prompt. Of course, this free program let users produce deep faked audio of prominent people like Joe Rogan and Justin Roiland saying sexist or racist epithets. After users reported examples of those deep fakes to the company, ElevenLabs announced they were making VoiceLab only available to users of the paid version and was introducing more identity verification for new accounts.
[...] Schalk said he believes that voice actor unions will soon need to get involved and steer the conversation for any major corporation thinking AI-created voice is a way to "replace actors for the sake of saving dollars."
Pollock said he has joined with other voice actors on Vocal Variants, a trade group representing voice actors and other performers trying to push back against AI-generated voices and promote work contracts that still allow actors the right to their voice. He and other voice actors said the next best thing for Their trade would be a law that codifies their right to their vocal likenesses.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by openlyretro on Friday February 17, @03:01PM (1 child)
Pleased to find their service is so popular with online trolls and bullies, ElevenLabs hopes to make even more money off of online harassment by banning free accounts.
"We're not interested in stopping abuse, only profiting from it," they said between the lines. "We absolutely won't stand for people freely abusing others online with our services. They have to pay us if they want to do that."
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 17, @07:02PM
Honorable bullying will use free and open source alternatives, such as TorToiSe.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday February 17, @04:45PM (1 child)
The is stuff being done over the internet. You'll need an international agreement, or at least a consensus, for it to be effective. You might be able to handle it by using copyright or trademark law, but I'm no lawyer. You probably can't do it with contract law.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Frosty Piss on Friday February 17, @05:03PM
It's too late, the cat is out of the bag.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 17, @05:24PM
Because actors never copy anybody AMIRITE?
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Friday February 17, @08:04PM (3 children)
When this tech gets just a little bit better the majority of voice jobs are going away anyway. Why pay Troy McClure to narrate when there are plenty of dead guys who'll do it for free. Pretty soon Bogart really will say "Play it again Sam".
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 18, @04:47AM (1 child)
Most VAs get paid so little that it might as well be a rounding error on a big video game project. Living and some dead celebrity voices could be protected by personality rights laws.
This technology works best for amateur productions.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by deimtee on Saturday February 18, @08:39AM
Yeah, but how protected are they from "soundalikes"? It won't really be Humphrey Bogart. You could have an entire cast of almost (dead actors).
"Starring the voices of Livien Veigh, Bumphry Hogart, Wae Mest, Gary Crant, Dette Bavis, Hock Rudson, and many more".
An interesting side effect might be to slow down language drift. People in movies from the 1920's and 30's already speak in a slightly different manner to current speech. If they use the speech patterns as well as the voices in a large enough cross section of media there could be a significant effect on current language. These earlier voices are also the ones most likely to be out of copyright and unprotected.
No problem is insoluble, but at Ksp = 2.943×10−25 Mercury Sulphide comes close.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Sunday February 19, @05:14PM
Why "revive" dead guys when you can "invent" completely new ones that are just as good, by simply interpolating between different voices? You may even be able to parametrize the voices, so that no clear trace to any existing voice to the newly created one exists.
Anyway, it's not just the voice that makes a good voice actor, it's also the acting. The very same sentence has to be sound very different in different situations. Until AI understands context enough to get that right (which, given that not even all human voice actors get this right, will probably be a long rime), I don't think voice actors will become obsolete. However it may become less important to have a good voice (the AI can fix that), and more important to have good voice acting skills. Which actually should make the field more fair, as you can't do too much about your voice, but a lot about your voice acting.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.