I was going to make a comment about #OpenAI and #voiceactors but I realized that some of my assumptions were wrong.
What I'm worried about is that a lot people don't necessarily recognize the difference. Traditionally, a full buyout for a voice actor is reasonable, because it covers a single recording.
But open AI is literally buying the person's voice.
#AI#GenerativeAI#VoiceCloning: "Using ElevenLabs, you can clone your voice like I did, or type in some words and hear them spoken by “Freya,” “Giovanni,” “Domi,” or hundreds of other fake voices, each with a different accent or intonation. Or you can dub a clip into any one of 29 languages while preserving the speaker’s voice. In each case, the technology is unnervingly good. The voice bots don’t just sound far more human than voice assistants such as Siri; they also sound better than any other widely available AI audio software right now. What’s different about the best ElevenLabs voices, trained on far more audio than what I fed into the machine, isn’t so much the quality of the voice but the way the software uses context clues to modulate delivery. If you feed it a news report, it speaks in a serious, declarative tone. Paste in a few paragraphs of Hamlet, and an ElevenLabs voice reads it with a dramatic storybook flare.
ElevenLabs launched an early version of its product a little over a year ago, but you might have listened to one of its voices without even knowing it. Nike used the software to create a clone of the NBA star Luka Dončić’s voice for a recent shoe campaign. New York City Mayor Eric Adams’s office cloned the politician’s voice so that it could deliver robocall messages in Spanish, Yiddish, Mandarin, Cantonese, and Haitian Creole. The technology has been used to re-create the voices of children killed in the Parkland school shooting, to lobby for gun reform. An ElevenLabs voice might be reading this article to you: The Atlantic uses the software to auto-generate audio versions of some stories, as does The Washington Post."
#AI#Deepfakes#Privacy#VoiceCloning: "Protection against voice cloning may be dependent on a variety of factors. Privacy and data protection may still be the best avenue to stop such cloning, this is because at least in the UK IP protection, specially copyright, may be hit and miss and may also depend entirely on a number of conditions being right in order to gain protection.
The reality is that we could use with a much stronger protection for image and personality rights in the UK, perhaps in line with protection for likeness and voice in US publicity rights.
This sounds very interesting: OpenVoice is #VoiceCloning tool. It allows to generate speech from small samples of a given speaker, in many languages. It has controls for mood and accent. And it is free. Unfortunately I don't have an #AI capable GPU yet. https://github.com/myshell-ai/OpenVoice
#AI#GenerativeIAI#VoiceCloning#Audiobox: "The researchers published a scientific paper explaining some of their methodology and rationale for taking an SSL approach, writing “Because labeled data are not always available or of high quality, and data scaling is the key to generalization, our strategy is to train this foundation model using audio without any supervision, such as transcripts, captions, or attribute labels, which can be found in larger quantities.”
Of course, most leading generative AI models are heavily dependent on human-generated data for training how to create new content, and Audiobox is no exception. The FAIR researchers relied upon “160K hours of speech (primarily English), 20K hours of music and 6K hours of sound samples.”"
It mainly shows how distinctive Weird Al’s voice is, though MechaLorde singing ‘Foil’ is pretty good
AI has the potential to disrupt the whole comedy genre of pop-cultural pastiche and parody. Why would you watch comedians doing impressions of celebrities, or riffing on pop-culture texts, when you could just manipulate the celebrity yourself using AI?
Still, what constantly annoys me about the state of AI-driven parody (eg the meme of pop-culture characters as #Balenciaga models) is that the writing underpinning them is so poor
So even if we get to a point where we can completely puppeteer real people’s likenesses and voices, it still fails if there isn’t decent writing
Weird Al’s writing has always been excellent and hilarious. I mean, lines like in ‘Fat’, his parody of ‘Bad’: “When I sit around the house, I really sit around the house”
So far, that kind of stuff can’t be automatically generated – AI-created comedy is of the surreal and absurdist kind that reads as an unintentional, “machine-innocent” artefact of the generation process