Technology

Not sure if you read the article but in this specific instance I believe they are denouncing studios ability to copy their likeness and voice without their consent. Think deepfakes and simulated voices such as elevenlabs’ AI voice tool. That is something that is actively being tested and actors and voice actors want control of how their likeness and voice are used.

I think this is a reasonable and valid argument and should be protected.

I mostly agree with you but think it's important to clarify that even with machine learning many humans can be replaced.

To extend your metaphor, that library has always had a bunch of clerks sitting inside of it. They've been handling requests, finding books, and organizing them into a system that works to best serve that information.

Now with machine learning, instead of having all of those clerks making the library run smoothly, they've effectively replaced 99% of all of the humans with an organizational system that serves content and helps find books even faster than a human would be able to.

Slightly deeper: this machine learning replacement can also now mix and match bits of content. The human system before might have a request that looks like this - "I want information on Abrahamic Religion in Western Culture" so they'd gather up a ton of books and pass them to the person that requested info.

In the new replacement system, the request could take bits and pieces from all of those books and present a mostly comprehensive overview of Abrahamic Religion in the West without having to run and fetch all of the books.

Deeper yet, and the scary iceberg - today, someone still needs to write all of those books and we as a society tend to trust information gotten from those books (cited sources and all that) so humans are safe as the content authors right? We've basically just made a super efficient organizational and content delivery system. But as we start to trust the new system and use it more, we're potentially seeing the system reference its own outputs as opposed to the source material...which creates a recursive, negative feedback loop.

We still need human content creation today, but the scary part (IMO) is when we treat these LLMs as generative general AI. The LLMs are fallible and can be incorrect and often hallucinate - so when most people start blindly trusting these systems (they already do - look no further than general confusion on the terms AI and machine learning and LLMs), we're going to get increasingly further away from new knowledge generation.

To be fair that’s how I learn too! I read what others have written, watch was others do, and generally take knowledge that other people have found, experienced, or learned from other folks themselves. Also I used to never leave my room and didn’t experience life either lol.

Anyway, it’s rare that I can sit down and poke and prod something or some subject to learn and research on my own something new, only to find that hundreds of other people have already figured that out and I just reinvented the wheel.

I think what you were trying to get at is usually referred to the concept of the Chinese room.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

Regardless, the concern for me hasn’t been that LLMs can’t replace humans, it’s that they can replace writers, voice actors, extras, and programmers. (Software engineers just see AI as a new tool for the toolbox, but that’s a tangent I’m not getting into here) replacing the creatives that make entertainment is largely concerning in that like you said, the LLMs just regurgitate content that was fed into the model and new creative works can’t be created with it.

The corporations that make money on the creatives love these new AIs as a way to cut costs. I think there is going to be an influx of cheap scripts created for sitcoms, children’s shows, and popcorn summer movies and there isn’t much anyone can do other than boycott the content.

It’s kind of scary knowing this could shut out new writers and actors from the industry as their market effectively shrinks. Though I’m hoping that people will recognize the cheap junk food level content created by LLMs and stop consuming it in favor of content written and acted by humans.

Luckily, the big name celebrities can’t be replaced by LLM anytime soon, but I’m sure the scripts for the superhero movies will have acts largely written by LLMs soon. I also expect something like the Simpsons to be entirely AI generated and voice acted. They have over 30 years of content to feed into the model and the show is already known for regurgitating its own jokes, stories and content.

Thanks for listening to my TED talk.

The fact that this is upvoted so much is just sad.

While at face value it appears to be critical of AI, and thus bandwagoning on a very popular slant these days online, the inherent anthropomorphizing of the model in question is extremely wrong in so many ways.

LLMs are trained to complete human thought. And as a result, that very narrow class of machine learning ends up being oddly good at seeming human in responses.

But a diffusion model for generating images? Or text to voice generation?

To anthropomorphize these models is like saying that your cell tower triangulating your position won't care about you as much as your mother would.

It's just incredibly bizarre.

It is going to get better and better at replicating human speech patterns, and is going to be able to be further customized in how it expresses sounds mimicking human emotions. Already it can get uncannily good off just a few seconds of a sample.

As for the actors - as soon as residuals get figured out such that they get paid per hour of secondary usage of their recordings, they are going to go from "I'll never deign to let AI replace me" to "yes, of course I'll let you pay me more for me to do less work."

The creativity of Matt Mercer in deciding on as frightened goblin voice for an innkeeper is going to be years before an AI successfully replaces that contribution.

But for Matt Mercer to provide samples of many different voices to an AI which pairs with GPT-5+ to DM your DnD campaigns with that voice pack for a monthly fee he gets a large cut from?

That's not only going to be extremely possible sooner than you might think, but you'll be seeing serious voice actors falling over themselves to directly market their voices to main street for personalized content.

It's all about economical fairness, and those rigidly protesting change that endangers the status quo are very much like the MPAA fighting Napster instead of funding its successor - who as a result left a clear victory open to Apple and then Spotify and others by resisting change rather than embracing it.