[HN Gopher] Use deep fake tech to say stuff with your favorite c...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Use deep fake tech to say stuff with your favorite characters
        
       Author : Jugurtha
       Score  : 345 points
       Date   : 2021-12-25 23:29 UTC (23 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (fakeyou.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (fakeyou.com)
        
       | ronsor wrote:
       | It's worth mentioning that one similar site is 15.ai[1]
       | 
       | [1] https://15.ai
        
         | mrVentures wrote:
         | That one has way less content but the quality is perfect.
        
           | moffkalast wrote:
           | Yeah OP's does sound as robotic as ubuntu speech to text,
           | this one is almost completely clear.
        
         | elhenrico wrote:
         | Uberduck[0] has a great selection of voices
         | 
         | [0] https://uberduck.ai
        
           | pndy wrote:
           | "Sign up to synthesize speech".
        
         | smoldesu wrote:
         | 15.ai was the original, in a lot of regards. I used to chat
         | with the dude on 4chan, he was a genuinely intelligent (albeit
         | rather socially awkward) guy, and a bit of a perfectionist at
         | that. The downside was that there was always downtime and a few
         | hidden servers floating around. The upside was... almost
         | perfect voice synthesis, even a year ago.
        
           | yeetaccount4 wrote:
           | >even a year ago.
           | 
           | I must be getting old.
        
           | Melting_Harps wrote:
           | > I used to chat with the dude on 4chan, he was a genuinely
           | intelligent (albeit rather socially awkward) guy, and a bit
           | of a perfectionist at that.
           | 
           | Funny, I just wrote about this type of encounter with
           | exceptional talented people with similar results, and while I
           | didn't detail it in the response, several of those were from
           | those I met on 4chan from 2005-2015 (I checked out after
           | gamergate as it got toxic and less fun).
           | 
           | I hadn't seen 15.ai but its pretty accurate from what I
           | played with. I wonder if he'd be open to see how he trains
           | his algo (deepthroat) with the data sets he gets. He seems to
           | not care about making money from this, or IP and hates NFTs
           | so this would be a good indication he might be up for it.
           | 
           | Sidenote: Also, did you just out yourself as pony*** (brony)?
        
             | smoldesu wrote:
             | > Also, did you just out yourself as pony** (brony)?
             | 
             | In all fairness, if you looked up my Mastodon account I'd
             | be outed in moments :p
             | 
             | It's not that big of a deal anyways. I still consider it
             | less degenerate than the folks who burn a decade of their
             | life working on an SAAS that they hate. At least I got to
             | go to a few cool conventions.
        
         | prox wrote:
         | The modding community also has xvasynth, which is an app you
         | can download. It has some voices from popular games. If you
         | don't want Another Web Service (tm)
        
           | moffkalast wrote:
           | My ancestors are smiling at me, imperial, can you say the
           | same?
        
         | ajcp wrote:
         | I love how if you reject their ToS they Rick Roll you. Fair
         | play.
        
         | bobsmooth wrote:
         | There's no comparison between 15.ai and other TTS.
        
         | a_t48 wrote:
         | The Chell voice is on point.
        
       | mohap2 wrote:
       | Someone do data
        
       | karaterobot wrote:
       | You've read about how, before the health consequences were widely
       | understood, people would eat radium, or paint household objects
       | with radium paint? This technology feels like the epistemological
       | equivalent of making a toy out of radium.
        
       | wyldfire wrote:
       | "The Earth cannot be saved." - Chrisjen Avasarala (Shohreh
       | Aghdashloo)
       | 
       | [1]
       | https://fakeyou.com/tts/result/TR:sxshpsntvje985ymtknpyskr04...
        
       | mobb_solo wrote:
       | still no DOOM (MF)...
        
       | dillondoyle wrote:
       | This is amazing!
       | 
       | I wish there was some kind of notation to help generate intended
       | inflection and emphasis. Like <sarcasm> or /s tags
       | 
       | Here is my bojack. What are _youuuu_ doing here is read flat and
       | funny! suck a D dumb S sounds decent though.
       | 
       | https://fakeyou.com/tts/result/TR:n45c3yyjwrg3fqbdcxfpn3xrac...
        
         | a1371 wrote:
         | Yes, notation seems to be critical. I wanted to see how well it
         | can recreate the training data; so I picked Kyle from South
         | Park and put in "they killed Kenny". I assume this should be in
         | the training set, being a running theme in the show. The
         | inference puts it in a question-like tone, not like the
         | original.
        
       | JasonFruit wrote:
       | Fictional characters, sure. Real people? That's crossing a line.
       | I believe I own myself, and manipulating my face and voice to say
       | what I did not and never would say is a misuse of my property. I
       | can't fully justify that belief, but I would certainly be enraged
       | beyond reason to see a representation of my principled father
       | speaking against his values.
        
         | smoldesu wrote:
         | I agree. Now, who's going to be the one to step up to the plate
         | and stop these rascals from running open-source code on their
         | GPUs that allows for this kind of nonsense?
        
           | weregiraffe wrote:
           | There are things society allows you to do in private, but not
           | in public.
        
           | JasonFruit wrote:
           | I don't want to force them; I want them to refrain.
        
             | spywaregorilla wrote:
             | And if they refuse?
        
               | bobsmooth wrote:
               | I will be sad.
        
               | JasonFruit wrote:
               | Precisely.
        
         | sneak wrote:
         | > _Real people? That 's crossing a line._
         | 
         | Not really. You can't force people to say stuff they don't want
         | to say, and it was always possible (although with a higher
         | barrier to entry) to come up with recordings of people who
         | sound like other real people. Impersonators aren't a new
         | concept.
         | 
         | Just because you have a recording that sounds like person x
         | saying thing y doesn't mean that person x _actually_ said thing
         | y and, critically, _it never did_. Nothing has changed here.
         | 
         | > _manipulating my face and voice to say what I did not and
         | never would say is a misuse of my property_
         | 
         | Your appearance and the way that you sound a) aren't property,
         | and b) aren't yours.
        
         | wruza wrote:
         | I think that some real people (public persons) are ready to
         | see/hear that someone mocks them, and the rest is not ready for
         | such attention. It's interesting that our voices and
         | appearances are not unique. I knew people who look _or_ sound
         | like me or like someone else, but when it becomes " _and_ ", we
         | read it as an indentity theft or something like that. We are
         | not far from calls and records to be signed by personal
         | identity keys and fingerprints included into id documents,
         | because otherwise it would be hard to recognize who is who.
        
         | gmiller123456 wrote:
         | There are plenty of ethical uses for using this with real
         | people. Entertainment, a language interpreter, helping disabled
         | people communicate, etc. The lines don't change based on what
         | technology is available, it can, however, make it easier for
         | people to cross them.
        
         | spywaregorilla wrote:
         | Much as with other things, the problem isn't the creation of
         | the lie, its the publishing of it. I can claim your dad spoke
         | against his values, publish a fake document, draw or photoshop
         | a photo showing him committing a horrendous crime, etc..
         | Publishing something anonymously as a fake primary document is
         | vaguely new but probably not going to be too common.
         | 
         | It's pretty dumb to suggest that I shouldn't be allowed to
         | create something on my computer privately that I can just
         | imagine on my own, imo.
        
           | JasonFruit wrote:
           | Notice that I didn't say it shouldn't be allowed; I said it
           | wad wrong and would make me angry. That's an important
           | distinction that is rarely drawn today, between what people
           | shouldn't do and what they shouldn't be _allowed_ to do.
        
         | t0suj4 wrote:
         | I want to point out that there are people that sound or look
         | like famous characters/actors all their life and are being, in
         | some cases, mocked for that.
         | 
         | Now imagine people getting sued for being themselves.
         | 
         | I think there should be, at most, a protection covered by libel
         | laws as written today and nothing more. Otherwise we risk
         | getting into that mess.
        
       | jacobsievers wrote:
       | What! No Bender? This is the worst kind of discrimination...
        
         | wyldfire wrote:
         | You _could_ make your own speech synthesis site. With
         | blackjack, at least.
        
           | EarlKing wrote:
           | And hookers! Don't forget those, meatbag!
        
       | Blackthorn wrote:
       | Could someone make one for the SpongeBob timecard voice? That
       | would be exceptionally helpful for D&D night.
        
         | wyldfire wrote:
         | That one is "just" a French accent on English words? and
         | relatively few unique ones at that. probably wouldn't be hard
         | to train or just brute force the most frequent number and
         | duration words.
        
           | capableweb wrote:
           | Seemingly, assuming there are 10 + 6 combinations (1-10,
           | seconds/minutes/hours/days/weeks/months), it'd probably be
           | less than 250 words and you could use Fiverr to get some
           | native French speaker who knows English (and applies a heavy
           | accent) to do it for you, for less than 10 EUR
        
         | Shared404 wrote:
         | Party gets sunk in saltmarsh:
         | 
         |  _three weeks later_
        
       | PanMan wrote:
       | Not bad, but it seems to ignore newlines in the input. I pasted
       | in newlines in the famous Pulp Fiction quote:
       | https://fakeyou.com/tts/result/TR:d1yw37dftm42ayt34h17scy1n8...
        
       | darwinwhy wrote:
       | I have a sudden urge to want to deep fake Steven Hawking's voice.
       | I wonder both how the deep fake tech would handle Stephen Hawking
       | as an input, and I'm just realizing that he just missed the
       | survival threshold for being able to use this tech.
        
         | progman32 wrote:
         | Hawking turned down the use of new voices!
         | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_H._Klatt
        
           | genewitch wrote:
           | My naive understanding is that he considered the voice he
           | used to be his voice, and had no desire to change it.
           | 
           | I also read some weird teardown of all of the chips and
           | technology used to synthesize that voice a while back and it
           | was very interesting. I'd like to read it again and archive
           | it.
        
       | Dramatize wrote:
       | We (Replica Studios) are releasing a major quality update next
       | year. Here's a preview:
       | https://replicastudios.notion.site/Preview-Voice-Quality-Upd...
        
         | spoonjim wrote:
         | What are the main differences between you guys and Resemble.ai?
        
       | 14 wrote:
       | I've noticed on any of those deep fake sites you can't find
       | Dwayne Johnson the Rock. I wonder if there is a legal reason
       | because surely he is super famous and would be there. I've
       | searched multiple ones if there is one I missed it.
        
         | 14 wrote:
         | I stand corrected one of the sites linked was uberduck and it
         | seems to have him but I was unable to get it to work today.
        
         | capableweb wrote:
         | From https://fakeyou.com/about
         | 
         | > We'll be happy to remove any of the voices featured here for
         | any reason.
         | 
         | Maybe they've requested to be removed from the site. Impossible
         | to know though, and they are unlikely to acknowledge it if you
         | ask.
        
       | cableshaft wrote:
       | Tested it with voices "singing" Praise You by Fatboy Slim. Here
       | are the results:
       | 
       | Alan Rickman:
       | https://fakeyou.com/tts/result/TR:hsrgb9haeqff63s966e42m7dnq...
       | 
       | Bernie Sanders:
       | https://fakeyou.com/tts/result/TR:e7b02rgxqzrmfkavrn0pr39jsg...
       | 
       | Snoop Dogg:
       | https://fakeyou.com/tts/result/TR:kn2yaam78wq03d2w53xfd0kcvq...
       | 
       | Morgan Freeman:
       | https://fakeyou.com/tts/result/TR:msxvghpkzs7942vkdfhmxjg2bs...
        
       | krylon wrote:
       | I have always wanted to hear Ayn Rand call for workers to throw
       | off the shackles of bourgeois capitalism. And now I can. Thank
       | you, Internet!
        
         | iszomer wrote:
         | I let (robot) Ayn Rand read a youtube comment I found funny..
         | 
         | https://fakeyou.com/tts/result/TR:ev54r4q5b1txx28k32e1s5nw6t...
        
       | ksec wrote:
       | No Steve Jobs. Which got me thinking would they get sued by Apple
       | if they had it?
        
         | wyldfire wrote:
         | Jobs' estate, maybe. Hopefully Apple doesn't own his likeness.
         | 
         | But really it seems like fair use IMO. these short clips seem
         | very benign.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | verst wrote:
       | I chose "Batman" and used as test "this is a test". On the word
       | "test" it sounds completely metallic distorted and glitchy.
       | 
       | Which characters seem to work well?
        
       | smusamashah wrote:
       | What are these sounds at the end?
       | https://fakeyou.com/tts/result/TR:n0vhhc8z8z4a1rfa8vrpn0s1fw...
       | Seems like the number of full stops at the end of a sentence can
       | generate weird mumbo jumbo. It's interesting.
        
       | Fnoord wrote:
       | I checked out various and wasn't impressed by most, except most
       | notably Nas and Yennefer. Its also biased towards English.
        
       | fareesh wrote:
       | In case some moron from the west comes after you, please accept
       | my permission as an Indian to use Apu's voice. Pathetic puritans
       | killed off my favourite character.
        
       | Aeolun wrote:
       | This is really cool.
       | 
       | It could use some smoothing of the AI artifacts (no idea how
       | you'd do that though). It's like they're talking over a broken
       | mic.
        
       | skilled wrote:
       | Looks like a lot of these have been pulled from songs/movies, so
       | their voice pattern follows of that media type.
        
       | phist_mcgee wrote:
       | An interesting site, with amazing tech once again let down by a
       | hopeless UI. Seriously, a dropdown with _several hundred_ options
       | is not a great user experience. Still not as bad as the NVIDIA
       | image generator posted a few weeks back.
        
       | IsThisYou wrote:
       | That's scary. Also, I am missing Cartman in the list of voices.
       | And Ben Shapiro's voice talks way too slowly :D
        
       | spoonjim wrote:
       | These are cute but not even in the same league as Resemble.AI
        
       | kgran wrote:
       | Too bad I couldn't find the HEV suit voice from Half-Life. At
       | least it has GLaDOS though.
        
       | iamthemonster wrote:
       | Ned Flanders is shockingly good. I'm from Australia so I don't
       | know half these characters it has listed, but it has all the
       | major Simpsons characters, and that's enough for me.
       | 
       | If I ever end up paralysed and unable to speak, you bet your ass
       | I'm talking like Ned Flanders to everyone.
        
         | Jugurtha wrote:
         | > _If I ever end up paralysed and unable to speak, you bet your
         | ass I 'm talking like Ned Flanders to everyone._
         | 
         | That's funny. What was the sentence you typed if you don't mind
         | me asking? I had subpar results with 50 cent, chosen randomly,
         | and very NSFW language, but also Obama with "My fellow
         | Americans" was strange.
         | 
         | I wonder how they're training and improving the models. I work
         | on a product that could help them
         | train/track/package/deploy/monitor models effectively. Maybe
         | they're not up to date. There also is an issue with the
         | language.
        
           | muststopmyths wrote:
           | Obama saying "Don't have a cow man" sounds like an Australian
           | who's lived in South Africa for many years.
        
           | unlog wrote:
           | This got me thinking that it would be nice to have some sort
           | of recursive processing in which if you say, that Flanders is
           | personalizing Obama, then when you quote "My fellow
           | Americans", you should hear an attempt of Flanders saying
           | that the Obama's way. A way to detect fake voices, I guess :P
        
             | sharperguy wrote:
             | What would be sweet is a voice changer, where you can
             | record yourself talking and it changes it to sound like one
             | of those characters. That way you can intonate and say
             | things less robotically.
        
             | Jugurtha wrote:
             | Nice! What about Flanders doing an impression of Obama
             | doing an impression of Flanders?
        
             | thanatos519 wrote:
             | JukeBox did that for music so it's not impossible ...
             | https://openai.com/blog/jukebox/
        
             | Waterluvian wrote:
             | I'm guessing what you basically want is two switches:
             | 
             | - simulate tone and timbre
             | 
             | - simulate cadence and mannerisms.
             | 
             | Now I wonder if AI can do this or if this is a perfect
             | example of where AI falls short?
        
               | unlog wrote:
               | Disclaimer: I know nothing about AI.
               | 
               | I think the AI is now capable to reply to "how likely
               | this will mean this other thing if you say it this way",
               | that applies to text, pictures, videos, whatever, you
               | name it. Is not intelligent in any way, but still gives
               | meaningful responses back, which is useful for the use
               | cases to which it is applied, search, games, etc. That
               | been said, I have no doubts, that with time, it will
               | reach understanding resolving basically almost any
               | problem... but.. we always have doubts, and you can't
               | just divine the future, look at the James Webb Telescope,
               | we launch it to get some answers, so doesn't matter how
               | intelligent a system may be, we would need more research,
               | and the system will need it too, even if it's an AI,
               | (because its needs to know things, to learn from them, in
               | case that wasn't obvious)
        
               | Hendrikto wrote:
               | Yes AI can do this. It's called Audio Style Transfer.
        
       | forgingahead wrote:
       | This looks like it was previously known as Vocodes, made by
       | echelon who is here on HN:
       | 
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23965787
       | 
       | The code repos used are listed in their credits section, and it
       | looks like a mixture of (customised?) Tacotron2, Glow-TTS,
       | HifGan, and others. Videos are generated using Wav2Lip.
       | 
       | Text-To-Speech (TTS) has improved greatly over the past several
       | years, but there's still a lot of metallic sounds in "pure" TTS
       | implementations. I've started exploring voice style conversion,
       | otherwise known as "voice cloning", and there are some
       | interesting repos out there with decent results. These work
       | differently from TTS, in that you don't type out the text to be
       | spoken, but rather pass in an audio file of what you want the
       | cloned speaker to say, and the system outputs an audio file with
       | the same sounds (words, intonation) but with a different speaker
       | identity.
       | 
       | This may be easier to get the right cadence and emotion in the
       | generated audio, as text doesn't capture proper emotion and
       | intonation. I suspect game character audio will use more of
       | voice-style conversion instead of pure TTS simply to get the
       | right emotional cadence of the lines being delivered.
       | 
       | Some interesting voice style conversion repos (in no order, just
       | a random selection if anyone is interested in exploring):
       | 
       | https://github.com/yl4579/StarGANv2-VC
       | 
       | https://github.com/ebadawy/voice_conversion
       | 
       | https://github.com/RussellSB/tt-vae-gan
       | 
       | https://github.com/auspicious3000/autovc
       | 
       | https://github.com/edresson/yourtts
       | 
       | Papers With Code has interesting repos there as well:
       | https://paperswithcode.com/task/voice-conversion/latest
        
         | kragen wrote:
         | This list is great, thanks!
        
         | krapht wrote:
         | Thanks for the links! Interesting reading.
        
         | vpilcx wrote:
         | Thanks a lot for posting this. I've been meaning to take some
         | audio from my grandpa to resurrect my grandpa's voice before my
         | grandma dies, so maybe I'll finally get around to doing it now.
        
       | scrollaway wrote:
       | Super interesting. Bernie Sanders' voice is very good (way better
       | than some of the others I tried such as D.Va and Richard Ayoade),
       | but it sounds very flat. You can fake a eulogy with this, but not
       | a political message.
        
       | vvoyer wrote:
       | Homer Simpson has a message for us HN:
       | https://fakeyou.com/tts/result/TR:k8996czqz22t83nrh69sv7x54y...
        
       | d1lanka wrote:
       | Neat
        
       | imranhou wrote:
       | As tech like this nears perfection, How long before models
       | created using data from movie audio would be treated as
       | unauthorized use of content by classifying it as derivative
       | copyrighted works?
        
       | IceWreck wrote:
       | Are those TTS models downloadable ?
        
       | grouphugs wrote:
        
       | pkaye wrote:
       | Liam Neeson's deep fake voice has a weird stutter when he speaks.
       | 
       | https://fakeyou.com/tts/result/TR:twwgqfh2432z2sq1e1k1ek4340...
        
         | microbass wrote:
         | And, he can't say "Irish" properly.
        
         | jmkni wrote:
         | I found something similar with Mark Zuckerberg's one as well
         | (impressive apart from that) -
         | https://fakeyou.com/tts/result/TR:y47qqrr4kv7b07qncj5cyrdaxe...
        
           | capableweb wrote:
           | It seems longer phrases just simply won't work well. Here is
           | Eric Cartman having a brain aneurysm: https://fakeyou.com/tts
           | /result/TR:81fj66esxpgctxx4s443npz3gf...
        
       | causality0 wrote:
       | One interesting application of tech like this is to produce story
       | mods for games that still sound like they're using the original
       | voice actors.
        
         | ninjanomnom wrote:
         | If it gets good enough eventually you can bet games will do
         | this at their core too rather than re record lines whenever
         | anything new or different is needed. Then mods just need to add
         | the new script.
        
           | indigochill wrote:
           | I know at least one studio that's already using AWS Polly,
           | (IIRC) for at least prototyping voice lines. I'm not positive
           | that they end up in production, but I've heard samples and
           | IMO they could fly as-is for at least informational lines.
           | I've not yet heard TTS even attempt lines with strong
           | emotion, though.
        
         | TeeMassive wrote:
         | Is it possible to create a voice changer with these kind of AI?
        
           | qayxc wrote:
           | In principle this could be done, even with decent results.
           | 
           | It would basically involve a two-step approach where the
           | first model extracts text and intonation and the second model
           | synthesises the target voice.
        
       | 1cvmask wrote:
       | My favorite deepfake is Sassy Justice by the South Park creators
       | Trey Parker and Matt Stone:
       | 
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WfZuNceFDM
        
         | micromacrofoot wrote:
         | oh wow the ad breaks in this caught me off guard in the best
         | way, thank you for sharing this!
        
         | pimlottc wrote:
         | To be clear, in Sassy Justice they had actors doing the voices
         | and body movements, the only part that was deepfaked was the
         | faces. That's why the results were so good.
        
           | amelius wrote:
           | Yes, and they cherry-picked the results from endless tuning.
        
         | willhinsa wrote:
         | This is great. Thank you for sharing. I'd never heard of this!
        
       | wara23arish wrote:
       | Getting failed attempts for the Arnold voices
        
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       (page generated 2021-12-26 23:02 UTC)