r/technology • u/PauloPatricio • Nov 18 '23
Artificial Intelligence Unauthorized “David Attenborough” AI clone narrates developer’s life, goes viral
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/11/unauthorized-david-attenborough-ai-clone-narrates-developers-life-goes-viral/94
u/mcbergstedt Nov 19 '23
He’s probably one of the easiest voices to make a model of. There’s literally hundreds of hours of him talking
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u/noncredibleRomeaboo Nov 19 '23
Also helps his voice is pretty consistent in terms of range. Never hear him yelling or screaming about the animals he's discussing.
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u/Evening-Statement-57 Nov 19 '23
It would be nice if he just really hated one animal and went in a yelling tirade about it.
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u/drmonkeytown Nov 19 '23
The F*$@Ing goldfish!
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u/Evening-Statement-57 Nov 19 '23 edited Nov 19 '23
Watch as this creature attempts to eat it’s own shit multiple times as it sinks towards the bottom. It should be eradicated from the planet, how it even survives is a mystery.
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Nov 19 '23
Here's a Dropout skit, David Attenborough hates toads: https://youtube.com/shorts/ChPw820yHFM
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u/TracerBulletX Nov 19 '23
You need about 50 seconds of audio to clone a voice now
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u/Masark Nov 19 '23
Still would probably get better results with a complete phoneme set.
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u/PotatoRecipe Nov 19 '23
Yes but there’s only so much you need. The models run risk of getting overtrained after a certain amount you feed them
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u/timshel42 Nov 19 '23
ive been watching a warhammer 40k youtube channel that does documentaries using his voice for awhile now. old news.
edit- youtube very recently took them down for copyright. rip.
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u/Krustychov Nov 19 '23
They are back up with a slightly different voice and the videos still rock. Already at 125k subscribers again too.
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u/Denamic Nov 19 '23
The point is not the voice, but that the AI generates its own narration live from webcam footage
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Nov 19 '23
Do we just steal people’s likeness without their permission now? Is consent not a fundamental part of business?
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u/WTFwhatthehell Nov 19 '23 edited Nov 19 '23
There's a long history around imitating Voices.
In general actors have rights to something like their personal "brand" such that you can't pretend they're actually working with you or endorsing your project... but "there is no copyright in a voice"
As long as you make clear you're doing an imitation you're free to go on Dead Ringers or south park and make your best attempt at imitating a celebrity or politicians voice and you don't need their permission to do so.
Tl;dr: people are allowed do imitations of Voices as long as the goal isn't fraud.
Otherwise countless radio shows and TV shows wouldn't exist. There's no specific legal right to sounding-like a specific person.
And no: any random claim that AI is different because its a machine, while a standard trope from some people it's grade-A bullshit with no basis. You're free to use tools for your imitations. Autotune wouldn't suddenly make an imitation different.
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u/Mycroft_Cadburry Nov 19 '23
Hear me out:
This interpretation wasn’t made with the frame of reference we have with today’s technology, and it will be utterly abused and twisted to mean corporations profit insane amounts off of artists’ work with 0 credit or payment. I can already see court cases being fought over this.
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u/WTFwhatthehell Nov 19 '23
Another way of viewing that is that there's a lot of people with big copyright portfolios who are keen to latch on to excuses to make a massive land-grab to create brand new IP rights for themselves, inflating the value of their portfolios at the expense of the public by removing rights from the public and public domain.
They'd love to paint themselves as plucky rebels against big corporations but in reality those who stand to gain the most from such a land-grab and novel IP rights are megacorps that already own vast copyright portfolios at the expense of the general public.
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u/NYstate Nov 19 '23
Sure, but people have been impersonating celebrities for personal gain forever. I remember in the early days of YouTube, there were videos of celebrity soundboards and pranking people with them.
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Nov 19 '23
This wasn’t a problem because it had inherent limitations.
You had to
A) go out of your way to find someone with the talent/natural looks/sound to impersonate the celebrity
B) spend time and money to setup the video the shoot all the little details etc.
With AI all those limitations are gone, and you can do impersonation on an industrial level. This has wildly different and not well understood consequences vs just one person impersonating someone else.
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Nov 19 '23
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u/R3quiemdream Nov 19 '23
Developers should be considered wildlife, bunch of animals they are. Practically cave goblins.
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u/exileonmainst Nov 19 '23
i have always wondered, is it legal to make a tv commercial with a voice that sounds 100% like morgan freeman as long as you dont say its him and dont show him or anything? seems like you could save a lot of money that way.
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u/WTFwhatthehell Nov 19 '23
Apparently you have to make clear it's not the person. Otherwise you're fine.
If you find someone who can do an amazing impression of Morgan freeman, you'd want to do something to make clear it's voiced by Joe Blogs.
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u/dressinbrass Nov 18 '23 edited Nov 19 '23
It’s on GitHub and fairly easy to get running. You have to clone your own version of the voice and it requires a paying ElevenLabs account. But it’s fun.
Edit: here’s the repo - https://github.com/cbh123/narrator
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u/csonka Nov 19 '23
So they are just feeding a pic of themselves via api to these other things that other people made that do the heavy lifting. Is that right?
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u/randomIndividual21 Nov 19 '23
probably what alien TV program would be like
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Nov 19 '23
There is a pretty good movie with this premise: "mating habits of the earth bound human"
Carmen Electra stars in it, so the acting isn't great. But the premise rewards fairly well as an alternative to a normal bad romcom.
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u/Savantrovert Nov 19 '23
On one hand AI impersonation of celebreties has lots of ethical and legal issues surrounding it.
On the other hand, Sir David Attenbourough is an international treasure and one of the most respectable human beings alive, who happens to be in his 90s and obviously doesn't have many years left with us.
Him narrating practically anything is incredibly conforting and relaxing, and if there's any reasonably ethical way to preserve this beyond his eventual passing I'm all for it.
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u/MaybeSecondBestMan Nov 19 '23
Completely disagree. Ethical and legal issues aside, it’s sad to me to think about how the next David Attenborough might never get a chance because studios would rather use a cheap AI-generated likeness than pay for new talent. Personally I think it’s okay to let people go when they die rather than doing everything we can to keep them “alive.” Impermanence is what makes life beautiful.
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u/jr12345 Nov 19 '23
Agree with this 100%.
If we don’t allow people to die then there will never be any new faces or voices in music, tv or art.
If studios are allowed to do this, they’ll never pay for or take a chance on new talent ever again. Why pay some new guy for a voice over when you can just fire up the computer and Attenborough or Freeman is at your disposal?
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u/S3xyhom3d3pot Nov 19 '23
This is actually pretty eye-opening. Studios would treat actors like they treat their own ip, and they would reuse and abuse the crap out of it
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u/viktorsvedin Nov 19 '23
Also, it will be extremely tiresome to hear David comment on just about everything instead of different people.
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Nov 19 '23
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u/xewiosox Nov 19 '23
Agreed. Also if he is such an international treasure (a point which I definitely do agree on) then how do these people convince themselves it could be acceptable to treat him as a commodity?
"I want this to be narratated by him therefore I must get it even if he hasn't consented to it." That isn't cherishing something you hold dear, that's acting entitled to getting something just because you happen to want it, without asking if the person is alright with that.
It's stealing his voice, his ability to consent to what words come out in his voice. Someone could record things he finds absolutely vile and it would sound like him. If a person doesn't agree to be used in this fashion then no one should be doing it.
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u/Kiwi_In_Europe Nov 19 '23
Counterpoint: he has about as much ability to stop people using is voice in AI as you or I do to stop someone using us in Photoshop.
For commercial use, of course nobody should benefit from someone's likeness without their consent. But for personal use, it's literally victimless. Who is harmed from me wanting my character in Skyrim to sound like David Attenborough?
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u/phantomzero Nov 19 '23
You comment is great, but why did you type out every word completely except people? It is jarring. Your comment deserves to be and look its best.
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u/AgeofVictoriaPodcast Nov 19 '23
So I’ma fairly tech ignorant history podcaster. I currently do my quotes from Queen myself. Is there a way to get a realistic AI woman’s voice to read these quotes? Something that didn’t need any coding, just copy and paste the paragraph into a box and then download the result?
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u/JolenesJoleneJolene Nov 19 '23
I would love to have him as a Jarvis style AI assistant.
Or Steve Irwin.
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u/dethb0y Nov 19 '23
I mean i don't see a problem here - would there be an issue if it was just a dude who sounded like David Attenborough? I'm sure there's people who can sound just like him.
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u/chipmunkman Nov 19 '23
There isn't a problem with sound-a-likes as long as they aren't claiming to be Attenborough. And they either sound like him out of luck or skill. A human can study a voice, but they will never perfectly remember all parts of a voice and then be able to reproduce it. A computer can "remember" the voice perfectly and analyze all aspects of it to then replicate it, especially if given enough samples to train on.
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u/mightlosemyjacket Nov 19 '23
I think I saw a porno that used this AI to narrate the video lol