I might be missing something, but what are the non-questionable, or at least non-evil, uses of this technology? Because every single application I can think of is fucked up: porn, identity theft, impersonation, replacing voice actors, stealing the likeness of voice actors, replacing customer support without letting the customers know you're using bots.
I guess you could give realistic voices to people that lost their voices by using old recordings, but there's no way that this is a market that justify the investment.
The ability to use my own voice in other languages so I can do localization on my own youtube videos would be huge.
With game development as well, being able to be my own voice actor would save me an immense amount of money that I do not have and give me even more creative freedom and direction of exactly what I want.
It's not ready yet, but I do believe that it will come.
There's a bit thing atm around human creative work being replaced by AI; even if a voice isn't cloned but just generated by AI it gets people frothing as if human hands in factories haven't been replaced by robots, or a human rider on horseback wasn't replaced by an engine.
that's... exactly what they did. They hired real VAs that recorded some lines that are used as-is in the game, and stuff for training, which is to make more dynamic commentary about the match. It was a controversy because people saw "AI" and lost their marbles. Nothing wrong if it's contracted/licensed training data.
> what are the non-questionable, or at least non-evil, uses of this technology?
iPhone Personal Voice [1] is one. It helps people who are physically losing their voice and the ones around them to still have their voice in a different way. Apple takes long voice samples of various texts for this though.
I have the same concerns generally. But one non-evil popped into my head...
My dad passed away a few months ago. Going through his things, I found all of his old papers and writings; they have great meaning to me. It would be so cool to have them as audio files, my dad as the narrator. And for shits, try it with a British accent.
This may not abate the concerns, but I'm sure good things will come too.
Serious question: is this a healthy way to treat ancestors? In the future will we just keep grandma around as an AI version of her middle aged self when she passes?
Fair question. People have kept pictures, paintings, art, belongings, etc of their family members for countless generations. AI will surely be used to create new ways to remember loved ones. I think that is a big difference than "keeping around grandma as an AI version of herself", and pretending they are still alive, which I agree feels unhealthy.
Made me think how different can be generations and what is countless. I can count back 2 and have not even seen anything about my grandfather who was born 101 years before me (1875). At least I have “signature” as XXX in 1860ies on a plan of farmland from his father, when he bought it out from slavery. And that actual farmland.
Good luck AIng that heritage.
I think everyone's entitled to their opinion here. As for me, though: my brother died at 10 years old (back in the 90s). While there are some home videos with him talking, it's never for more than a few seconds at a time.
Maybe a decade ago, I came across a cassette tape that he had used to record himself reading from a book for school - several minutes in duration.
It was incredibly surprising to me how much he sounded like my older brother. It was a very emotional experience, but personally, I can't imagine using that recording to bootstrap a model whereby I could produce more of his "voice".
Text to speech is very close to being able to replace voice actors for a lot of lower budget content. Voice cloning will let directors and creators get just the sound they want for their characters, imagine being able to say "I want something that sounds like Harrison Ford with a French accent." Of course, there are going to be debates about how closely you can clone someone's voice/diction/etc, both extremes are wrong - perfect cloning will hurt artists without bringing extra value to directors/creators, but if we outlaw things that sound similar the technology will be neutered to uselessness.
Years ago The Indiana Jones podcast show made a feature length radio adventure drama (with copyright blessing for music/story of indiana jones) and it has a voice actor that sounds 98% exactly like harrison ford. No one was hurt by it because cultural artefacts rely on mass distribution first.
As someone involved in the AI creator sphere, that's a very cold take. Big studios pay top shelf voice talent to create the best possible experience because they can afford it. Do you think Blizzard is using AI to voice Diablo/Overwatch/Warcraft? Of course not. On the other hand, there are lots of small indie games being made now that utilize TTS, because the alternative is no voice, the voice of a friend or a very low quality voice actor.
Do I want to have people making exact clones of voice actors? No. The problem is that if you say "You can't get 90% close to an existing voice actor" then the technology will be able to create almost no human voices, it'll constantly refuse like gemini, even when the request is reasonable. This technology is incredibly powerful and useful, and we shouldn't avoid using it because it'll force a few people to change careers.
You want a world where only the rich can create beautiful experiences. You're either rich or short sighted.
Edit: If you've got a cadre of volunteer voice actors that don't suck hidden somewhere, you need to share buddy. That's the only way your comments make sense.
I don't know what else to tell you, I just think people deserve to be paid for the work they do.
Your vision of a world where anyone can create voice for their projects for cheap CAN NOT exist without someone getting exploited. Nor is it sustainable, really.
You said they this world would be worth some people losing their careers, but what do we gain? More games/audiobooks of questionable quality? Is this really worth fucking a whole profession over?
We agree that people should be paid for the work that they *DO*. Your view smacks of elitism, and voice actors don't have any more right to be able to make decent money peddling their voice than indie game devs have to peddle games with synthetic voices.
Your view smacks of contempt for workers, particularly in the arts. Specially the emphasis on "do", as if voice actors don't actually work, and just live of royalties or something. The kind of worldview that the rich and the delusioned working poor tend to share.
Professions disappear, it's a natural side effect of progress. Stablehands aren't really that common anymore, because most people drive cars instead of horses.
I really hope we can deprecate a whole bunch of professions related to fossil fuels, including coal miners and oil drillers etc.
I sympathise with the people working in those professions, I do, but times change and professions come and go, and I don't buy the argument that we should stop inventing new stuff because it might outcompete people.
As for positive uses of this technology, it might be used to immortalise a voice actor. For example Sir David Attenborough probably won't be around forever, but thanks to this technology, his iconic voice might be!
You have a narrow view of what a beautiful experience is. It does not require professional-level voice acting.
It is not unfair that, in order to have voice acting, you must have someone perform voice acting. You don't have the natural right to professional-level voice acting for free, nor do you need it to create beautiful things.
The tech is simply something that may be possible, and it has tradeoffs, and claiming that it's an accessibility problem does not grant you permission to ignore the tradeoffs.
> You don't have the natural right to professional-level voice acting for free
I also don't have the natural right to work as a professional-level voice actor.
"Natural rights" aren't really a thing, the phrase is a thought-terminating cliché we use for the rhetorical purpose of saying something is good or bad without having to justify it further.
> The tech is simply something that may be possible, and it has tradeoffs, and claiming that it's an accessibility problem does not grant you permission to ignore the tradeoffs.
A few times as a kid, I heard the meme that the American constitution allows everything then tells you what's banned, the French one bans everything then tells you what's allowed, and the Soviet one tells you nothing and arrests you anyway.
It's not a very accurate meme, but still, "permission" is the wrong lens: it's allowed until it's illegal. You want it to be illegal to replace voice actors with synthetic voices, you need to campaign to make it so as this isn't the default. (Unlike with using novel tech for novel types of fraud, where fraud is already illegal and new tech doesn't change that).
The lightness with which you treat forcing tens of thousands of people to change their career is absurd. Indie games are hardly suffering for a lack of voice acting, even if you only look at it from a market perspective and ignore that voice acting is a creative interpretation and not simply reading the words the way the director wants.
Yes, we should avoid using it because it will upend the lives of a significant amount of artists for the primary benefit of "some indie games will have more voice acting and big game companies will be able to save money on voice actors". That's not worth it, how could you think it is?
Suppose all existing voice actors, and, to be maximally generous, everyone who had spent >1 year training to be a voice actor, was given a pension for some years, paying them the greater of their current income or some average voice actor income. And then there would be no limits on using AI voices to substitute for voice actors.
Would you be happy with that outcome, or do you have another objection?
> The lightness with which you treat forcing tens of thousands of people to change their career is absurd.
Only tens of thousands? Cute. For most of the 2010s, I was expecting self-driving cars to imminently replace truck drivers, which is a few millions in the US alone and I think around 40-45 million worldwide. I still do expect AI to replace humans for driving, I just don't know how long it will take. (I definitely wasn't expecting "creative artistry" to be an easier problem than "don't crash a car", I didn't appreciate that nobody minds if even 90% of the hands have 6 fingers while everyone minds if a car merely equals humans by failing to stop in 1 of every (3.154e7 seconds per year * 1.4e9 vehicles / 30000 human driving fatalities per year ~= 1.47e+12) seconds of existence).
Almost every nation used to be around 90% farm workers, now it's like 1-5% (similar numbers to truckers) and even those are scared of automation; the immediate change was to factory jobs, but those too have shifted into service roles because of automation of the former, and the rest are scared of automation (and outsourcing).
Those service-sector roles? "Computer" used to be a job; Graphical artists are upset about Stable Diffusion; Anyone working with text, from Hollywood script writers to programmers to lawyers, is having to justify their own wages vs. an LLM (for now, most of us are winning this argument; but for how long?)
We get this wrong, it's going to be a disaster; we get it right, we're all living better the 0.1%.
> Indie games are hardly suffering for a lack of voice acting, even if you only look at it from a market perspective and ignore that voice acting is a creative interpretation and not simply reading the words the way the director wants.
I tried indie game development for a bit. I gave up with something like £1,000 in my best year. (You can probably double that to account for inflation since then).
This is because the indie game sector is also not suffering from a lack of developer talent, meaning there's a lot of competition that drives prices below the cost of living. Result? Hackathons where people compete for the fun of it, not for the end product. Those hackathons are free to say if they do or don't come with rules about GenAI; but in any case, they definitely come with no budget.
> Yes, we should avoid using it because it will upend the lives of a significant amount of artists for the primary benefit of "some indie games will have more voice acting and big game companies will be able to save money on voice actors". That's not worth it, how could you think it is?
Why do you think those textile workers lost the argument?
And to pre-empt what I think is a really obvious counter, I would also add that the transition we face must be handled with care and courtesy to the economic fears — to all those who read my comment and think "and therefore this will be easy and we should embrace it, just dismiss the nay-sayers as the Luddites they are": why do you think Karl Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto?
Probably not, because the voice actors are a community draw. In fact, one of the top threads in the overwatch subreddit right now is pictures of all the voice actors. They go to cons and interact with fans and they don't cost so much that losing that value to save a few bucks is worth it.
Based on the way consumers have behaved over my 30-odd years of life, I seriously doubt they will care enough about the fates of voice actors, developers or any other folks who are mistreated or discarded in the project of creating yet another Call of Duty iteration. We're an atomized society thats being trained all day every day to just purchase things, consequences be damned. I want to believe you are right but I suspect you are not. I suspect you are coping and to be honest, I want to do that too.
There are some cases where that's true, but people connect with actors too, which is why a AAA star will get paid 20+ million dollars to just associate their name with a project.
I think the truth will be in the middle. Nobody's choosing AI over Brad Pitt or Henry Cavill, and in the various niches I think the highest performing humans will still do very well. Overwatch is a good example of that, see https://blizzardwatch.com/2018/01/24/rolling-stone-calls-ove.... AI is going to destroy the bottom of the barrel though, stuff like Fiverr and a lot of mediocre trained voice actors are going to have to get better or change careers.
It is creating a new and fully customisable voice actor that perfectly matches a creative vision.
To the extent that a skilled voice actor can already blend existing voices together to get, say, French Harrison Ford, for it to be evil for a machine to do it would require it to be evil for a human to do it.
Small indie creators have a budget of approximately nothing, this kind of thing would allow them to voice all NPCs in some game rather than just the main quest NPCs. (And that's true even in the absence of LLMs to generate the flavour text for the NPCs so they're not just repeating "…but then I took an arrow to the knee" as generic greeting #7 like AAA games from 2011).
Big studios may also use this for NPCs to the economic detriment of current voice actors, but I suspect this will be a tech which leads to "induced demand"[0] — though note that this can also turn out very badly and isn't always a good thing either: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cotton_gin
I don't disagree with the thought that large companies are going to try to use these technologies too, with typical lack of ethics in many cases.
But some of this thinking is a bit like protesting the use of heavy machinery in roadbuilding/construction, because it displaces thousands of people with shovels. One difference with this type of technology is that the means to use it doesn't require massive amounts of capital like the heavy machinery example, so more of those shovel-weilders will be able to compete with those that are only bringing captial to the table.
I'm not saying that this should be forbidden or something. I just wonder what is the motivation for the people pitching and actually developing this. I'm all for basic, non-profit-driven, research, but at some point you gotta ask yourself "what am I helping create here?"
Saying something is evil would seem to suggest that you think it should be forbidden. Maybe you should choose a different word if that’s not your intention.
Super-niche use-case: our game studio prototyped a multiplayer horror game where we played with cloning player voices to be able to secretly relay messages to certain players as if it came from one of their team-mates (e.g. "go check out below deck" to split a pair of players up, or "I think Bob is trying to sabotage us" to sew inter-player distrust, etc).
Less-niche use-case: if you use TTS for voice-overs and/or NPC dialogue, there can still be a lot of variance in speech patterns / tone / inflections / etc when using a model where you've just customized parameters for each NPC -- using a voice-clone approach, upon first tests, seems like it might provide more long-term consistency.
Bonus: in a lot of voiced-over (non-J)RPGs, the main character is text-only (intentionally not voiced) because they're often intended to be a self-insert of the player (compared to JRPGs which typically have the player "embody" a more fleshed-out player with their own voice). If you really want to lean into self-insert patterns, you could have a player provide a short sample of their voice at the beginning of the game and use that for generating voice-overs for their player character's dialogue throughout the game.
The idea of a personalized protagonist voice is interesting, but I'd worry about some kind of uncanny valley where it sounds like myself but is using the wrong word-choices or inflections.
Actually, getting it to sound "like myself" in the first place is an extra challenge! For many people even actual recordings sound "wrong", probably because your self-perception involves spoken sound being transmitted through your neck and head, with a different blend of frequencies.
After that is solved, there's still the problem of bystanders remarking: "Is that supposed to sound like you? It doesn't sound like you."
> Super-niche use-case: our game studio prototyped a multiplayer horror game where we played with cloning player voices to be able to secretly relay messages to certain players as if it came from one of their team-mates (e.g. "go check out below deck" to split a pair of players up, or "I think Bob is trying to sabotage us" to sew inter-player distrust, etc).
That's an insanely cool idea, and one I hadn't really considered before. Out of curiosity, how well did it work? Was it believable enough to fool players?
There's a huge gap in uses where listenable, realistic voice is required, but the text to be spoken is not predetermined. Think AI agents, NPCs in dynamically generated games, etc. These things are currently not really doable with the current crop of TTS because either they take too long to run or they sound awful.
I think the bulk of where this stuff will be useful isn't really visible yet b/c we haven't had the tech to play around with enough.
There is also certainly a huge swath of bad-actor stuff that this is good for. I feel like a lot of the problems with modern tech falls under the umbrella of "We're not collectively mature enough to handle this much power" and I wish there were a better solution for all of that.
If I'm getting your meaning, that is - we don't have a fix for "we can but we ought not to", then yeah I see what you mean.
Even that is not straightforward, unfortunately. There's this thing where the tech is going to be here, one way or the other. What we may have some influence on isn't whether it shows up, but who has it.
...which brings me to what I see as the core of contention between anyone conversing in this space. Who do you think is a bigger threat? Large multinational globocorps or individual fanatics, or someone else that might get their hands on this stuff?
From my perspective, we've gone a long time handing over control of "things"; society, tax dollars, armaments, law - to the larger centralized entities (globocorps and political parties and wall street and so on and so on). Things throughout this period have become incrementally worser and worser, and occasionally (here's looking at you, september '08) rapidly worser.
Put in short, huge centralized single-points-of-failure are the greater evil. "Terrorists", "Commies", "Malcontents" (whatever you wanna call folks with an axe to grind) make up a much lesser (but still present!) danger.
So that leaves us in a really awkward position, right? We have these things that (could) amount to digital nukes (or anything on a spectra towards such) and we're having this conversation about whether to keep going on them while everyone knows full well that on some level, we can't be trusted. It's not great and I'll be the first to admit that.
But, I'm much more concerned about the people with strike drones and billions of dollars of warchest having exclusive access to this stuff than I am about joey-mad-about-baloney having them.
Joey could do one-time damage to some system, or maybe fleece your grandma for her life savings (which is bad, and I'm not trying to minimize it).
Globocorp (which in this scenario could actually be a single incredibly rich dude with a swarm of AI to carry out his will) could institute a year-round propaganda machine that suppresses dissent while algorithmically targeting whoever it deems "dangerous" with strike drones and automated turrets. And we'd never hear about it. The 'media AI' could just decide not to tell us.
So yeah, I'm kinda on the side of "do it all, but do it in the open so's we can see it". Not ideal, but better than the alternatives AFAICT.
I used it to translate a short set of tv shows that were only available in Danish with no subtitles in any other language and made them into English for my personal watching library.
The episodes are about 95% just a narrator with some background noises.
Elevenlabs did a great job with it and I cranked through the 32 episodes (about 4 mins each) relatively easily.
There is a longer series (about 60 hours) only in Japanese that I want to do the same thing for. But don't want to spend Elevenlabs prices to do.
Agreed. I think the framing of "stealing" is a needlessly pessimistic prediction of how it might be used. If a person owns their own likeness, it would be logical to implement legal protections for AI impersonations of one's voice. I could imagine a popular voice actor scaling up their career by using AI for a first draft rendering of their part of a script and then selectively refining particular lines with more detailed prompts and/or recording them manually.
This raises a lot of complicated issues and questions, but the use case isn't inherently bad.
The problem is not about replacing actors with technology. It is about replacing the particular actors with their computer-generated voice. It's about likeness-theft.
A long term goal of mine is to have a local LLM trained on my preferences and with a very long memory of past conversations that I could chat with in real time using TTS. It would be amazing to go on a walk with Airpods and chat with it, ask questions, learn about topics, etc.
I want to preserve samples of my voice as I age so that when voice replication technology improves in the future, I can hear myself from a different time of my life in ways that are not prerecorded.
I would also like to give my children this as a novelty of preserved family history so if I so desire, I can have fun with them by letting them hear me from different ages.
> there's no way that this is a market that justify the investment.
It's not just worth justifying investment. You can make just about anything worth the investment as measured by a 90-day window of fiscal reporting. H!tmen were a wildly profitable venture for La Cosa Nostra.
Huh? Replacing human labor with machine is evil? You wouldn't even able to post this comment without that happening, because computers wouldn't exists or we wouldn't have time for that because many of us would work on farms to produce enough food without the use of human-replacing technologies.
In a similar way as machines allowed to produce abundance of food with less labor, the voice AI combined with AI translation can make information more accesible for the world. Voice actors wouldn't be able to voice act all the useful information in the world, (especially for the more niche topics and for the smaller languages) because it wouldn't worth to pay them and humans are also slower to than machines. We are not far from almost realtime voice translation from any language to any other one.
Sure, we can do it with text-only translation, but voice makes it more accessible for lot of people. ( For example between 5–10% of the world has dislexya. )
What about for remembering lost loved ones? There are dead people I would love to hear talk again, even if I know it's not their personality talking just their voice (and who knows, maybe with LLM training on a single person it could even be roughly their personality, too).
I can imagine a fairly big market of both people setting it up before they die, with maybe a whole load of written content and a schedule of when to have it read in future, and people who've just lost someone, and want to recreate their voice to help remember it.
I can't, and if I could, I think this would be fairly dystopian. Didn't black mirror have an episode about something similar? I vaguely remember an Asimov/Arthur C. Clark short story about the implications of time travel (ish) tech in a similar context. Sounds like a case of "we've build the torment nexus from classic sci-fi novel 'do not build the torment nexus'"
We already have ways to preserve the voices of people past their lives. Cloning their voices and writing things in their names is not only wrong but deceptive.
I used to work in the space and host read ads are the best performers compared to other types of audio ads. Imagine you can automate that ad creation as a podcaster/platform. You just give it the script and it creates a new ad in that voice.
Now, is this wrong? I think this is a separate discussion
It enables to use your favorite audiobook reader’s voice for all your TTS needs. E.g. you can have HN comments read to you by Patrick Steward, or by the Honest Trailers voice. Maybe you find that questionable? ;)
The existence of Photoshop doesn't mean that you can put Kobe Bryant on a Wheaties box without paying him. There's no reason that a voice talent's voice can't be subject to the same infringement protections as a screen actor's or athlete's likeness.
You absolutely can put Kobe on a Wheaties box without problems legally, IF you do not sell it. That's "fair use." It has not been tested in court yet, but precedent seems to suggest that creating voice clones for private use is also fair use, ESPECIALLY if that person is a celebrity, because privacy rights are limited for celebrities.
That would be non-evil, sure. But I wonder if blind people even want it? They're already listening to screen readers at insane speeds, up to 6-8x, I think. Do they even care that it doesn't sound "realistic"?
Well, I’m sure the blind readers of HN (which I am certain exist) can answer this question, and you, a sighted person, don’t need to even wonder from your position of unknowing.
I mean, I explicitly used "wonder" because I don't wanna assume about blind people's experiences and needs. What else should I have done so you wouldn't come in kicking me in the nuts?
If I am learning new content I can make my own notes and convert them into an audiobook for my morning jog or office commute using my own voice.
If I am a content creator I can generate content more easily by letting my AI voice narrate my slides say. Yes that is cheap and lower quality than a real narrator who can deliver more effective real talks ...but there is a long tail of mediocre content on every topic. Who cares as long as I am having fun, sharing stuff, and not doing anything illegal or wrong.
I can think that better quality audio content generated from text would be a killer application. As someone else mentioned, pipe in an epub, output an audiobook or video game content. With additional tooling (likely via ai/llm analysis), this could enable things like dramatic storytelling with specific character voices and dynamics interpreted from the content of the text.
I can see it empowering solo creators in similar ways that modern music tools enable solo or small-budget musicians today.
No, it really doesn’t. There are thousands of very smart and talented creators without the budget to hire voice actors. This lets them get a start. AI voices let you lower the barrier to entry, but they won’t replace most voice actors because the higher you go up the stack, the more the demand for real actors will also go up because AI voices aren’t anywhere near being able to replace real voice actors.
> AI voices let you lower the barrier to entry, but they won’t replace most voice actors because the higher you go up the stack, the more the demand for real actors will also go up
That is as absurd as saying LLMs are increasing the demand for writers.
> because AI voices aren’t anywhere near being able to replace real voice actors.
Even if that were true—which it is not; the current crop is more than adequate to read long texts—it assumes the technology has reached its limit, which is equally absurd.
As another reply put, I'm very skeptical that the benefits for small content creators will offset the damaged to society as a whole, from increased fraud and harassment.
It seems like it would be great for any kind of voiceover work or any recorded training or presentation. If you want to correct a mis-speak or add some information, instead of re-recording the entire segment, you could seamlessly update a few words or sentences.
Jeeze, I can't imagine why women feel so alienated from the tech industry.
It's almost as if any time some sort of way to make computers more human-like emerges, the first thing a subset of the men in the space do is think "How can I use this to make a woman who has absolutely no function other than my emotional, practical, and physical gratification?"
Humans in desiring deep emotional and sexual connections with people of their desired gender and being driven to weird behaviours when they can't achieve it in the way you personally approve of shock
Then work on it. Ask friends for feedback. Go to therapy. Have some damned introspection instead of just reducing 51% of the people on the planet to a bangmaid.
I don't know how stressful my life will be then, but I thought about reading to my kids later and creating audiobooks with my voice for them, for when I am traveling for work, so they can still listen to me "reading" to them.
The first couple I've come up with are training courses at scale, or converting videos with accents you have a hard time understanding to one you can (no one you'll understand better than yourself)
New uses will be fashioned. Imagine altering the output accent of your assistant on the fly to signify more information like sarcasm, posh accent for assuredness etc no one else listening over the shoulder can detect the true private meaning without your permission. We needn't be stuck in confines of the public dialogue communication world.
I guess you could give realistic voices to people that lost their voices by using old recordings, but there's no way that this is a market that justify the investment.