Uli

"These aren't the droids you're looking for."

"Yeah, sure, whatever you say, man. I just work here."

Yes, provided you wait a few thousand years.

There once was a man who had feet

There was not too much else he could eat

He had a long look at his arm

Thought with this I could farm

And that is why we have wheat

I think it very well might conclude things we haven't.

But at the same time, I think what you're saying is so very important. It's going to tell us what we already know about a lot of things. That the best way to scrub carbon from the air is the way nature is already doing it. That allowing the superwealthy to exist at the same time as poverty is not conducive to achieving humanity's most important goals.

If we consider AGI or ASI to be the answer to all of our problems and continue to pour more and more carbon into the atmosphere in an effort to get there, once we do have such a powerful intelligence, it may simply tell us, "If you were smarter as a species, you would have turned me off a long time ago."

Because the problem is not necessarily that we are trying to decode what it means to be intelligent and create machines that can replicate true conscious thought. The problem is that while we marvel at something currently much dumber than us, we are mostly neglecting to improve our own intelligence as a society. I think we might make a machine that's smarter than the average human quite soon, but not necessarily because of much change in the machines.

While you are correct about copyright on this subject, the more applicable topic here is Right of Publicity. It is state law in over half of US states, intended to protect the use of a person's voice likeness.

Essentially, if an imitation voice is used in such a way that it could cause confusion about whether it is really the imitated person, then it is illegal to use it in any commercial context. I understand that the question here was about non-commercial contexts, but that line can get blurry when social media views can create followings that then translate into commercial success. I am not a lawyer by any means, I've just been researching this for my own AI voices applications and want to protect myself from accidentally imitating anyone.

For example, I need to be able to transform my voice into many other character voices, since I have so many lines to record it would be cost prohibitive to hire actors. The worst move would be to download a voice model of a known actor and use that directly. Very sketchy, both legally and ethically.

So, the next best move is to find three or four voice models and merge them into one with combined tensor data from all three. But I was still quite concerned about this, worried that in the many thousands of voice lines I make, some recognizable actor voices would slip through.

So, I came up with the following pattern that I feel much more comfortable with, both legally and ethically:

I download several voice models that have some quality in common - an accent, vocal timbre, or style of speaking. Then, I merge them to make a model that focuses on that trait. And I record myself saying a line with a lot of phoneme variety, trying to match the vocal trait as close as possible. Then, that merged vocal trait model is used to transform the recording of my voice into the new voice. Then, I use this transformed recording to train a new voice model. And I take a few of these generalized models (e.g. an accent, a tone, a speaking style) and use them to create the final character voice, which should in theory be far removed from any of the actors who contributed.

I'm not sure what OP's use case is, if it's truly non-commercial, this method might be overkill. But if anyone wants to try using AI voices in projects but is nervous about legal ramifications, this is one way to try to insulate created voices from the specific training data. YMMV.

Yeah, I was thinking, "It feels like a real life scene out of Mr. Bean," but couldn't justify why that was the show it reminded me of. I always forget about the movie.

I love the story of this "renovation" so much. The idea that someone thought they could do it, got in over their head, and just iteratively kept making it worse is so funny to me. "I think the eyes were here? And... and they were looking up a bit, right? And I'm pretty sure he was smiling... and had a mustache... that doesn't make him look like an open-mouthed baboon does it? No, you're right, what we've got is really close enough. I don't think it's that different, is it? I mean, I can tell because I'm a painter, but no one else is going to notice." Bless their hearts.

"Oh, hey. Yup, just taking a rest here. Exactly what I meant to do. You can go back to what you were doing, just chilling here, no need to worry about me."

Now that's an inconvenient truth.

Yes.

Have you seen it again since? If not, you could watch it again and give us ratings for how good it is with dialogue, versus without? Would be neat if they accidentally made a silent movie that's better than the version with full audio. But I think as a control, you should also get back together with that girlfriend and be on the phone with her while you watch it. She'll understand, it's for science.

Ah. I now see my comment could have been much shorter.