The actor told an audience in London that AI was a “burning issue” for actors.
I think it’s important to remember how this used to happen.
AT&T paid voice actors to record phoneme groups in the 90s/2000s and have been using those recordings to train voice models for decades now. There are about a dozen AT&T voices we’re all super familiar with because they’re on all those IVR/PBX replacement systems we talk to instead of humans now.
The AT&T voice actors were paid for their time, and not offered royalties but they were told that their voices would be used to generate synthentic computer voices.
This was a consensual exchange of work, not super great long term as there’s no royalties or anything and it’s really just a “work for hire” that turns into a product… but that aside – the people involved all agreed to what they were doing and what their work would be used for.
The ultimate problem at the root of all the generative tools is ultimately one of consent. We don’t permit the arbitrary copying of things that are perceived to be owned by people, nor do we think it’s appropriate to do things without people’s consent with their “Image, likeness, voice, or written works.”
Artists tell politicians to stop using their music all the time etc. But ultimately until we really get a ruling on what constitutes “derivative” works nothing will happen. An AI is effectively the derivative work of all the content that makes up the vectors that represents it so it seems a no brainer, but because it’s radio on the internet we’re not supposed to be mad at Napster for building it’s whole business on breaking the law.
I think a more interesting (and less dubious) example of this would be Vocaloid and to a greater extent, cevio AI
Vocaloid is a synth bank where instead of the notes being musical instruments, they’re phonemes which have been recorded and then packaged into a product which you pay for, which means royalties are involved (I think there might also be a thing with royalties for big performances and whatnot?) Cevio AI takes this a step further by using AI to better smooth together the phonemes and make pitching sound more natural (or not - it’s an instrument, you can break it in interesting ways if you try hard enough). And obviously, they consented to that specific thing and get paid for it. They gave Yamaha/Sony/the general public a specific character voice and permission to use that specific voice.
(There’s a FOSS voicebanks but that adds a different layer of complication to things like I think a lot of them were recorded before the idea of an “AI bank” was even a possibility. And like, while a paid voice bank is a proprietary thing, the open source alternatives are literally just a big file of .WAVs so it’s much easier to go outside their intended purposes)
Studios basically want to own the personas of their actors so they can decouple the actual human from it and just use their images. There’s been a lot of weird issues with this already in videogames with body capture and voice acting, and contracts aren’t read through properly or the wording is vague, and not all agents know about this stuff yet. It’s very dystopian to think your whole appearance and persona can be taken from you and commodified. I remember when Tupac’s hologram performed at Coachella in 2012 and thinking how fucked up that was. You have these huge studios and event promoters appropriating his image to make money, and an audience effectively watching a performance of technological necromancy where a dead person is re-animated.
Did Tupac’s estate agree? Or receive compensation?
Who cares if his estate agreed to it? HE didn’t. His estate shouldn’t have the right to make money off of things he never actually did.
Let the dead stay dead, it’s just an excuse to not pay new, living artists.
That’s literally how estates work.
Once I’m 6 feet under, if it could give my family a better life I’d say they should be able to agree to whatever they want on my behalf as long as it doesn’t go against my will.
I know that legally they have the right. I’m saying they shouldn’t have that right because reanimating a digital facsimile of your corpse just to puppet it to make money is fucked up. This includes shit like the CG Tarkin and Leia in Star Wars as well as the Tupac hologram
I’m saying it’s not fucked up and I would be totally down for my family to do it
It took me a minute to realize that you said Tupac, not Tuvok.
Great, another holodeck episode…
His voice wasn’t stolen, it’s still right where he left it.
Fair enough. It’s not theft, it’s something else.
But that’s just semantics, though.
The point is that his voice is being used without his permission, and that companies, profiteering people, and scammers will do so using his voice and the voices others. He likely wants some kind of law against this kind of stuff.
It’s emotionally charged semantics.
If you made a painting for me, and then I started making copies of it without your permission and selling them off, while I might not have stolen the physical painting, I have stolen your art.
Just because they didn’t rip his larynx out of his throat, doesn’t mean you can’t steal someone’s voice.
We’re getting into samantics but it’s counterfeit not stolen.
It would be more like if you made a painting for me, and I then used that to replicate your artistic style and used that to make new paintings without your permission and passed it off as your work.
Well, I just printed a picture of the Mona Lisa.
Did I steal the Mona Lisa? Or did I just copy it? Reproduce it?
You’re also not causing da Vinci to potentially miss out on jobs by copying it. You’re also not taking away his ability to say no to something he doesn’t want to be associated with.
That’s fine. I’m not arguing this is a bad thing, I’m just being pedantic about the word theft.
Having your voice used to say things you didn’t say is a terrifying prospect. Combined with deep faking takes it one step further.
But is it technically theft?
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Yes, actually. In the same way as copyright infringement or identity theft could be considered so.
Wow the court obviously got this one wrong. Imitation is in no way stealing someone’s voice.
Not to mention with billions of people walking around is anyone’s voice really unique? I have met hundreds of people in my life who sound so much alike it is hard to distinguish them.
The idea obviously doesn’t apply to the public domain.
Jfc the pedantry.
I think it was a joke
No, the use of words matter when having a debate. “Theft” is an emotionally charged word that has a lot of implications that don’t actually map well to what’s going on here. It’s not a good word to be using for this.
Seems to map pretty well. I’ve looked up a handful of definitions of theft and looking at it from an emotionless perspective it seems to fit. To take something without permission or the right to. I don’t really see where the removal of a finite resource is required.
Thats why I figured that comment was just a dad joke.
When you steal something the person you stole it from doesn’t have it any more. That’s why copyright violation is covered by an entirely different set of laws from theft.
This isn’t even copying, really, since the end result is not the same as anything in the source material.
Lots of people may want it to be illegal, may want to call it theft, but that won’t make it so when they take it to court.
“When you steal something the person you stole it from doesn’t have it any more.”
Idk “identity theft” is a crime but you don’t actually remove the persons identity from them either. And also digital reproduction like in the case of piracy doesn’t remove a copy from the author but that is also illegal and is also considered theft. So I’m not really sure where you’re getting this idea that something isn’t both considered theft and a crime if it doesn’t remove a copy from the original owner, there are multiple examples to the contrary.
The point is loss. You have to show you were damaged. In this case fry isn’t losing anything.
And also digital reproduction like in the case of piracy doesn’t remove a copy from the author but that is also illegal and is also considered theft.
No, it is considered copyright violation. That’s a crime too (well, often a civil tort) but it is not theft. It’s a different crime.
If you want something to be illegal there needs to be an actual law making it illegal. There isn’t one in the case of AI training because it isn’t theft and it isn’t copyright violation. This is a new thing and new things are not illegal by default.
Calling it “theft” is simply incorrect, and meaningfully so since it’s an emotionally charged and prejudicial term.
What word or phrase would you have used in the headline ?
“Copied” or “mimicked” would be more accurate.
Hornswaggled?
I’ll go for ‘captured’ which is both figuratively and literally accurate
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It’s not copyright infringement. You can’t copyright a style, which is basically what a voice amounts to.
This is something new. It’s a way of taking something that we always thought of as belonging to a person, and using it without their permission.
At the moment the closest thing is trademark infringement, assuming you could trademark your personal identity (which you can’t). The harms are basically the same, deliberately passing off something cheap or dodgy as if it was associated with a particular entity. Doesn’t matter if the entity is Stephen fry or Pepsi Max.
It is, as a matter of fact. When Fry recorded his voice for those audiobooks, they were copyrighted. Reproducing the contents of those works as they have is, arguably a violation of copyright.
And when you compare Steven Frye to Pepsi Max, that’s a false equivalence, because you’re comparing a copyrighted material to a trademarked brand which are two different things.
Still, to your point of theft, nobody is taking anything from anyone. They are using something without permission, and that still falls squarely as copyright infringement, not theft.
Reproducing the contents of those works as they have is
This did not occur.
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That’s not reproduction of content so isn’t a copyright violation. Not shouldn’t be. Literally right now is not.
The whole reason people are so up in arms about this is that we do not currently have laws or even standards that accurately police this kind of thing.
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!
Good bot
Paywall.
Archive
And that archive is blocked at my work because it’s in Russia.
Apologies. Do you know a better way I can link stuff behind paywalls.
Also, am I being a jerk when I link to Archive? I don’t wanna spread shady links unknowingly.
Nope you didn’t do anything wrong.
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I don’t. Anymore.
The site is in Russia and I’ve blocked all sites from Russia from reaching the company. It really cuts down on malware.
Ah, so you’re in charge. Then you can unblock it 🤷♂️
Oh, my bad. I wasn’t complaining about it. It was funny to me that I have to go through this many hoops to read this article, but my comment made it look like I was mad that the site was in Russia.
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See, I’m pulling the smartest move right now: AI can’t take your job if you use AI to take your own job first.
Besides, I think Hollywood is pretty behind on tech overall. The current state of the art voice generator quality is still pretty bad, it’ll be a very long time before it can replace actors in quality (if ever): if you train the AI voice on audiobooks, the generated voice is going to sound like someone narrating an audiobook, which really doesn’t sound natural for dialogues at all.
I think then the key point isn’t to ban generative transformer based AI: once the tech out of its box, you can’t exactly put it back in again. (heh) The real question to ask is, who should own this technology so that it does good and help people in the world, instead of being used to take away people’s livelihood?
Wrong. The real question is why do we presuppose that the output of creatively driven individuals must generate profit for a capitalist economy to have sufficient value that those people be permitted the basic necessities of life? Frankly I suspect most of our most valuable contributors to culture are never given the opportunity to be bad enough long enough to develop into their potential.
This whole “oh no, AI is going to take away our liveihoods” notion fundamentally accepts the false notion that people are only deserving of a functional life so long as the primary activities of that life is ultimately to contribute towards increasing the wealth of a tiny percentage of individuals.
It’s the same mistake that leads us to massively undersupport educators and carers and will have people freaking out about how they’ll “earn a living” once robots are able to do everything we practically require to be done.
People are fundamentally entitled to a living. If someone is being denied one, then look at the system that causes that not the specifics of that particular flavour of how it’s happening.
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Since it is paywalled I can only guess from the title.
I don’t understand the problem. He was payed for reading books and now we all have his voice. What did he expect?
Is there an AI imitating his voice making money? Is it being represented with his name? If not, what would be the difference with some person imitating his voice, whould that be stealing too?
Basically I don’t see any problem with me buying those books training local model and give it other books to read. That can not be illegal, right?
Giving it to other people mentioning his name would definitely be fraud. But stealing? I don’t know.
Selling it to other people under other name… I don’t see a problem.
But than we come to AI generated images and I do start thinking in that way. Thou if they can find someone that looks like him, and other person sounding like him… they are all good?
Agree. The AI hate is becoming absurd and irrational. People really being played by the “think of the poor artist” propaganda.
No harm, no foul imo
I haven’t seen him in anything for ages, is being on strike a euphemism?
Not a lot on his bio since 2020…
Looks like he’s been busy with quite a few upcoming projects https://m.imdb.com/name/nm0000410/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_7_nm_1_q_stephen%2520fry
Oh cool. I knew he had a job in cricket but thought he’d retired from the media as he used to be on TV all the time
https://www.lords.org/lords/news-stories/stephen-fry-launches-mcc-campaign-to-reward-commun
He can’t do much as an actor without a voice.
Most of his work in progress is voice though
https://m.imdb.com/name/nm0000410/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_7_nm_1_q_stephen%2520fry
It was a childish joke about him conflating a violation of his rights with “stealing his voice”.
Ah
Don’t worry, ““artists”” only complain about ai when open source ai gets released.
AI can very easily be abused and I don’t see how this is related to the tech being open sourced or not. Fighting to ensure you aren’t exploited is fine and I support anyone to fight against exploitation.
I don’t get why so many people feel the need to defend big corporations this much. It’s not like they’re going to share the profits with the people who defend them, nor do they probably care.
If anything, the industry will just use whatever ammo they can to exploit more people.
Without maintaining and creating protections, they will roll back until there are almost none. Our current labor rights didn’t come for free, they were fought for.
They downvoted him because he spoke the truth.
It’s funny how all (or at least most of them) of the parents of those “artists” told them to do/learn something real and now they get their recipe for their bad choice.
I’ve discussed with someone about how pictures made by stable diffusion is not Art while there are literally “paintings” where the “artist” just jizzed on the canvas which then got declared as Art. I trolled him by sending him multiple generated anime pictures and asked him which is “Art” because he said he could recognize Art. He chose one and fell into the trap.
ChatGPT is why the public is scrambling about AI. AI art has been around awhile and there’s always been complaining because its lame compared to real artists. This has fuck all to do with it suddenly being open source AI.
