Actor Stephen Fry says his voice was stolen from the Harry Potter audiobooks and replicated by AI—and warns this is just the beginning
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.
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.
I’m sorry, while I understand this issue is a more visible issue for actors/voice actors, there are a lot of people who are going to be hurt by this in the long run.
You think scam calls are bad now? Imagine if Gamgam gets a call from “you” saying you’re hurt and scared and need money to be safe. And I don’t mean just someone pretending to be you, I mean that the person on the other end of the phone sounds exactly like you, up to and including the pauses in your voice, the words chosen to say, and even the way you roll your r’s. All because someone skimmed your public Facebook videos.
Someone wants that promotion you’re going to get? Record your voice a few times, then have you “drunk call” your boss hitting on them, and then harassing them when they don’t react well to it.
This is going to be one hell of a ride.
143This is the exact kind of thing people were worried about years ago when I first started using the internet, and it wasn't even possible yet! Common practices included never giving your real name for anything, and never posting pictures or video of yourself.
65‘Common practices included’ sounds past tense. Also now we have data brokers! How fun is that. 🫠
27So no daily mirror selfies or extensive vacation albums? No checking in anywhere? No open discussions on subjects that could be used as data points to create a digital profile of me? Why even use social media then?
2
You think scam calls are bad now? Imagine if Gamgam gets a call from “you” saying you’re hurt and scared and need money to be safe
Already happening: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/03/rising-scams-use-ai-to-mimic-voices-of-loved-ones-in-financial-distress/
14It would effectively kill traditional phone usage pretty much overnight as enough people get scammed and scared off the technology.
7I’m sorry, while I understand this issue is a more visible issue for actors/voice actors, there are a lot of people who are going to be hurt by this in the long run.
I'm sorry, but as somebody who's tried out the tech, the amount of vocal processing required is still many hours of data. Even the more professional AI cloning web sites that allow you to clone your own voice require that you submit "a couple of hours" of your voice data. The reason why musicians and voice actors get into the middle of this is because they already have many hours of voice work just out there. And in many cases, the speech-to-text transcription, which is required to train a voice model, is already available. For example, an audio book.
You think scam calls are bad now?
You think scam call centers are going to spend the time to look for voice clips, parse them out, transpose them into text, put them in a model, train that model for many hours, realize the Python code needs some goddamn dependency that will take many more to debug, fix parameter settings, and then get a subpar voice model that couldn't fool anybody because they don't have enough voice clips.
They can't even be bothered to look up public information about the caller they are making the call to. Fuck, the last call I got was from a "support center for your service", and when I asked "which service?", they immediately hung up. They do not give a fuck about trying to come prepared with your personal details. They want the easiest mark possible that doesn't ask questions and can get scammed without even knowing their name.
Imagine if Gamgam gets a call
Who's Gamgam?
Record your voice a few times
Yeah, sorry, you need more than a "few times" or a "few voice clips".
-15It's not at all clear that what you're saying is true now: They thought loved ones were calling for help. It was an AI scam.
And it's a nailed-on guarantee that it won't remain true for very long at all.
This is the kind of thing that AI actually is good at. Hollywood will use it to make out like bandits and so will criminals.
There's a lot of hyped-up scaremongering about AI but this particular cat is out of this particular bag.
16Amazon showed off voice cloning over a year ago, and iirc it was claimed to not require hours of content. You’re lagging in your understanding of current capabilities, nevermind the fact that I was talking about the near future.
5
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
37https://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?".
9I watched something similar except they did an entire Top Gear episode about Dark Souls 2.
4
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Among those warning about the technology’s potential to cause harm is British actor and author Stephen Fry, who told an audience at the CogX Festival in London on Thursday about his personal experience of having his identity digitally cloned without his permission.
Speaking at a news conference as the strike was announced, union president Fran Drescher said AI “poses an existential threat” to creative industries, and said actors needed protection from having “their identity and talent exploited without consent and pay.”
As AI technology has advanced, doctored footage of celebrities and world leaders—known as deepfakes—has been circulating with increasing frequency, prompting warnings from experts about artificial intelligence risks.
At a U.K. rally held in support of the SAG-AFTRA strike over the summer, Emmy-winning Succession star Brian Cox shared an anecdote about a friend in the industry who had been told “in no uncertain terms” that a studio would keep his image and do what they liked with it.
Oscar winner Matthew McConaughey told Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff during a panel event at this year’s Dreamforce conference that he had concerns about the rise of AI in Hollywood.
A spokesperson for the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), the entertainment industry’s official collective bargaining representative, was not available for comment when contacted by Fortune.
The original article contains 911 words, the summary contains 213 words. Saved 77%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
13Permanently Deleted
12IBM allegedly submitted unix code into Linux. (SCO lawsuit fiasco)
1well 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
1
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.
9Hours 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.
4
replicated by AI
Where? Who was selling what?
-8I 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.
-13A few humans imitating other humans is not even comparable to the scale that computers imitating humans can reach though.
39True. 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.
-1
It needs to be regulated though. The potential to mislead is immense.
8This 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.
3
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.
-14Where'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?
8