[HN Gopher] VALL-E: Microsoft's new zero-shot text-to-speech model
___________________________________________________________________
VALL-E: Microsoft's new zero-shot text-to-speech model
Author : cbeach
Score : 476 points
Date : 2023-01-09 11:48 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (mpost.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (mpost.io)
| bamboozled wrote:
| Oh that's great news \s
|
| Do other people read these types of headings and just think
| immediately about how freaking scary this stuff is going to
| get...if it's actually accurate ?
| tootie wrote:
| A company called Lyrebird claimed they could replicate a voice
| in less time and had demos available a few years ago. The
| deepfake scare of 2019 also seems like a long time ago.
| sendfoods wrote:
| Yeah, I am increasingly nervous about some point in the future
| where you cannot trust any digital medium because of deep
| fakes, NERFs, voice cloning...
|
| The only possible solution I have seen being talked about is
| digitally signing any and all "real" content, similar to
| GPG/SSH.
| ravivyas wrote:
| Photoshop and minor video manipulation is enough to trick
| people into believing fake news, this will make it harder. I
| see political parties doing simple edits to make people
| believe anything, this will push it multiple notches higher.
| iso1631 wrote:
| > Photoshop and minor video manipulation is enough to trick
| people into believing fake news
|
| If the news confirms what they think is the truth, it
| doesn't need manipulation, just a fake heading
|
| https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/climate-protest-ukraine-
| bo...
|
| for example (and in that case it even had the true caption
| on the video, just not in English)
| jacquesm wrote:
| That they can do so without consequences is almost as scary
| as that they can do so in the first place.
| willnonya wrote:
| Fraud, slander etc are already illegal. There are
| consequences for crossing these lines.
| jacquesm wrote:
| AFAIK _nothing_ ever happened to the political parties
| that use these tactics. But I 'll be happy to be
| corrected.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Not in politics they aren't. There was an _incredibly_
| high bar to clear for the Alex Jones libel lawsuit to
| succeed.
| teekert wrote:
| You really have low exceptions for humanity. Most people
| are not complete idiots you know. I think your opinion is
| pretty elitist. Or do you think you yourself will fall for
| this as well?
| ravivyas wrote:
| Less elitist(might really sound like one), more realist
| who knows that masses devolve to the lowest common
| denominator of sorts based on the information they are
| provided
| citizenkeen wrote:
| Not the person you're responding to, but I don't think
| it's egotist at all. I'm sure I'll fall for some news
| manipulation. I'm sure I already have.
|
| I don't think it's elitist to think many people will be
| duped. I think it's arrogant to think you won't.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Bunch of people just stormed the Brazilian government
| buildings yesterday over a fake "election theft"
| narrative. This stuff will be constantly tuned until
| enough people _do_ fall for it, like advertising.
|
| There's also the unravelling biography of
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Santos#Scandals (you
| know someone's doing well when their "scandals" section
| has ten subheadings! And that's all old-fashioned manual
| fraud)
|
| (I'm now wondering how far you could get with an elected
| official who's entirely deepfaked and only appears in
| recordings. Probably all the way to being sworn in, at
| which point someone has to appear in person. People have
| occasionally been elected despite being _dead_ , so it's
| not impossible)
| iso1631 wrote:
| > Probably all the way to being sworn in, at which point
| someone has to appear in person. People have occasionally
| been elected despite being dead, so it's not impossible)
|
| Unless the people doing the swearing in are also fake.
| swader999 wrote:
| Or millions of people passively accepted the results of a
| stolen election. That would be an equally viable scenario
| with this technology. You just won't know the truth
| anymore.
| benlivengood wrote:
| It's not equally viable; there are centuries worth of
| checks and balances designed to prevent voting fraud and
| errors vs. the ease of speaking a lie on video.
|
| If electoral boards around the country or at the national
| level were all sounding the alarm for irregularity in
| voting returns or procedures then an election might have
| been stolen. As it stands, the election results match the
| earlier polls which is a strong indicator that, at best,
| the election became a tossup at the time it was held, and
| the military also didn't find any reason to suspect fraud
| or error.
| willnonya wrote:
| Perhaps most people aren't, evidence is pending, but
| enough of them have been proven to be that this is a real
| concern.
| nullsense wrote:
| >enough of them have been proven to be that this is a
| real concern
|
| This matters a loooot more than the smart enough people
| realize too, because it's so difficult to imagine what
| it's like being south of that threshold, the potential
| consequences are difficult to imagine.
| timeon wrote:
| It is easy to see through bullshit... ex-post. But not so
| easy in real-time.
|
| > Or do you think you yourself will fall for this as
| well?
|
| Yes.
| sethammons wrote:
| Agent K: A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky
| dangerous animals and you know it. --Men in Black
| hef19898 wrote:
| I don't believe anything digital anymore for quite a while.
| Heck, pictures have been staged and faked since the beginning
| of photography. Modern tech just makes it easier.
|
| Maybe, just maybe, human society will move back to personal
| interaction, since apparently you cannot trust call, voice
| and video, anymore in the future.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > human society will move back to personal interaction
|
| Which implies a much narrower, less diverse, more elitist
| system of both politics and economy, as it gets harder to
| trust people from outside your existing circle.
| hef19898 wrote:
| True. Sometimes it seems some people read every CyberPunk
| story and considered it an instruction instead of
| something between a parody and a warning.
| brightstep wrote:
| Hard to get more elitist than our politics and economy
| are now at the height of digital interconnection. The
| liberal democratic revolutions and popular democratic
| swell of the US labor movement under FDR all happened
| without the internet. A return of social connection to
| the community would be very much to our political
| benefit.
| chmod775 wrote:
| At some point natural people are going to use cryptographic
| signatures just to authenticate themselves in daily life. No
| video, audio, or text can be presumed real unless signed by the
| human subject.
| zigman1 wrote:
| But... That's good no?
|
| > No video, audio, or text can be presumed real unless signed
| by the human subject.
|
| Where is the controversy in that?
| Someone wrote:
| Those subjects could lie.
|
| Journalists would have a hard time showing that an
| interviewee actually said what claim they said.
|
| Wire-tapping by the police also would become useless in
| court.
|
| = I would adjust it to "unless it has a reliably chain of
| trust". That would mean that people could judge differently
| about whether to accept some things as true, but I think
| that's unavoidable.
| rippercushions wrote:
| It would be nice if we were at 100% signing, but currently
| we're at ~0%, and the transition is going to be _rough_.
| willnonya wrote:
| Why would that be nice?
|
| Follow the thou g ht through to how it would work and
| what it would mean in terms of privacy for the average
| person.
|
| Your niceties seem dystopian to me.
| jddj wrote:
| Agreed. The time between now and then is much scarier.
|
| Companies can't even wrap their heads around sim swapping
| scams and social engineering of secret questions.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| To do that, any meaningful communication will have to be
| recorded to be signed by the person, on a device provided to
| them by their Trust Authority company. Can't be just any
| device, because the chain of custody is as strong as its
| weakest link. Depending on the country, the Trust Authorities
| will be private companies with large regulatory exposure,
| like banks, or just governments themselves.
|
| But hey, at least this will solve the problem of journalists
| quoting people out of context: they won't be able to claim
| you've said something without you personally signing off on
| it with your cryptographic key.
| 323 wrote:
| Or maybe it will be like today - if it's reported by
| Reuters/... it's trusted, if it's reported by DailyStar,
| maybe not.
| Asraelite wrote:
| > Can't be just any device, because the chain of custody is
| as strong as its weakest link
|
| I don't quite understand what you mean. We already trust
| phones and computers not to be compromised for things like
| online banking, so why not allow these devices to sign
| recordings using keys lent to them by the main trust
| device? You could allow revocation of these keys.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _We already trust phones and computers not to be
| compromised for things like online banking_
|
| Sorta, kinda. "We already trust phones and computers"
| because we have no better alternatives _yet_.
|
| There's a reason online banking is at the front of the
| push for device attestation, and thanks for Google
| happily obliging, rooting your Android phone is pretty
| much pointless now. This is coupled with a parallel push
| to do your banking through a mobile app, or _at least_ to
| use it as a second authentication factor, which makes the
| app necessary just as much. This means we 're already
| undergoing the transition I'm talking about: in the
| nearby future, you'll _have to_ use a pristine, unrooted,
| unmodded phone from a blessed corporate vendor, to
| perform basic functions like paying for things and
| managing your account. And yes, such device _will_ be
| appropriate for signing everything else too - and the
| vendor owning the key will be your Trust Authority.
| acdha wrote:
| There'd be a variable scale of trust: for many people, a
| signature from a generic phone would be fine since nobody
| is going to attack the secure element just to forge a valid
| signature. National level politics, or a billionaire's
| divorce, could be a very different story, however.
| lxgr wrote:
| Given that digital signatures have been around for decades,
| yet banks, the government, and the legal system still treat
| signed (and potentially notarized) physical paper or scans of
| it as the gold standard, and SMS-OTP as a close second, I
| wouldn't hold my breath.
|
| All digitally approved contracts I've ever encountered were
| e-"signed" (i.e. me emulating a paper signature at a
| computer), not digitally signed, due to lack of a mutually
| trusted public key infrastructure.
|
| In that sense, I would be sad but not surprised if we instead
| moved to a system of "trusted recording devices", where
| scanners, cameras and microphones by some vendors are defined
| to be trusted, signing their outputs and leaving the
| underlying workflows (signatures, recordings of verbal
| affirmations etc.) largely untouched.
| Semaphor wrote:
| With all the (deserved) ridicule Germany gets for our
| failed digitalization efforts, we use public/private key
| pairs for our taxes, and IIRC even our national ID supports
| some PKI thing (not sure how that works exactly, never had
| any use for my ID's online features, doesn't seem
| widespread)
| lxgr wrote:
| > not sure how that works exactly, never had any use for
| my ID's online features
|
| I think that's a pretty apt summary of the state of
| digital ID in Germany: Commendable technical basis (with
| some privacy-preserving aspects too, including selective
| assertions, e.g. "older than 18" or "EU citizen").
|
| When I called about actually getting such an ID card
| (several times) as a non-citizen, which is explicitly
| mentioned as a feature of the scheme, I only received the
| acoustic equivalent of blank stares.
| Semaphor wrote:
| When my wife got her temporary residence permit in 2018,
| it came with exactly the same online features as our
| national ID card. Yours might have been too old.
| lxgr wrote:
| EU citizens don't need (and in fact can't get) a
| permanent residency card.
|
| For that reason, Germany introduced a "non-identity"
| (i.e. not doubling as a photo ID) e-signature card in
| 2021, but apparently almost nobody is requesting it, so
| most administrative offices don't know how to issue
| one...
| Semaphor wrote:
| Oh wow, that sounds like quite the oversight. I'm fully
| of the opinion that my fellow Europeans should be allowed
| to have a digital ID that they can't use anywhere ;)
| mrtksn wrote:
| With all that ML stuff going on we can no longer trust our
| devices to guarantee authenticity of their behaviour. By that,
| I mean we can no longer be sure that the human voice produced
| by the speaker of our handheld computers is happening because a
| human somewhere else spoke to a microphone.
|
| Unfortunately the move towards it is nothing new, we gradually
| lost text and images and now the remaining media is closing.
|
| This will probably decimate online public forums completely and
| off-person communications will en up being P2P through trusted
| devices. Closed communities in WhatsApp, Telegram, Slack and
| Discord already replaced forums.
|
| Maybe if infestation of closed communities with machines
| becomes a thing, maybe the real life gatherings will make a
| comeback?
|
| I don't know but I used to mock Sci-Fi movies about portraying
| aliens as uncivilised that don't seem to have the means to have
| developed all that tech but I'm no longer sure. Maybe what will
| happen is, we will create a symbiotic life where machine will
| no longer be tools but partners and they will take care of us
| to reduce us to our basic instinct.
| dsr_ wrote:
| Yes. Then I listened to the samples, and was relieved that it's
| not good enough to handle a well-known voice impersonation...
| yet.
|
| My primary worry is for criminal misuse. There's a class of
| scams where the scammers find elderly victims, call them, and
| pretend to be their children or grandchildren on vacation in a
| plausible city and suddenly in need of money to help get their
| passport back or a ticket home.
|
| There are any number of cases where I have accepted an order
| worth large sums of money over the phone from someone I have
| previously dealt with and feel familiar with their voice.
| silon42 wrote:
| Time to look into robot-voice plugins that activate when the
| caller is not in the contacts.
| rwmj wrote:
| Only a year ago, my bank replaced their (already not very
| secure) second factor authentication with voice recognition.
| chinathrow wrote:
| They will recycle it for sure once fraud hits their
| internal thresholds. Until that: self defense.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| It's mind boggling that the banks, who you think would
| have the most to gain from staying ahead of the tech scam
| curve, can't be bothered and instead continue to play a
| slow defense. I suppose they aren't losing THEIR money.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| It's very concerning how ubiquitous this very soon to be
| insecure authentication factor is.
|
| https://www.fidelity.com/security/fidelity-myvoice/overview
|
| https://www.schwab.com/voice-id
|
| https://blogs.perficient.com/2016/04/18/3-benefits-of-
| vangua...
|
| https://www.chase.com/personal/voice-biometrics
| XorNot wrote:
| No, I read these types of headings and think how awesome open
| world gaming is going to be when any random developer can fully
| voice their game cheaply. The AAA benefits too: you get a lot
| of stilted dialogue when the script and gameplay diverge and
| you have to work with what you have - a world where the writers
| can just redo that on the fly pretty much up till release would
| mean we'd be looking at a new era of dynamic storytelling.
|
| It'll be interesting when someone releases the first MMO which
| combines GPT models and VO generation to fill out the in-
| universe world with dynamic characters who can react to
| surrounding events.
| lannisterstark wrote:
| Oh great, more fearmongering.
|
| What cases do you think it will be used wrongly in? It can't do
| 1:1 realistic phone calls, the processing it'd need for that is
| beyond the reach of any average user.
|
| I just would like this so I can copy-paste books/text and
| listen to it in the voices of my favorite narrators, but can't
| have that, can we? No, it'll be super dangerous, I'll listen
| myself to nuking a country or some such.
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| Compute keeps getting cheaper. This will absolutely be within
| the reach of a dedicated user in a very short span of time.
|
| If you can't see the danger in this, perhaps it's more that
| you're ok with it.
| Tao3300 wrote:
| > the voices of my favorite narrators
|
| If you really like them and their work, why would you want a
| forgery?
| r-zip wrote:
| If you seriously don't think this will be widely abused, then
| you're extremely optimistic.
|
| Spreading propaganda is the most obvious use case, assuming
| the resource requirement remains high. I don't think it's
| far-fetched either. If these models become less resource-
| hungry, then we're in for much worse.
| pjc50 wrote:
| People talk about cryptography, which has fairly terrible
| adoption rates outside of invisible systems like TLS, but in
| practice the way humans authenticate sources is heuristic: do I
| trust the person telling me this? Does it agree with things I
| already know?
|
| That is, you have a "filter bubble" which tells you that there
| isn't going to be a Nigerian prince with some money waiting for
| you (unknown sender, unlikely message). Reduced cost fakes
| force people to make their filter bubble smaller by raising the
| threshold for faking. More broadly, the question of "high trust
| vs. low trust" society.
| jacquesm wrote:
| "Hi mom, it's Chrissy, I am calling you from someone else's
| phone, my phone got stolen. Do you have a pen handy, I'll wait.
| Ok, here is my new number, take the old one off your contacts
| right away, surely some scammer has it, and can you forward me
| 1000 bucks or so for a new phone, I'll pay it back when I have
| the new phone set up, here is my account number...."
|
| When it's a text message it's likely going to ring a bell
| somewhere (hopefully an alarm bell), if it is a voice message
| and it sounds like the original many more people are going to
| fall for it.
| bmacho wrote:
| "Hi Chrissy, can you touch your ID to the phone so I can know
| that it is you" _call ended_
|
| The government just should give you a card sized mini
| computer with 2 large primes stored in it, and everyone is
| perfectly fine. In fact, more secure, than the current
| situation?
| lm28469 wrote:
| In the US where stealing a SSN is enough to impersonate
| someone I doubt the government would provide anything to
| mitigate these
| galangalalgol wrote:
| And telephone numbers can be spoofed for voice or text in
| the US. Not sure when the problem will get big enough
| that signed comms become normal. I guess imessage
| probably is? But only between users of apple devices.
| addandsubtract wrote:
| "My ID got stolen with my phone..."
|
| It'd be better to ask something personal. "What did we do
| to Christmas/Birthday/[other event] last year? Who was with
| us?"
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Two large Prime minicomputers sounds pretty heavy for
| people to carry around with them all day!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Computer
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Computer#/media/File:Pr
| i...
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| "Hey mom, could you tell me the name of your first pet, your
| favorite song and your birthday? Also, please fill out the
| captcha from this URL. xoxo chrissie"
|
| EDIT: Also looking forward to AIs scamming each other, fully-
| automated.
| chirau wrote:
| But AIs can't own crypto... or can they?
| mikro2nd wrote:
| What's to stop them? A wallet is just a keypair.
| pjc50 wrote:
| I don't see what relevance that has other than making it
| easier to scam people irreversably?
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| Maybe they can bootstrap their own crypto? Or just open
| Monero wallets. If we're at the point where they can
| imitate voices and human behaviour, they might even pass
| KYC checks after stealing someones information.
|
| As soon as AI gets out of hand and starts randomly
| hacking things we're probably out of luck anyways.
|
| "If the rise of an all-powerful artificial intelligence
| is inevitable, well it stands to reason that when they
| take power, our digital overlords will punish those of us
| who did not help them get there. [...]" - Bertram
| Gilfoyle
| wolpoli wrote:
| They just need to earn their own crypto somehow. The AI
| could do then quite a bit even though they do not have
| Personhood, which could include lobbying politicians for
| Personhood.
| aceazzameen wrote:
| This and who knows what else as time goes on. It might be a
| good idea to not talk on phones anymore unless you already
| know the contact.
|
| In this bleak scrape the bottom of the barrel world, I can't
| help but think it's only a matter of time before customer
| service departments start selling voice data to the highest
| bidder. And to counter that there will be services where
| everyone ends up using voice changers, except close personal
| contacts. I want this fiction to stay fiction.
| 1over137 wrote:
| >It might be a good idea to not talk on phones anymore
| unless you already know the contact.
|
| As opposed to what? Writing is even easier to forge, no?
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| >It might be a good idea to not talk on phones anymore
| unless you already know the contact.
|
| As a millennial, I'm way ahead of you on that one. The
| government and telecom companies just need to crack down on
| number spoofing. Any day now..
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| Society will respond by having secret keywords that you know
| from a young age in your family to verify or to point to an
| emergency that is ongoing.
|
| " Here's my new account number. It's really me. Slippers in
| the toaster."
| hef19898 wrote:
| Oh, great! Now we have to come up with proper code words and
| code books for everyday life! I', not worried so, some AI
| solution will help us with that for sure.
| bambax wrote:
| You can still
|
| 1. Ignore voice messages
|
| 2. Ask pointed questions to any live caller, esp. one
| calling from a new number and asking for money...
| counttheforks wrote:
| So now scammers will have to first scrape your & your
| families social media, then run that through ChatGPT to
| answer any questions.
| nullsense wrote:
| Let the games begin.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| The one earnest question that will ALWAYS make scammers
| hang up immediately:
|
| "In case we get cut off, what phone number can I call you
| back on?"
|
| If they actually give you a number instead of hanging up
| (which has NEVER happened in the many times I've used
| this line), just hang up immediately and call them back,
| to see if they answer.
| teekert wrote:
| So, we need to work on this ringing bells. Sure some people
| will fall for it initially, but then we adapt.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Scammers have been scamming since the beginning of society
| sendfoods wrote:
| My god...I haven't really thought about scamming at all, I
| was "just" worried about manipulation of media and politics.
| New nightmare unlocked.
| hackerman123469 wrote:
| "Okay, let me just video call you because I also need to
| show you something" and then the scammer hung up and was to
| never be seen again.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| FYI, there's the following trick I read here some time
| ago:
|
| The scammer starts a video call with the person they want
| to impersonate and record it. When that person takes the
| call, the scammer doesn't say anything. This creates a
| 5-10 seconds video of the person looking at the camera
| waiting for the scammer to say something, until they get
| fed up and hung up.
|
| The scammer then calls the victim. They offer a video
| call as verification straight away, and they play that
| short video.
| Loughla wrote:
| How is a 5-10 second video of someone either not saying
| anything, or saying, "Hello, who is it?" over and over
| convincing at all?
| wccrawford wrote:
| I imagine they say something like, "I couldn't see or
| here you. Did you see me?" through the other channel, and
| because modern tech messes up enough, it'll be believable
| to a lot of people. Especially the most gullible.
| citizenpaul wrote:
| HN gets so caught up in logic. Has no one watched
| interviews of scammed people? Huge numbers of them report
| that they were suspicious it was a scam but they were so
| worried for a loved one they sent the money anyway
| because it was worth the risk to them just in case.
| Anything that helps push scams in the even slightly
| plailusible direction will make scams more successful.
| pictureofabear wrote:
| All of these advances in technology have made the internet
| much less trustworthy. I wonder if we'll eventually hit a
| threshold where nothing is done virtually anymore because
| you can't trust it.
| sofixa wrote:
| I think the work being done in the opposite direction is
| going to make it so the Internet can be used for high
| trust actions too.
|
| E.g. in the EU we have ID cards and passports with
| biometric information and NFC, and there was a beta of a
| phone app by the French government where it would read
| your photo from the ID card/passport, and compare with a
| video selfie. That way you get fully local and secure
| identification allowing you to do stuff online that would
| otherwise require you to show up in person to a
| government office.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That 'video selfie' is untrustworthy, which was sort of
| the point.
| sofixa wrote:
| It's taken by the app directly, so it's somewhat hard to
| pass fake 3D video input to it.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Scammers are well incentivized to find bypasses and
| feeding an alternative video stream into an app on a
| device that you control physically isn't all that hard
| for a determined person. I can think of three ways to do
| this right off the bat and if I think about it a little
| longer I'll probably find some more. I sincerely hope
| that that is not the last line of defense.
| int_19h wrote:
| Only if hardware is completely locked down.
| MisterTea wrote:
| My grandmother was called by a scammer claiming they were me,
| said they were arrested and needed bail money or some
| nonsense. She knew it wasn't my voice, asked two questions
| which were dodged then told them where to go and how to get
| there. It left her very shaken and my mother had me call her
| to assure her I was fine and as soon as she heard my voice
| she bellowed "Now that's my grandsons voice!" With this tech
| all they need is a few seconds of my voice.
|
| With AI we have lost all privacy and identity. This makes
| nonsense like novelty theory and timewave zero seem less
| nonsensical. Lets hope we make it through the great filter.
| nullsense wrote:
| >Lets hope we make it through the great filter.
|
| My thoughts on this are that oftentimes things at the
| extreme ends of the distribution are usually in some way,
| shape or form problematic. Compared to all other living
| creatures we know of, humans are right at the extreme tail
| end of the intelligence distribution, and the result is
| somewhat pathological when compared to other creatures. I
| think nothing that's north of a certain threshold required
| to make advanced technology can make it through the great
| filter without destroying itself in the process.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| My thoughts are that getting noticed by another culture
| is the great filter, so cultures make it through
| occasionally, but we will not notice them. "The benefits
| of not being seen"
|
| Of all my concerns for humanity, excessive intelligence
| is not one of them...
|
| Our earliest (and easiest to detect) transmissions should
| already be far enough away to be far below ambient noise
| I think/hope. So maybe we made it through unless someone
| starts shouting. Own-goals are also certainly a thing,
| but it would take a serious mistake to end all of us, or
| even set us back that far technologically on a geologic
| time scale.
| nullsense wrote:
| >Own-goals are also certainly a thing, but it would take
| a serious mistake to end all of us, or even set us back
| that far technologically on a geologic time scale.
|
| I must be a pessimist in this regard. I don't necessarily
| think it would take a serious mistake, rather just the
| nature of complexity itself will likely become a factor
| at some point and I can imagine certain scenarios playing
| out based off that.
|
| When you compare the length of time of humanity spent
| pre-neolithic-revolution with the short ~14,000 odd years
| since, I can't help but feel our current trajectory won't
| see us reach hundreds of thousands more years into the
| future without a serious backslide in that time.
|
| Humanity is pretty darn resilient, but the last few years
| have highlighted to me that modern day life is some weird
| fantasy land we've created for ourselves that has an
| expiry date at some point in the future.
| dilawar wrote:
| Recently in India, a politician deepfaked the voice to deliver
| his speech in multiple languages [1]. Can't comment on the
| quality of tech since i dont speak this language but it is
| pretty alarming to me. 2% vote swings make a huge difference in
| Indian politics since there are many regional parties. Almost
| more than 2/3rd of Indian voters didn't vote for modi yet his
| party is doing very well.
|
| [1] https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/18/21142782/india-
| politician...
| pjc50 wrote:
| Interesting. Providing a translation is an accessibility
| measure, but it seems that the "fake" here is matching his
| lip movements to the translation. Almost not worthy of
| calling it a fake since he (not somebody else) did say those
| things (in a different language), and it's endorsed by him.
|
| The unendorsed version is far more dangerous.
| dharmach wrote:
| >>Almost more than 2/3rd of Indian voters didn't vote for
| modi yet his party is doing very well.
|
| Do you understand what is first-past-the-post voting system?
| mejutoco wrote:
| The pope reads in phonetic alphabet to speak a big number of
| languages and most people do not consider it cheating. I do
| not se the problem.
| thalassophobia wrote:
| I think this is one of the cases where there is nothing wrong
| with using deepfakes. The person mimicked gave explicit
| consent and they did not do any harm with the tool. If
| technology increases accessibility of true political choice
| then it's good technology.
|
| That said, I don't understand why the parent and the article
| paint this as a bad thing.
| jwestbury wrote:
| When language is tightly coupled to cultural identity,
| using this kind of fake is lying to voters, saying, "I'm
| one of you."
|
| It's a new use of technology to repeat an old lie. I think
| it's a bad thing, but it's hardly the most dangerous and
| novel application of this technology for evil.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| Had he used a translator, it would have been more obvious
| but possibly had the same effect (if what he had to say
| resonated with the voters). So what you are against is
| the idea that it's not labeled as "virtual translator was
| used to produce this speech"?
| iso1631 wrote:
| Certainly that's the impression I had from the comment -
| it's a politician being dishonest, and an undemocratic
| system which gives non-proportional power.
| piaste wrote:
| Given that the PR firm who made their video apparently
| reached out to the press to tell the story, it seems that
| he wasn't actually claiming or pretending to be a native
| speaker (and anybody who did would be extremely easy to
| uncover). Just using a glorified overdub service and
| being quite upfront about it.
| teekert wrote:
| When everyone know this is possible, we need better methods to
| verify what is real. We'll handle it, people said the same
| about photoshop.
| _visgean wrote:
| Photoshop isnt realtime. This will be.
| swarnie wrote:
| I suspect it is already widely known.
|
| My employer is known for tracking a decade behind the curve
| and we already have financial processes in place to prevent
| this vector from being exploited. That leads me to believe
| the majority must already have as well.
| worldsavior wrote:
| No because I know as technology advances, security advances.
| stemlord wrote:
| I remember Lyrebird did this back in 2017. They used to have a
| free-to-use interface on their site to speak a phrase then listen
| to a text-to-speech output of your voice. Assuming Microsoft
| improved it somehow?
| morrisjm wrote:
| Open source tortoise-TTS has been able to do this for 6+ months
| now, which is also based on the same theory as DALL-E. From
| playing with tortoise a bit over the last couple of weeks it
| seems like the issue is not so much accuracy anymore, rather how
| GPU intensive it is to make a voice of any meaningful duration.
| Tortoise is ~5 seconds on a $1000 GPU (P5000) to do one second of
| spoken text. There's cloud options (collab, paperspace, runpod)
| but still https://github.com/neonbjb/tortoise-tts
| jordibc wrote:
| I think you mean https://github.com/neonbjb/tortoise-tts
| (missing last "s")
| morrisjm wrote:
| fixed thx
| NayamAmarshe wrote:
| Is the link wrong?
| ShamelessC wrote:
| Heh you might want to use an equivalent gaming GPU for the
| price comparison. Surely a thousand dollars spent on an RTX
| 4000 series card (Hopper) would outperform a P5000?
|
| I agree though, Tortoise TTS did a lot of similar work IIRC by
| a single person on their multi-GPU setup. Really impressive
| effort. Did they get a citation? They deserve one.
|
| edit: reading other comments it seems there is a misconception
| that the model takes 3 seconds to run? That isn't the case - it
| requires "just" 3 seconds of example audio to successfully
| clone a voice (for some definition of success).
| morrisjm wrote:
| rtx4000 only has 8gig memory which means reducing the batch
| size (much slowness) and/or how much text you can give it at
| once (meaning you have to break up text chunks not at
| sentence breaks)
|
| rtx5000 maybe but not sure how much of a value improvement
| there is
| ShamelessC wrote:
| What is this, chatGPT? RTX 4000 is a series of cards, some
| of which have 24 GB of VRAM. There is no such thing as RTX
| 5000 series yet.
| morrisjm wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graphics_pro
| ces...
| dc443 wrote:
| The commenter you're responding to is talking about
| Lovelace architecture based GeForce RTX 40x0 products.
| The Quadro line isn't even released yet on this
| architecture. You are talking about the specific Quadro
| RTX 4000 product, which is a TU104 (turing arch, 2 gens
| behind, with 2560 processors and 8GB memory). The
| commenter you're responding to is referring to something
| like a GeForce RTX 4090 which sports an AD102 (lovelace
| arch, with 16384 processors and 24GB memory).
|
| You were merely an unfortunate casualty of Nvidia's
| product marketing scheme (and a commenter's slightly
| imprecise reference to it) here.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| I'm really skeptical about TTS. There's lots of theoretical and
| academic and research lab stuff that supposedly is quantum leaps
| forward in TTS. However, all the commercial offerings sound like
| TTS and never match the breathless hype. Try them out and you can
| tell within seconds it's a robot talking.
| sschueller wrote:
| I have to disagree.
|
| The SBB (Swiss Rail) is now using a quite sophisticated TTS
| system [1] that sounds very clean and has a Swiss German accent
| in the high German its talking (Zurich accent based which is
| what most of the complaints are about). The old system was
| built using over 10k recording which was a enormous task
|
| The system now is able to announce pretty much anything
| including reasons for delay etc. and it does not sound like a
| bunch of recordings attached to each other.
|
| I am hoping it will be expanded eventually to switch accents
| depending on the region just how it already switches to French
| or Italian depending where you are.
|
| [1] https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/so-klingt-die-neue-stimme-
| der-s...
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| > Zurich accent based which is what most of the complaints
| are about
|
| I've given up on this a long time ago. Ads are almost always
| in a Zurich accent, except if the ad is for extremely
| regional stuff like secret cheese recipes or tourist ads for
| Graubunden.
|
| Zurich is the tech hub of Switzerland and the accent seems to
| be the default. Then again, who in their right mind would
| want an AI to talk with an accent from Thurgau (/s)
| sschueller wrote:
| Well we do have Tschugger[1] which is definitely not Zurich
| Swiss German...
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1AwYqquL7k
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| True, and thanks for reminding me! I've meant to watch it
| for some time now and heard that the second season was
| out.
|
| Have you watched it/did you like it?
| sschueller wrote:
| I watched it, it was ok. I did like the first season
| better.
| 4ggr0 wrote:
| Might give it a shot then!
| ale42 wrote:
| Except that... while the German-speaking one sounds
| relatively well, I am definitely unhappy with the new system
| in French. It sounds more unnatural (and harder to understand
| in certain cases) than the old system. Maybe it's just a lack
| of tuning of the French version vs. the German one, but
| still...
| sschueller wrote:
| I agree, I hope the fix that soon. I think the product they
| are using is from Germany which may explain the quality
| difference.
| rippercushions wrote:
| Except when you're talking over a phone call that sounds like
| two tin cans connected with a string even on a good day.
|
| I'm regularly astonished at how _bad_ international calls in
| particular have become, and you 're regularly subjected to
| these even domestically, since so many call centers are in the
| Philippines or India these days. And this despite bandwidth
| being cheaper than ever.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Unfortunately, all the bandwidth in the world can't
| compensate for latency, and the loss of quality in ADC, DAC
| and compression steps as currently implemented.
| pjc50 wrote:
| It's _all_ in the compression. That 's why VOIP systems
| sound much better. Lots of telco systems still use AMR with
| a very low bitrate.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I can't think of a single VOIP system that sounded
| _good_. Of the ones I use regularly, like Messenger,
| Teams and Skype, they rarely if ever sound better than
| just making a regular phone call with the same device.
| adql wrote:
| Good enough ADC/DACs are so cheap and plentiful I don't
| even know why you're even mentioning them in same sentence
| swader999 wrote:
| Yes, this is the CEO and I do need you to wire that money. C'mon
| Frank (from accounting), you need to act more promptly on these
| urgent requests
| fumblebee wrote:
| New scam incoming...
|
| > Scammers get hold of someone's voice which is synthesised in
| ~real-time whilst they're on the phone with that person's mother,
| asking them to transfer them some emergency funds to a new bank
| account.
|
| We won't be able to trust digital sound, digital image, digital
| text, and soon digital video. We need proof of authenticity /
| proof of authorship / proof of humanity!
| rco8786 wrote:
| > proof of humanity
|
| This resonated with me when I read it. Seems clear where AI is
| going, so it seems clear that we need some sort of
| "authentication" that can reliably differentiate a real human
| from an AI one.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I'm excited for when they can duplicate patterns and mannerisms,
| especially if in a different voice.
| fdalvi wrote:
| Previous discussion here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34270311
| sjellen wrote:
| I know of a bunch of audiobooks that I'd rather listen to the
| author than listen to the current person narrating or in other
| cases I'd rather hear the person the book is about instead of the
| author.
| iso1631 wrote:
| Good News Everyone, I'm a Horse's Butt
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1D9WEL7PKQ
| talhof8 wrote:
| Really scary to be honest...
|
| Making things much easier for scammers. Voice phishing and social
| engineering is now easier than ever.
| lannisterstark wrote:
| or...get this
|
| this will enhance accessibility to a vast number of people with
| disabilities. Also imagine reading your books/articles in voice
| of your favorite narrator.
|
| A normal person will have to work really hard to do a 1:1 real
| time voice obfuscation with the processing it'd take.
|
| ----
|
| Why are you lot always doom and gloom and small-minded, is
| beyond me.
| tropicalbeach wrote:
| Because you're not thinking 10 years out. At a certain point
| you will be able to copy any voice and any video of a person
| in realtime. It will be as simple as downloading an app. When
| AI has scanned your whole life's details and it can be found
| by anyone there will be no privacy left. Nothing will be
| trusted anymore.
| talhof8 wrote:
| It's not about being doom and gloom. It's the opposite of
| being small-minded.
|
| I like all of the above use cases you suggested, I like
| science advancements. I'm sure this will help plenty.
|
| But, at the same time, we should be really careful and aware
| of what we're creating.
| weinzierl wrote:
| I had planned to play around with TorToiSe[1] next weekend and
| already watched some videos. There it looks like all you have to
| do, is to offer you own voice samples to the system and no
| separate training seems to be required. TorToiSe is slow to
| synthesize, so it doesn't beat the 3 seconds but can anyone
| confirm that these models really don't need an extra training
| phase to clone a voice?
|
| [1] https://github.com/neonbjb/tortoise-tts
| oslem wrote:
| That's correct. However, the 3 seconds refers to the minimum
| amount of audio required for the reference audio, not how long
| it takes the mode to synthesize.
| paulluuk wrote:
| I've been voice-cloning using tortoise-tts and I'm very happy
| with the results, but it is indeed very slow. It's also free
| and open-source though.
| reubenmorais wrote:
| Correct, that's what zero-shot means, no training steps.
| btseytlin wrote:
| I would love to hear David Attenborough's voice training VALL-E
| so that we can forever narrate "planet earth" like tv shows with
| his voice.
| Pxtl wrote:
| One more step deeper into the post-truth era.
| Kuinox wrote:
| The generated voice has the same creepiness fake AI voice has in
| movies. It also has the same monotone tone that there is in some
| dystopian movies (For some reason it make me remember of
| Bladerunner, but I don't remember a narrator voice).
| r_hoods_ghost wrote:
| A relative of mine recently died from bulbar ALS. By the time she
| had the diagnosis her voice had already changed and weakened
| significantly so she couldn't get a decent recording to use with
| a text to speech synthesizer. Something like this could
| potentially help people like her or those who lose their voices
| in traumatic accidents. Even if you do have the time to do it,
| training a current TTS engine in your voice takes a significant
| amount of time and the results are often poor.
| dividedbyzero wrote:
| > Even if you do have the time to do it, training a current TTS
| engine in your voice takes a significant amount of time and the
| results are often poor.
|
| I wonder what sort of recordings and other data you'd need to
| get this right assuming what TTS might look like in a few
| years' time
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| Interestingly, the prime example of how much a person's
| attachment to their voice is part of their own personal
| identity also comes from ALS... but ironically in the opposite
| direction. I'm talking of course about Stephen Hawking, who
| famously rejected upgrading his voice synthesiser when
| technology improved [0]: Hawking is very
| attached to his voice: in 1988, when Speech Plus gave him the
| new synthesizer, the voice was different so he asked them to
| replace it with the original. His voice had been created in the
| early '80s by MIT engineer Dennis Klatt, a pioneer of text-to-
| speech algorithms. He invented the DECtalk, one of the first
| devices to translate text into speech. He initially made three
| voices, from recordings of his wife, daughter and himself. The
| female's voice was called "Beautiful Betty", the child's "Kit
| the Kid", and the male voice, based on his own, "Perfect Paul."
| "Perfect Paul" is Hawking's voice.
|
| [0] https://www.wired.com/2015/01/intel-gave-stephen-hawking-
| voi...
| IanCal wrote:
| I disagree that's in the opposite direction. Hawking didn't
| want to change his voice - he'd had this for years at that
| point, and the option was also to just change to a different
| arbitrary voice rather than restoring what he had before.
|
| Something like this could let someone keep their "original"
| voice. Hawking may have preferred to have something that
| sounded like his voice before he lost it than a completely
| new voice.
| tgraham wrote:
| 100%. The tech my father tried to use in the last year of his
| MND was so poor (effort to train it, reality of what it
| delivered- jilted voice).
|
| The impact on his quality of life - imagine not being able to
| communicate at all - would have been massive were it better.
| voakbasda wrote:
| This makes me wonder whether we could create a standard
| monologue that someone could record, which provides a
| complete set of training data for that individual. Something
| about a quick brown fox and a lazy dog would be apropos here,
| but I suspect the length would be more Shakespearian than
| that simple typographic clever sentence.
|
| I expect it will be a while until we can fully utilize that
| data, but I have to imagine that something could be done
| today to preserve my voice (while I am still in my prime).
| Effectively, this would be a sort of vocal cryogenics,
| betting that we can do something today that will allow us to
| take advantage of future technology.
| r_hoods_ghost wrote:
| This is basically what you do currently for a TTS engine if
| you have ALS or similar. The search term you want is "voice
| banking". You are given a long list of words and sentences,
| often complex, to read out that have all the different
| sounds and then these are re combined by the software. The
| problem is that by the time you know you need this, you
| often already have speech problems and so making clear
| sounds is difficult. Also if you're like my relative who
| was trilingual you would need to do it in all three
| languages using the current system. She got a half way
| decent voice bank in her native tongue, but it was still
| noticeably slurred. She didn't even attempt it in her
| second and third tongues.
| _greim_ wrote:
| There's plenty to be afraid of, but legit applications as well,
| for example automated announcements and voice menus where you
| can't pre-record every possible combination of things to be said.
| [deleted]
| alanwreath wrote:
| anyone know what's up with the sudden uptick in AI assisted
| everything? - ChatGPT - DALL-E -
| VALL-E - Stable Diffusion
|
| maybe it's just a reflection of my interest being peaked with AI
| junk and google ads -- but I feel like I'm seeing it more and
| more even in HN.
| gl-prod wrote:
| It's the new hot topic?
| jddj wrote:
| Breakthrough tech doing breakthrough tech things
| college_physics wrote:
| The cynical view would be that in the current tech environment
| and generalized risk aversion rushing to demonstrate tangible
| use cases for AI will help justify a decade of out-of-control
| hype and investment, support exits, new funding runds etc.
|
| Underneath all the commercial interest some specialists
| inevitably must keep adding to the knowledge base /
| capabilities but good luck finding any objective account of
| that process.
| Thorentis wrote:
| One of the perks of crypto losing value. GPUs finally being
| used for breakthrough research, rather than pyramid schemes.
| kybernetyk wrote:
| Crypto has been running on ASICs for years. The "evil crypto
| miners make your GPUs so expensive" psyop is a NVIDIA
| campaign to rise GPU prices.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| True, but that doesn't mean that crypto miners aren't still
| evil.
| nindalf wrote:
| This claim feels truthy, but is it true? Most of the big
| models were being trained on specialised hardware like tensor
| chips right?
|
| And the biggest drop isn't because crypto is worth less, it's
| because Ethereum doesn't use proof of work since November
| (Bitcoin hasn't used GPUs for years). The explosion in novel
| AI models we saw last year predates this change.
| bfgoodrich wrote:
| [dead]
| lajamerr wrote:
| Most big AI is trained on Nvidia GPUs but usually not the
| standard consumer ones found in the GeForce line-up.
| Instead it's usually their data centre GPUs like the
| current A100 or soon to be H100 that's just hitting the
| market.
|
| Google does have their TPUs(Tensor Processing Units),
| however it is not cost efficient budget wise, so unless you
| have some kind of deal with Google or compute credits it
| doesn't make sense. They have pods upon pods of TPU
| clusters though so the main selling point of TPU training
| is that you can get your training done really fast with
| just the ease of scaling your workload to more TPUs.
|
| So if you needed a big model like GPT-3 trained in a single
| day, you could spend an ungodly amounts of money and get it
| done with Google TPUs. Otherwise if you can wait weeks or
| months you can go with the standard Nvidia data centre
| solution and it'd be cheaper at the end by a significant
| margin.
| 2342346666 wrote:
| [dead]
| pifm_guy wrote:
| There have been some pretty big advances in the last few months
| in machine learning.
| QuesnayJr wrote:
| Imagine Hacker News existed when Netscape Navigator was
| released. (Maybe it was a Usenet discussion board or
| something.) Suddenly everyone would be talking about the World
| Wide Web.
|
| At the moment, ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion look like the same
| order of magnitude of advance.
| BatteryMountain wrote:
| And Open AI's Whisper, which for me is the cherry on top!
| nprateem wrote:
| Jesus it can even understand Scottish. I need this app!
| pjc50 wrote:
| Obligatory Burnistoun reference:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqAu-DDlINs
|
| But I'd be interested to see what its reliability is like
| on various types of Scottish accent.
| pjc50 wrote:
| I tried Whisper on an admittedly very challenging task (live
| translate Albanian to English subtitles), and it failed
| miserably. Went back and saw it had a 44% error rate for that
| language.
|
| Might give it another go on an easier task.
| lajamerr wrote:
| Even though Whisper advertises the translation part of it.
| I honestly wouldn't say it's a first class feature at least
| part of the Whisper model itself.
|
| The only thing I'd use Whisper for is transcription part of
| it. Then use ChatGPT for the translation.
| wcoenen wrote:
| The paper about the transformer architecture was published in
| 2017 [1]. My understanding is that it took a few years, but we
| are now seeing the results of that breakthrough.
|
| [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762
| webreac wrote:
| In 1993, it was said that the game of Go would be the
| drosophila fly of artificial intelligence. Alphago (then
| AlphaGo Zero) has succeeded in 2016, 2017. The glass ceiling
| has been broken. We are witnessing the birth of a new world
| where artificial intelligence will be more and more present in
| everyday life. I do not see any limit.
| nullsense wrote:
| > I do not see any limit.
|
| Hmmm, now I'm wondering if you're actually an advanced AI
| that has already simulated what's going to happen.
| dubcanada wrote:
| I listened to the 3 samples, and I must say some of it is quite
| close and some of it is completely wrong with how I would expect
| that person to sound saying those words.
|
| Like the first one "just his scribbles that charmed me" sounds so
| weird compared to how the sample sounds.
|
| Second one, sounds very close but again "just his scribbles that
| charmed me" sounds off and wrong. His "scrouples? that charmed
| me".
|
| Third one as well, it's very up and down (not sure the correct
| science words for that type of speaking), "Dynamo and lamp....
| Edison realized". The second one is completely flat and seems
| computer generated.
|
| Overall these don't seem very good to me at least. It's clearly
| not to the level of some other AI coming out where it is very
| difficult to determine the human part, I could easily pick up the
| human and generated version from these samples.
| wmwmwm wrote:
| I think it is actually meant to be "scruples" - so it sounds
| pretty accurate to me:
|
| https://www.ibiblio.org/ebooks/James/Turn_Screw.pdf (see p4)
| icepat wrote:
| Yes, there's definitely an uncanny valley effect on these
| voices. There's something subtly not right about them, and I
| suspect if you were to hold a conversation with one, you'd
| catch on that something was wrong.
|
| The uncanny valley makes it more spooky to me. Like a
| reanimation sort of thing.
| garyclarke27 wrote:
| HSBC in the UK used to advertise Telephone banking with security
| just based on speech recognition. I wonder whether systems like
| that could be fooled by this?
| pjc50 wrote:
| My employer had a project to look at phone unlocking with voice
| authentication. While we had a number of interesting techniques
| for anti-faking, the problem was the base error rate was about
| 1/10,000 even without adversarial considerations.
| robjan wrote:
| HSBC Hong Kong is actively promoting this. Just say "I will
| need your help with something" and you're in.
| Tade0 wrote:
| Biometric identification via voice is mostly hokum.
|
| My education is in biometrics and our undergraduate seminar
| group had a student and his supervisor with essentially
| identical voices.
|
| But that's just anecdata - the human voice doesn't carry a lot
| of unique information and on top of that it _changes_ over
| time.
|
| In biometric identification the iris is king. 3D face scans are
| a distant second, fingerprints on the border of usefulness and
| the rest like gait, voice, keystrokes etc. get rediscovered
| every decade or so just to, again, not yield results.
| MollyRealized wrote:
| Given its name, I was quite surprised not to hear it sounding
| like this: https://youtu.be/R5Q1yVLSR3I?t=17
| gatane wrote:
| Time to use the Snake voice more often:
|
| "Text to speech? Anyone voice? What?"
| gatane wrote:
| It only works in English(?)
| jxramos wrote:
| For another angle what exactly is the source for our distinct
| voices to begin with? Are everybody's vocal chords distinct in
| some way like a fingerprint or something or is it mostly governed
| by our baseline neural control considering how people can
| frequently impersonate others ala comedians to some degree of
| accuracy where it's funny.
| nullsense wrote:
| Considering a given person's voice would sound different if
| they were brought up speaking a different language, yet all the
| speakers of that language have distinct voices, I'd say it's a
| bit of column A and a bit of column B.
| jxramos wrote:
| that's a good point too, accents can creep over from first
| learned languages of a different tongue.
| boredumb wrote:
| Exciting to see ML develop in ways that will enhance
| accessibility for people. I imagine being able to train a screen
| reader with your own voice (or voice of your choosing) would be a
| huge plus for vision impaired folks.
| surume wrote:
| Me to my partner: "Didn't you say you were going to do the
| dishes?" Partner: "I don't remember saying that" Me: "Here, I
| have a recording of you saying it..."
| nullsense wrote:
| Yikes.
|
| I think a remake of the movie "Gas Light" using these kinds of
| AI technologies needs to happen as a sort of social commentary
| on where this is going.
| nugget wrote:
| I'm curious how all these advancements in AI will impact KYC and
| identity authentication. It's already easy to scrape OSINT to
| pull the answers needed for most people's knowledge based
| authentication sequences. Will we hit the point where fake
| passports, IDs, and biometrics (including voice prints here) can
| be replicated undetectably? If so, what will become the standard
| for identity authentication?
| pifm_guy wrote:
| KYC isn't about stopping bad guys doing stuff. It's about
| stopping the government from shutting you down.
| acdha wrote:
| I'm assuming it'll come down to two things: more reliance on
| in-person checks and eventually pushing more towards digital
| signatures but the latter is complicated in the U.S. by
| politics. It wouldn't be insurmountable to deploy national ID
| cards like Estonia from a technical perspective but we have a
| non-trivial number of people who object to that on religious
| grounds so I'd expect we'll have some kind of private sector
| multiple standards mess for years.
| kybernetyk wrote:
| Maybe governments finally start implementing public-key
| cryptography with their chip-enabled IDs and passports?
| ipsin wrote:
| Are these text-to-speech models manually controllable in terms of
| prosody, etc., or is it all transformer-based text-to-audio?
|
| I've followed some of the research on prosody transfer, etc., but
| it still seems bad in the TTS systems I've heard.
| choeger wrote:
| Is it just me or is "AI" focused very much on fooling human
| perception, lately? AFAIK, we have no deterministic algorithm
| that can tell us whether synthetic language sounds "human", have
| we? So essentially, that model has been trained to fool human
| perception. Similarly, ChatGPT is not trained to output sensible
| and meaningful statements but rather statements that _appear_ to
| be to a human reader.
|
| Would not not be time to measure a model's success on the actual
| job? Like feeding a simulator with actual data from real-world
| traffic scenarios and running Tesla's, or any other company's,
| autopilot in it?
| krisoft wrote:
| > So essentially, that model has been trained to fool human
| perception.
|
| Is there any other sensible goal function for a text to speech
| model?
|
| > Similarly, ChatGPT is not trained to output sensible and
| meaningful statements but rather statements that appear to be
| to a human reader.
|
| Almost certainly not true. If they could they would make it
| output sensible and meaningful statements all the time.
|
| > Like feeding a simulator with actual data from real-world
| traffic scenarios and running Tesla's, or any other company's,
| autopilot in it?
|
| Do you seriously think that self driving car companies are not
| doing this already?
| tgv wrote:
| > Is there any other sensible goal function for a text to
| speech model?
|
| Yes: to transfer information aurally. And the models are
| there, and have been for quite some time. They can simply
| stop with the trying-to-fool part.
| adql wrote:
| The "fooling here" is "people wanting TTS to sound human".
| And obvious step for that is making the AI infer human
| voice traits from existing humans
| tgv wrote:
| It doesn't have to sound human. Fluent, ok, but human?
|
| But no matter what, it's unnecessary to make a tool that
| can copy anyone's voice. That just lowers the threshold
| for abuse, while not adding almost nothing of value.
| MrOwnPut wrote:
| It doesn't have to, and you can use ones that don't, they
| get the info across mostly. But it is jarring if it
| doesn't sound human, it's a speech impediment, or as a
| more generous take, an accent.
|
| The correct inflections, pauses, annunciations, etc. are
| all important to humans, especially so for audio books
| and similar things that need to immerse.
|
| Otherwise you have to strain to listen, similar to
| listening to someone with a heavy accent.
| tgv wrote:
| > especially so for audio books
|
| Perhaps real human readers can help?
|
| > The correct inflections, pauses
|
| Because a model that can imitate a voice is still not
| capable of that. There's no need to have model that can
| do that. A robotic accent is best. Or perhaps you like to
| see your politicians make all kind of bizarre statements
| on youtube.
| MrOwnPut wrote:
| > Perhaps real human readers can help?
|
| Certainly, and they do, but computers can annotate _much_
| faster, without attrition, and cost _much_ less.
|
| Generally you'll have human recordings for what you can,
| and TTS for anything missing.
|
| There are a _lot_ of books, live streams, podcasts,
| articles, etc. in the world.
|
| > There's no need to have model that can do that.
|
| I wouldn't say there's no need, or otherwise we wouldn't
| talk that way. It's a human element and the generated
| speech is for human ears.
|
| > A robotic accent is best.
|
| Best is subjective because that's a human preference.
| That being said, I'd say your preference is a far
| outlier.
|
| Most people's "best" would be what they are used to
| hearing; the speech of native speakers.
| moyix wrote:
| Listening to something that sounds non-human for a long
| period of time is fairly unpleasant; imagine trying to
| listen to an audiobook or podcast, or dialogue in an
| animated movie, when the voices are all obviously non-
| human/robotic. So TTS wouldn't be usable for a lot of
| cases where we might want it.
|
| And with the way the models work, once you have a model
| that can sound human, it is unfortunately very easy for
| it to sound like any individual human as well.
| yoavm wrote:
| Perhaps it's us that are obsessed about perception rather than
| substance though? I wonder if it's different from asking a
| child to memorize for an exam, or investing time in a stylish
| presentation, etc.
|
| Seems like we're very often interested in something that looks
| like the job rather than the job itself - maybe because it's
| more easily measurable? We then took this skewed ambition and
| developed AI after it.
| isthisthingon99 wrote:
| AI is focused on creating electronic humans that are never
| tired and can do low skill work with some high level
| directions. It seems like we will achieve this goal, but the
| companies will own the electronic humans.
| MarcScott wrote:
| This would have made Sneakers a much more boring movie.
| dang wrote:
| Recent and related:
|
| _VALL-E: Neural codec language models are zero-shot text to
| speech synthesizers_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34270311 - Jan 2023 (136
| comments)
| naillo wrote:
| This should probably link straight to page of the paper
| https://valle-demo.github.io/
| jimmyjazz14 wrote:
| "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they
| could, they didn't stop to think if they should."
| waynenilsen wrote:
| Perhaps digital signatures will help with authenticity issues. It
| may become necessary. Transcoding presents an issue I wonder how
| it may be solved
| jesuspiece wrote:
| Thanks MSFT for making my job of phishing people easier :)
| swader999 wrote:
| Yes, this is Mike Smith's father Steve, my son won't be attending
| school the rest of this week. We're flying back east to visit our
| relatives.
| cactusplant7374 wrote:
| Someone will eventually release an open source model, right?
| alexb_ wrote:
| Hope that 15.ai finishes soon.
| jmartrican wrote:
| So if you get a call from a number you do not know, maybe we
| should NOT talk and give them our voice which they will record
| and use to make new speech to scam our loved ones.
| jmartrican wrote:
| Will probably have to give my mom a secret word that only I
| know that I need to say to her so she knows its me and not a
| scammer using my voice.
| theptip wrote:
| It's not a bad idea, but you can already do this kind of
| check with shared knowledge. "Where did we go for vacation
| when I was a kid?", "where did we eat for dinner last time we
| saw each other" Etc.
| r-zip wrote:
| Serious question: do the people who work on this topic think
| they're doing a good thing?
| gdubs wrote:
| "My voice is my passport."
| eloff wrote:
| So is there anywhere you can play with this model yet?
| reverseblade2 wrote:
| - Hey Janelle, what's wrong with wolfie? I can hear him barking.
| Is everything okay?
|
| - Wolfie is fine dear. Wolfie's just fine. Where are you?
| dokem wrote:
| - Your parents are dead.
|
| That deadpan delivery always makes me laugh.
| [deleted]
| Octabrain wrote:
| https://youtu.be/MT_u9Rurrqg
|
| I felt obligated to find and post the link to the scene. What a
| great movie.
| O__________O wrote:
| Warning: Might be worth warning people there's an ultra
| violent cut included in the clip. Anyone not interested in
| seeing the violence, but watching the relevant dialogue can
| view it here:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34309876
| ridgered4 wrote:
| An interesting level of this scene is that it implies neither
| terminator is able to identify a fabricated voice even though
| they have a full understanding of each other's design. The
| T-1000 cannot tell it is talking to a T-800 until it realized
| it has been tricked and the T-800 cannot tell it is talking to
| a T-1000 until it tricks the other machine.
|
| Of course, it happens over a pay phone so perhaps with the full
| vocal range in person it would have been different.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| >so perhaps with the full vocal range in person it would have
| been different.
|
| I think there might have been other giveaways in person where
| the T-800 is concerned.
| [deleted]
| kernal wrote:
| >An interesting level of this scene is that it implies
| neither terminator is able to identify a fabricated voice
| even though they have a full understanding of each other's
| design. The T-1000 cannot tell it is talking to a T-800 until
| it realized it has been tricked and the T-800 cannot tell it
| is talking to a T-1000 until it tricks the other machine.
|
| What made it even more amazing was that the T-800 ran on a
| 6502 processor.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| That movie holds up so incredibly well.
| marpstar wrote:
| Best action movie of all time. Always has been.
| mavhc wrote:
| It wasn't in 1990
| kbrannigan wrote:
| The best action movie in my mind is: Terminator 2. Hands
| down. It's like an archetypal movie
| stinos wrote:
| I'd never use extremes like 'best' or 'worst' to describe
| any type of creative piece, but I have to say having
| recently watched the first 2 movies again for the first
| time in like 20 years: yeah there is something about
| these movies (and some others from that era) which I'm
| really missing in releases of the past decade. Only
| problem being: I don't know if it's merely some
| nostaligic bias or if they are really just better
| overall.
| codeulike wrote:
| I think the guy that made them has some new movie out or
| something
| flippinburgers wrote:
| Count me in in saying that there is something about these
| older movies that eclipses almost all "entertainment"
| these days. It is mostly the storytelling ranging from
| "the message" to the dialogue. None of it resonates with
| me.
| bornfreddy wrote:
| For me Pixar movies are great in this respect.
| Storytelling is there front and center. There is a book
| (Creativity Inc iirc?) that talks about Pixar history and
| their process, pretty incredible how many hits they were
| able to produce during their era and how consistent they
| were. Not sure if they produced anything lately though?
| ryanianian wrote:
| > Not sure if they produced anything lately though?
|
| Recently-ish: Coco, Soul, and Inside Out are among my
| favorite Pixar movies and all compete with the golden-era
| Pixar classics in terms of being memorable and story-
| first.
|
| The Disney acquisition seems to have crushed some Pixar
| magic. You can no longer assume every Pixar movie to be
| gold, but they can still turn out top-quality content.
| iamacyborg wrote:
| How do you feel about more modern movies like Sicario?
| That one has both a very strong message, fantastic
| dialogue and beautiful camera work, IMO.
| jonhohle wrote:
| That's true of many Denis Villeneuve movies, though.
| There are always going to be directors that produce
| quality, regardless of current trends, however, these are
| the exception (and unfortunately, not always reliably
| consistent).
| iamacyborg wrote:
| Sure, but the movies they're being compared to were also
| the exceptions of their day. We remember them precisely
| because they were good, but tons of dross was also being
| released at the same time.
|
| The market economics were also vastly different at the
| time, streaming really has changed the industry, and the
| quality of tv shows has improved dramatically.
| jonhohle wrote:
| My point was you chose a movie from a director known for
| stunning movies. That has nothing to do with the time
| period the movie was made. Stanley Kubrick, Terry
| Gilliam, Darren Aranofsky, and many others consistently
| make movies that would be considered beautiful regardless
| of when they were released.
| [deleted]
| _puk wrote:
| Having just re watched Gremlins with teenage children
| (for their first time), there is definitely something
| about that era of movies.
|
| Dodgy animatronics were first scoffed at, and then
| forgotten pretty quickly as everyone just got into the
| pure enjoyment of that movie.
|
| This is a nigh on 40 year old film, with a lot of target
| references, yet it still hits the mark..
|
| That said, rewatched transformers too, purely for the joy
| of the initial transformation (childhood toys coming to
| life..), and thoroughly enjoyed it (though it's already
| feeling a bit dated).
| cptskippy wrote:
| > That said, rewatched transformers too, purely for the
| joy of the initial transformation
|
| Aside from the voice acting, there's nothing redeeming
| about those movies and felt like someone just pissed on
| my childhood. Any aspect of the cartoons or toys that
| inspired joy and wonder was lost in translation.
|
| The initial transformations were spoiled by trailers and
| also just disappointing in general. The transformations
| are largely incomprehensible and they might as well have
| used Star Trek transporter FX or a flash of light to
| transform them.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| I still catch Back to the Future every time its on TV.
|
| That movie is so well-paced even by modern standards.
| johncalvinyoung wrote:
| IIRC, I remember from discussions with other
| scriptwriters that BTF was rejected SO many times (and he
| redrafted it each time, afterwards) that the version that
| got filmed was like v12 of the story. Very, very tight
| and plotted.
| williamcotton wrote:
| "Back to the Future is a perfect movie!"
|
| - Quentin Tarantino
| mrexroad wrote:
| I just watched Gremlins with my kids during the holidays.
| My older teen had to look away and hated it (they can't
| do horror films), my other teen was abhorred by all the
| death, and my pre-teen had the full range of emotions
| from cracking up often and jumping at the surprises.
|
| With that said, I was surprised to see how decisive,
| resourceful, and adaptable the mother was. Hears a noise
| in the attic, grabs a knife. Gets attacked, puts creature
| in nearest blender/microwave and hits switch. Hears
| another noise, grabs _two_ knives because one wasn't
| enough last time.
| kranke155 wrote:
| Terminator 2 is widely recognised as an amazing piece of
| filmmaking, film scholars included.
|
| I believe Paul Thomas Anderson partially left film school
| because his professor was shitting on the movie. And he
| was damn right.
| lofaszvanitt wrote:
| This movie is about this phenomena :D.
|
| https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0364955/
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Most of Cameron's older movies hold up very well. Aliens
| is still fun, tense, and well-paced. Even True Lies is
| still fun.
|
| I think Cameron's secret weapon is the camerawork and
| editing. He really lets the camera breathe and has an
| incredible sense of "beats" for every cut.
| grogenaut wrote:
| Had my daughter watch aliens for Halloween cause she was
| suggesting shit scary movies like the witch. She's 22.
| Gosh is that movie excellent. The best was the 3 endings
| where she relaxed and I was like excellent. Esp the
| spaceship fight. You thought this was over, no the most
| tense parts of the movie are yet to come.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| And it's not just "badass - it has a solid emotional core
| that drives the character.
|
| The director's cut makes it even more clear - Ripley lost
| her baby while she was in cryosleep, which gives her
| character's desperation to save Newt even more urgency.
| jonhohle wrote:
| _ALL_ of his 80s and 90s movies hold up. He was a master
| storyteller that understood the tools, the craft, how to
| get the best out of the people working for him, and most
| importantly the story and characters.
|
| For whatever reason, he through out story and pushing
| people to their limits for technology and spectacle. It
| makes me sad to think that the last movies we'll see from
| Jim Cameron are likely all in the Avatar universe,
| written by committee and acted in front of green screens.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| While I share that sentiment, I also appreciate that his
| current movies are at least his singular vision. Not a
| lot of original IP currently where the director gets
| control over the end product.
| benreesman wrote:
| Obviously it's all a matter of taste but there are people
| (myself included) that think practical effects
| _complemented_ with CGI is still the right way to do
| action.
|
| Top Gun Maverick would be a data point that a lot of
| people agree. No matter how good the CGI, actors con a
| sound stage in front of a green screen just behave
| differently than actors or stunt people actually doing
| action stuff.
| grogenaut wrote:
| Reminded of the star trek gif where they take out the
| camera motion and it's just the actors randomly lurching
| around in their chairs while acting.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Well, to be fair, if you filmed yourself in a car, with a
| windshield-attached camera, driving over rough terrain,
| and then stabilized the footage, it would also look like
| you and other passengers lurching around - though perhaps
| in a more synchronized fashion.
| kossTKR wrote:
| No they are just better. I watched them years later and
| not as a kid and they're just great.
|
| It's about the pacing, pauses and slower character and
| world building.
|
| Newer movies are built for second screening and
| maximising action sequences to not bore the audience
| which kills all atmosphere and sense of time and place -
| the worst example of this is the new Avatar movie,
| absolutely horrible in every sense of the word, while the
| first one was alright as i remember it.
|
| You simply need to "set the stage", explain why this
| story is important and why the characters deserve
| sympathy or hate before you start your 3 hour action
| sequence - this step has been removed for some reason.
|
| Verhovens old movies were the same - there was a nerve, a
| seriousness, a reflection beneath the action, now it
| could just have well been created by an alien algorithm
| without a sense of the actual human experience.
|
| I wonder if it's a ridiculously extrapolated but
| misunderstood tic-tokification of cinema to please
| marketing? Because i've seen 20 second tik-toks with more
| emotion and character introduction than a lot of newer
| movies.
| lancesells wrote:
| Interesting, I didn't love the new Avatar but I thought
| it was much better paced and directed than a Marvel or
| superhero movie. Shots lingered and showed more emotion
| than the current crop of action / fantasy movies (Star
| Wars, Marvel, Transformers).
| AB1908 wrote:
| Huh, I had friends complain that it was overly long and
| focused a lot on its setup and setting up bits and pieces
| like the kids' relationships and the new culture.
| codazoda wrote:
| For a contrasting movie, I thought "Once Upon a Time in
| Hollywood" (2019) was the opposite. The movie spends
| something like 80% of the time with setup. I loved it, my
| wife hated it. Looks like it's 70% on Rotten Tomatoes.
| thebeardisred wrote:
| One other difference: sounds & soundtracks. I don't mean
| the foley work per se, but songs you would _want_ to
| listen to very often written _for_ the movie.
|
| With the explosion of synthesis software and digital
| audio workstations its easy for a small team to score a
| sound track on the cheap.
|
| As with everything tough, there's always a few outliers,
| like (both) of the Tron: Legacy soundtracks.
| hermitdev wrote:
| Tron: Legacy soundtrack was done by Daft Punk. Not
| exactly your run of the mill movie studio hack job...
|
| Other interesting soundtracks done by musicians not known
| for soundtrack work you might find interesting: Fight
| Club (Dust Brothers) Event Horizon (Orbital with London
| Symphony Orchestra) Chaos Theory: Splinter Cell 3 (game)
| (Amon Tobin)
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Considering that DP lazily sampled entire hooks, still
| pretty run of the mill.
| [deleted]
| ModernMech wrote:
| > i've seen 20 second tik-toks with more emotion and
| character introduction than a lot of newer movies.
|
| Sure but this assumes movies are about characters and
| emotion. Michael Bay gets a lot of shit, but sometimes
| you just want to see things explode. Sometimes you just
| want to see robots fighting for two hours. Sometimes you
| want to see California swallowed by a tidal wave and the
| emotional character plot lines get in the way.
|
| I would pay to see a movie called "Two Hours Of Giant
| Rocks Hitting The Earth: No Characters Edition", and the
| fact Michael Bay is rich means a lot of people agree.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| >Michael Bay gets a lot of shit, but sometimes you just
| want to see things explode.
|
| That's the truth right here. I once ran across kung-fu
| movie called Chocolate (iirc). The premise was an
| autistic girl who was good at fighting. The _entire_
| movie was her walking into a room, kicking _major_ but,
| then walking into a _different_ room to kick _more_ but.
|
| It was _great_.
| pnt12 wrote:
| I'm almost disgusted by this post!
|
| Jokes aside, it's funny how that sounds the most boring
| stuff to me and you'd have to pay me to sit in a chair
| for 2 hours watching that.
| fullsend wrote:
| Watching the Bayhem piece by Every Frame A Painting gave
| a ton of great context for Michael Bay's work. Super
| interesting, ten minutes long, worth a watch. That
| channel is full of grade A content.
| pjc50 wrote:
| > a movie called "Two Hours Of Giant Rocks Hitting The
| Earth: No Characters Edition"
|
| But would you go to see Giant Rocks 2?
|
| > the fact Michael Bay is rich means a lot of people
| agree
|
| This is the argument often made for Avatar against the
| "no cultural impact" observation. It still doesn't have
| any quotable lines or memorable characters.
| ModernMech wrote:
| > But would you go to see Giant Rocks 2?
|
| If the graphics were better and the explosions were
| bigger, yes!
| kossTKR wrote:
| I appreciate action too but i mean, character or world
| building is not that hard and doesn't really require that
| much when a 30 second commercial can give you enough
| backstory to (unwillingly) empathise with someone.
|
| Theres a difference from both Avatar 1 and quite a few of
| Michael Bay's older movies - they still have have a story
| arch.
|
| Just a few minutes of character building and a few
| intermezzos and these movies would be much, much better
| in my opinion.
|
| But i also hate too much CGI. I don't know what happened
| to "well dosed", it makes what's dosed so much more
| valuable.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| It's not nostalgia. Movies today are mostly hyper-
| produced, over focused-grouped, effects driven piles of
| blandness trying to avoid being offensive or take chances
| because if every critic 51% likes you, you have a 100% on
| rotten tomatoes.
| Tenoke wrote:
| You (and many in this thread) are comparing the best
| movies of a period to the average movies of today.
|
| In reality there's as good or better movies now and a ton
| of crap from back then, too.
| NhanH wrote:
| What are the blockbusters of equivalent quality nowadays?
|
| I have to specify blockbuster because otherwise it
| doesn't make much sense to compare Terminator to a small
| indie movie
| darkerside wrote:
| How about Blade Runner 2049?
| mrexroad wrote:
| I very much enjoyed it. Sad it was a box office failure.
| gsich wrote:
| Dune, Avatar 2 probably.
| tartuffe78 wrote:
| The new Top Gun movie?
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| AKA Navy Star Wars + hardcore nostalgia play (so many
| shot-for-shots with the original)?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| What's wrong with nostalgia, though?
|
| People like to criticize back-references as a cheap way
| to entertain the audience knowing the referenced works,
| but I think it's a legitimate feature. A movie or a show
| doesn't exist in a vacuum; watching a sequel or a work in
| the same universe, I _expect_ to see both subtle and
| direct call-backs.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| I liked the nostalgic aesthetic and references of
| stranger things, it never felt gratuitous. Top gun had a
| lot of shot for shot callbacks and filler scenes/shots
| that could have been edited down/out to make for a
| tighter movie. It's like they couldn't decide if they
| wanted it to be a sequel or a remake, so they said "why
| not both?"
| burkaman wrote:
| Mad Max: Fury Road
| jonhohle wrote:
| Which is also an excellent counter-example to almost
| every other action movie which all rely on almost
| completely CG everything. No that MM:FR didn't have its
| share of CG, but the practical effects create an
| authentic anxiety to much of the action.
|
| Also: Top Gun: Maverick
| weregiraffe wrote:
| This.
| [deleted]
| jamesgeck0 wrote:
| The Mission Impossible films have maintained high quality
| despite an absurd number of sequels.
|
| I'd also compare _Everything Everywhere All at Once_
| favorably against a lot of old blockbusters.
|
| Modern technology aside, Top Gun: Maverick feels like it
| could have come out thirty years ago.
| pjc50 wrote:
| EEAO is very unusual; it's an "indie" "arthouse" film
| that's stuffed full of references to other bits of non-
| Western cinema, as well as having lots of SFX action
| sequences. It had a budget of under $15m (per wikipedia),
| which is much less than the $170m of Top Gun: Maverick.
| I'm very glad that somehow it got made, but there's a
| real drive to _not_ make any middle-budget movies like
| that any more.
|
| > Top Gun: Maverick feels like it could have come out
| thirty years ago.
|
| I've not seen it, but to what extent is that because it's
| a remake of a film that came out 30 years ago?
| jonhohle wrote:
| I never liked Top Gun, but when others spoke fondly about
| it, a Maverick-like movie was what I always wanted.
| Reasonable character arc, lots of practical effects, good
| story. It is a script that would have worked in the 80s
| and fits in that style of concise, well paced action
| movie, but it's far superior to the original, imho.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| It would have been concise if they hadn't wasted 30
| minutes of screen time trying to milk top gun nostalgia.
| fragmede wrote:
| Given advances in technology, I'm not so sure it has to
| be a blockbuster for there to be a comparison. Especially
| given how formulaic blockbusters can be. (Eg there are 6
| Transformers movies, with 2 more in development.) Drive
| (2011) is an indie movie, costing an estimated $20
| million (inflation adjusted) compared to almost $220 for
| Terminator 2. Everything Everywhere All At Once cost $25
| million to make, just over the threshold of "indie".
|
| Comparing computing power is a bit handwavey, but former
| Pixar employee Chris Good estimated that the SPARCstation
| 20 render farm cluster that rendered Toy Story had only
| half the power of the 2014 Apple iPhone 6.
| https://www.quora.com/How-much-faster-would-it-be-to-
| render-...
| bronson wrote:
| Terminator was made for $6.4 mil, like $18 million now.
| Not a blockbuster.
| blackhaz wrote:
| Guardians of the Galaxy (the first one), Thor 3, Boyhood.
| There are blockbusters of our days that are going to be
| eternal classics, like the Terminator.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> I have to specify blockbuster because otherwise it
| doesn't make much sense to compare Terminator to a small
| indie movie
|
| I thought Terminator was a relatively low budget movie.
| Not an indie though.
| palebluedot wrote:
| Bladerunner 2049
| cal85 wrote:
| No, we are comparing the best action movies of then with
| the best action movies of now.
| 1over137 wrote:
| They were better. Creators experimented. Now, it's all
| about profit maximization and it's better to repeat known
| formulas: sequels, reboots, etc.
| lm28469 wrote:
| For me a big part of it is due the slow pace. Today's
| slow movies are filmed in a way that make them feel more
| fast paced than action movies from the 80s/90s
|
| Watch Jurassic park and Jurassic world back to back, or
| The mummy vs the remake with Tom Cruise, too many
| cameras, too many view points, too many cuts
| AB1908 wrote:
| How do you feel about the new Dune? Curious to hear your
| thoughts.
| snapcaster wrote:
| As someone who LOVES the books (the frank herbert ones at
| least). I thought the movie was great. They captured the
| tone very well, casting was good. Even the dialogue
| created just for the movie that Duke Leto and Paul have
| about Desert power was very Dune. It also helped make
| clear that the Atriedes aren't "good guys" right off the
| bat.
|
| My only real complaint was that the time between them
| landing and the Harkonnen's invading was too short and
| didn't cover all the intrigue/politics occuring on
| Arrakis before the invasion.
|
| In the movie it came off as: Okay Leto you get Arrakis
| now LOL JK WE'RE INVADING IMMEDIATELY. But that being
| said, I understand there are length constraints and I
| think the movie was already about 2.5 hours so I can
| forgive them
| grogenaut wrote:
| I read the books back in the 90s, but I don't remember it
| being obvious the atradies were bad. The seemed pretty
| egalitarian other than the main family. But I may have
| missed it. The harkonens are just horrific though. Am I
| remembering wrong from someone who has read more
| recently.
|
| I'm fine with how they did it in the movie I just never
| really jive with shows where everyone sucks.
| int_19h wrote:
| The Atreides are still agents of a foreign empire
| occupying and exploiting Arrakis. They impose the
| Imperial hierarchy and law on the unwilling populace, by
| force, if necessary, and they extract the resources. They
| do try to treat their subjects well within the boundaries
| permitted by the system, unlike Harkonnens; it's just
| that the system itself is inherently oppressive, so the
| best they can do is being "good feudals". Paul even
| spells it out at one point:
|
| "You sense that Arrakis could be a paradise," Kynes said.
| "Yet, as you see, the Imperium sends here only its
| trained hatchetmen, its seekers after the spice!"
|
| Paul held up his thumb with its ducal signet. "Do you see
| this ring?"
|
| "Yes."
|
| "Do you know its significance?"
|
| Jessica turned sharply to stare at her son.
|
| "Your father lies dead in the ruins of Arrakeen," Kynes
| said. "You are technically the Duke."
|
| "I'm a _soldier of the Imperium_ ," Paul said,
| "technically a hatchetman."
|
| Kynes' face darkened. "Even with the Emperor's Sardaukar
| standing over your father's body?"
|
| "The Sardaukar are one thing, the _legal source of my
| authority_ is another," Paul said.
| sumedh wrote:
| The Dune was a complete waste of time. I have no idea if
| its adapted from a book or something but I just couldnt
| understand the story, just that the spice should flow.
| mrexroad wrote:
| ... which version did you watch?
|
| And yep, it's adapted from a a book!
| iamacyborg wrote:
| This isn't the case for everything. Go watch Too Old to
| Die Young on Amazon Prime if you want to see beautiful
| slow cinema.
| wseymour wrote:
| [dead]
| toivo wrote:
| Your experience is subjective and unique to you and so is
| for everyone else. That's why there's no point to use
| some objective metric to rate entertainment anyways. I
| don't generally like modern movies or TV as well, and I
| feel some what entitled to that opinion.
| papito wrote:
| It was the golden age of special effects, when weak
| computing power had to be supplemented with effects as
| craft - mechanical and chemical. Those impressive liquid
| metal bullet holes are NOT computer-generated:
|
| https://www.instagram.com/p/CViWXcMlJrM/
| the_af wrote:
| And they used twins as doubles in many cases, instead of
| CGI. One is the security guard in Sarah Connor's prison
| (in some shots his twin brother acts like the T-1000),
| and yet another case is of course with Linda Hamilton and
| her twin sister.
|
| A fascinating practical effects scene, cut from the
| theatrical release, is when Sarah is removing a chip from
| the T-800's head in front of a mirror. Instead of using
| CGI, there is no mirror but a hole in the wall, where you
| can see actual Arnie and Linda Hamilton's twin sister
| acting as the "reflection"; the people closer to the
| camera are actually a dummy (or a double with heavy
| prosthetics for the hole in the head) and Linda Hamilton.
| This means they are sync'ing their movements to simulate
| a mirror!
|
| https://youtu.be/wrDo7wVXrBQ?t=122
|
| (I understand this was done both to avoid showing a
| camera reflection on the mirror, and also to avoid using
| a dummy for Arnie's face, which worked in the original
| Terminator but would have been too noticeable for T-2's
| era).
| papito wrote:
| Yeah, I just love the ingenuity and sometimes brazenness
| of 90s effects and stunts. They look way better than
| today's green screen atrocities.
|
| Just yesterday I learned that in Cliffhanger (also aged
| amazingly well), they paid _one million dollars_ to a
| stuntman to actually travel the harness between the two
| planes while airborne. Not bad for a day 's work.
| ihatepython wrote:
| My favorite scenes where they used a body double was with
| Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop. Pause at about the
| 0:34 mark.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyWjZM780lw
| triceratops wrote:
| I rewatched it a few months ago. Fully expected the parts
| where they talk about the tech to be laughably wrong
| compared to the current state of the art in ML. Nope. Spot
| on.
|
| (Edit: with artistic license obviously. It was plausible-
| sounding instead of cringe technobabble).
| tootie wrote:
| A lot of the jokes making T-800 talk like a 90s skater punk
| are pretty cringey today. I still have fond memories but my
| kids thought it was pretty dumb.
| everdrive wrote:
| Just wait til they're 30-40, and they hear how kids are
| talking. Guaranteed it will sound just as dumb. :)
|
| I think it was always supposed to sound a little dumb.
| The T-800 is acting as a father figure, and bridging the
| cultural gap with his surrogate 'son.'
| blincoln wrote:
| I agree. Now that I'm older, I've seen kids 30 years
| younger than me try to get their parents to use modern
| popular slang, and it feels super cringey.
|
| James Cameron would have been 36 when he was making
| Terminator 2, and he's a polymath with an eye for detail,
| so I'm sure he deliberately went for that layered
| meaning.
| kwanbix wrote:
| If the fabricated voice is 100% indistinguishible from the
| real one, how can the T-1000 or T-800 distinguish them?
| axus wrote:
| The content of the message gave away that the speaker was
| missing knowledge the real person should have.
| kwanbix wrote:
| So you are implying that the robots know all about the
| people? Seems unreasonable.
| jrussino wrote:
| This is the scene they're talking about:
| https://youtu.be/qKLTbJMJOSI
| tromp wrote:
| I smell a terminator...
| O__________O wrote:
| Related Clip:
|
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=dGowjtiu908
| optimalsolver wrote:
| For those who don't know, the woman playing his mother is
| "Vasquez" from James Cameron's previous film, Aliens.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| Vasquez*
| optimalsolver wrote:
| Thanks. Corrected.
| ManuelKiessling wrote:
| Can I just unsolicitedly say that James Cameron is a god?
| wigster wrote:
| OMG. two of my favourite movies and I never spotted her as
| the same woman. I guess I'm not alone, looking at her IMDB
| bio...
|
| Jenette Goldstein is a true chameleon. She is so effective
| as an actress, it is nearly impossible to recognize her
| from role to role.
| higgins wrote:
| "Hey Vasquez, have you ever been mistaken for a cybernetic
| organism?"
| svth wrote:
| No. Have you?
| frereubu wrote:
| "Hey, Vasquez, have you ever been mistaken for a 17th
| century Spanish painter?"
| keithalewis wrote:
| Why drag Vasquez into this?
| ghoshbishakh wrote:
| Can someone try with David Attenborough 's voice?
| swader999 wrote:
| Can someone merge this with Chat GPT so I don't have to attend
| anymore zoom meetings?
| springcoil wrote:
| You might want to look at www.aflorithmic.ai - scalable
| infrastructure using models like VALL-E
| Havoc wrote:
| Hmm. I wonder if this can be used to make a home assistant sound
| like someone
| mdhb wrote:
| I wonder to what degree some of these issues can be addressed
| with cryptographic protocols.
|
| In some sense I feel like we already have good solutions in place
| when dealing with this problem in other contexts.
|
| We can for example get some guarantees about "who wrote this
| code" with signed git commits for example.
|
| The problem is a lot of our commonly used communication protocols
| were never designed with them in mind.
| nicce wrote:
| It is very possible and in some areas it is already been used.
| For example there are video cameras which sign data in realtime
| for 4k resolution already.
|
| So you would need microfone with TPM chip and you are good to
| go. You just need that video player which can verify the data.
| 152334H wrote:
| More samples available on their github page:
|
| https://valle-demo.github.io/
|
| Personally, I find that their samples aren't near anything I'd
| call "dangerous". I cross-compared the baseline examples to the
| VALL-E ones when the paper dropped, and found several that were
| garbled in the usual robotics sounding TTS failures.
|
| Probably a good thing that people are getting alarmed before a
| true indistinguishable voice cloner exists, though.
| rileyphone wrote:
| https://play.ht/voice-cloning/
| o_____________o wrote:
| $300/month :/
| chpatrick wrote:
| One or two papers down the line...
| nemacol wrote:
| I can hear their voice
|
| > "Dear Fellow Scholars, this is Two Minute Papers.... "
| llagerlof wrote:
| "What a time to be alive!"
| infinityio wrote:
| ...but is it actually their voice, or just a simulation of
| it?
| coding123 wrote:
| I think as soon as someone embeds the "excitement" or
| "sadness" and other emotions as training. Or perhaps combine
| it with GPT's abilities. There are no voice inflections. It's
| too dry and non-compelling. It's very much like a non-
| emotional programmer right now.
| serverholic wrote:
| He makes great videos but I wish he'd use a tool like Vall-E
| to narrate because his natural vocal cadence is like nails on
| a chalkboard to me.
|
| The way. He talks. Is like. He puts. A period. Every. Word.
| Or two.
| rafram wrote:
| His old videos weren't like that! He certainly had an
| accent, but his speaking pattern was much less unusual. I
| think that he's exaggerated it over time, leaning into it
| as a part of his channel's trademark (so-to-speak) style.
| Kind of silly.
| serverholic wrote:
| Silly is fine, but like I said this is like nails on the
| chalkboard for me. To the point where I have to turn his
| videos off even though I want to watch them.
|
| It's like when Lex Fridman goes on a tangent about love.
| I just can't do it lol.
| hermitdev wrote:
| > The way. He talks. Is like. He puts. A period. Every.
| Word. Or two.
|
| So... Like Shatner? Sorry, couldn't resist.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Yeah, it is only a matter of time. Better to be prepared before
| it happens then to be caught off guard.
| naillo wrote:
| This looks simple enough that stable diffusion people should be
| able to replicate it by applying openais whisper on a some
| large dataset of voices. Exciting times.
| another-dave wrote:
| > Personally, I find that their samples aren't near anything
| I'd call "dangerous".
|
| I don't think you'd be able to pretend it's a speech given on
| TV or whatever, but I think they're probably good enough for
| phishing e.g. the usual scam of pretending to be a stranded
| family member, but this time rather than texting/WhatsApping
| them, you can do a live audio call.
|
| Just (like the newspapers used to do to celebrities) try out
| lots of PIN numbers on random voicemails and lift a message
| from a family member if you get in. I think given that mobile
| phone reception isn't always stellar anyway, this would be be
| very effective.
|
| Layer in a background track of random street noise and prompt
| the target with deflections "Sorry, the line is really bad;
| it's breaking up a lot. I can't hear you properly but if you
| can still here me, can you send me $X".
| galangalalgol wrote:
| Or tie it to chatgpt primed with the prompt of: You are an
| actor playing the role of <target's partner> and you have
| left your credit card at home, but you need the information
| to purchase a gift for <target> before the sale ends.
| gigel82 wrote:
| Sprinkle in some deepfake on top and you get a killer
| combo.
| hooande wrote:
| People already do this now, successfully, without deep faking
| voices. Apparently all it takes is having someone of the
| correct gender kind of mumble. People will hear what they
| have been emotionally primed to hear
|
| a real life $5 wrench type solution
| goodgoblin wrote:
| you are totally right - I just watched the original Point
| Break over the weekend and all the surfing scenes obviously
| have different human beings from the actors they are meant
| to resemble but your brain still wants to think they are
| the same.
| 323 wrote:
| > before a true indistinguishable voice cloner exists
|
| At the rate things are progressing that's about two years away.
| vault wrote:
| Can someone please transcribe what "Speaker prompt" in Example #1
| is really saying? I can't get "When I love making babies" out of
| my head! I reduced speed to 0.5X and understood the final, "maybe
| suspended but".
| sgerenser wrote:
| I heard "whereby lovemaking may be suspended, but..."
| hef19898 wrote:
| Ah, I have serious Demolition Man vibes now.
| kmill wrote:
| Thanks for confirming -- I didn't trust my own ears for such
| a strange fragment of a sentence!
|
| It turns out it comes from a book called "The Foolish
| Dictionary: An exhausting work of reference to un-certain
| english words, their origin, meaning, legitimate and
| illegitimate use, confused by a few pictures" by Wurdz and
| Goldsmith. (Talk about nominative determinism -- a dictionary
| by _Wurds_?)
|
| Full entry:
|
| HAMMOCK From the Lat. _hamus_ , hook, and Grk. _makar_ ,
| happy. Happiness on hooks. Also, a popular contrivance
| whereby love-making may be suspended but not stopped during
| the picnic season.
| Jevon23 wrote:
| There are no legitimate uses for this technology. Its only
| purpose is to scam and deceive. It should be regulated in the
| same way that nukes and guns are regulated. Contrary to what a
| lot of the HN crowd thinks, regulation of technology is certainly
| nothing new. Up until now personal computing has been largely
| free of regulation, but that doesn't mean we couldn't start.
| deegles wrote:
| I can think of one... podcast cleanup app:
|
| 1. Speech to text
|
| 2.fix up/edit text with GPT-3
|
| 3.text to speech in the original speaker's voice(s), preserving
| prosody and inflection with Vall-e.
|
| If done with every participant's consent I don't see how it's
| not legitimate.
| burlesona wrote:
| Descript already does this.
| [deleted]
| morrisjm wrote:
| you could also just skip step 1 https://twitter.com/lexman_ai
| Veen wrote:
| You can look in this thread for legitimate non-deceptive uses.
| Voice synthesis for people with degenerative diseases like ALS,
| for example.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34309432
| alexb_ wrote:
| Technology like this should absolutley be regulated in the same
| way guns should be - not at all.
| notfried wrote:
| Once perfected, I can imagine there are many legitimate use
| cases for it. Like an author using their voice to narrate their
| audiobook without having to spend time in a recording studio,
| or Hollywood using it instead of dubbing sessions for re-
| recording muffed lines. It'd also be interesting if this could
| be used for foreign language dubbing - imagine if it can use
| the voice profile of an actor to convert subtitle text files
| into foreign audio language tracks in in the same tone of the
| actor.
| wrycoder wrote:
| I recently updated my telephone contact with a large
| brokerage service.
|
| Part of this was to voiceprint me during the conversation.
|
| The agent assured me that this was more secure than asking me
| the customary identification questions, and that their system
| would just use the voice identification in the future.
| Popeyes wrote:
| God yes, a dubbed European film without the naff American
| actor.
|
| Or for games where you can get the language for the NPCs all
| sorted out and change dialogue right up until it goes gold.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| Is the inference so heavy for this that it cannot run as
| part of the game? I want to play planescape torment with
| the text read to me, I don't know who I'll cast though. I
| suspect I actually like text dialogue in games better.
| dokem wrote:
| Only the state and criminals should have something. What could
| go wrong?
| fumblebee wrote:
| The difference is that nukes and - in most countries - guns are
| harder to find. Regulation is easier when you have more
| centralised distribution channels. Code is infinitely
| replicable at marginal cost, and so highly accessible once it's
| open source.
|
| While I agree with you that the net effect of such technology
| will be negative, there's no way regulation can keep up.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| I'm not sure the net effect will be negative. Cheaper and
| more follow along audiobooks for people with dislexia, a
| voice for people who lost their own. Lots of bad stuff too
| sure. But your first point is spot on. There is no stopping
| it. AI has come to replace all creative endeavors with poorer
| quality regurgitated substitutes leaving human created things
| as a luxury for the wealthy... Except people will not stop
| singing, painting, writing, or coding and too many people
| enjoy doing those things for the price to ever go too high.
| Except law clerks, and contract lawyers. They will probably
| just go away, but now they can pick that paintbrush up, or
| get the band back together. Or code up an unauthorized sttng
| game with synthetic vocals for picard.
| carbocation wrote:
| I disagree that this has no legitimate uses. This could be a
| phenomenal prosthesis for people who have lost their ability to
| speak. For example, many ALS patients.
| patwolf wrote:
| I would rather assume that this technology exists unfettered by
| any regulation and instead figure out how to deal with the
| ramifications.
|
| Guns are regulated, but we still have metal detectors.
| EGreg wrote:
| Sorry buddy but open source software eventually catches up and
| you can't stop it.
|
| People just don't realize that technology is what is behind the
| ability for people to wreak havoc on an unprecedented scale.
| One specific organism can't do that much, even with a sword.
| But today, every person will have more and more power, and you
| can't possibly stop them all!
| kruuuder wrote:
| > There are no legitimate uses for this technology.
|
| What about this: You have a voice actor whose voice is part of
| a company's brand (maybe for an animated mascot). You can now
| also use that voice for dynamic text, for example audio books
| or for a voice assistant.
| nullsense wrote:
| Or this: Morgan Freeman reads you all of your audiobooks from
| now on and they sound so much more profound and relaxing now.
| Popeyes wrote:
| It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
| mikro2nd wrote:
| How long would it take, do you suppose, for ~~Disney~~
| $ProductionCompany to simply get rid of the voice actor
| altogether. Now there's another person without work.
| r3trohack3r wrote:
| You could create a lot of jobs by banning the wheel.
| maximus-decimus wrote:
| I always find this argument bizzare.
|
| I don't want to live in a world where people are doing jobs
| that provide no value but only exist because "everyone
| needs a job". I would literally prefer we give them the
| money and they do no work than forcing people to do a
| useless job just for the sake of them working.
|
| Do people really want their jobs to be the equivalent
| Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill aimlessly everyday?
| There's a reason why this is seen as a divine punishment in
| the myth.
| omgsean wrote:
| I personally don't want someone to clone my voice without
| my permission and then use it to make money. I imagine
| many people feel the same way.
|
| I agree that I would prefer to move to a society where we
| don't have to work, but do you honestly think we're
| moving in that direction? We'll get the "there's no work"
| part, but not the "and here's some money" part.
| blincoln wrote:
| Or the voice actor could license their profile to
| {{ProductionCompany}}, and not even have to go to the
| recording studio anymore unless it's a project they're
| personally interested in or where the production team wants
| to pay extra for a custom performance.
|
| A high school friend of mine did that and became the voice
| of the "pronounce this name" feature on Facebook.
| blincoln wrote:
| Flip it around and it works too. Anyone who wants to could
| potentially set all of the text-to-speech systems they use
| (their phone/house's voice interaction, listening to
| audiobooks, warning messages from their car/plane, etc.) to
| whichever voice profile they like best. Basically what TTS
| has been trying to do since the 70s or 80s, but with an
| infinite number of natural-sounding voices.
|
| Maybe pick a couple of different ones for context-aware
| messages. Something familiar/reassuring for most messages,
| something less comfortable for "terrain!"-type alerts. If the
| model supports it, it could even morph between the two as the
| criticality of the message escalates.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| And Michael Winslow should be gagged and locked up for the sake
| of humanity!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAv1o9C9qow
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NOmalcIZZw
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCvqSo0C5ns
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-IJ1AilJ2I
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Winslow
| thsbrown wrote:
| What if I did 3 second long impersonations of characters for a
| video game. I then used this tech to produce more lines of
| dialogue for each character in said game.
| joezydeco wrote:
| I joke with my wife that I'll always be around to bug her, even
| after I pass. She'll carry my brain around in a jar ala
| Futurama and talk to me that way.
|
| But, obviously, the technology is getting to the point where a
| decade or so from now she'll be able to have a GPT-like chat
| with me with my own voice. The first company to offer that to
| the loved ones of a deceased person will make a fortune, not
| for any mode of deception but just to soothe the hurt.
| hahajk wrote:
| I think it's important to keep considering whether or not
| something _should_ be regulated, at least keep asking and not
| fall victim to an echo chamber.
|
| But in this case, couldn't your argument have been applied to
| photoshop or video manipulation software? Those are meant to
| deceive, right?
| tuffacton wrote:
| I have a project in mind to replicate my dead father's voice.
| Would be nice to "have a conversation" with him again.
| morrisjm wrote:
| Related: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-
| gastronomy/the-e...
| passion__desire wrote:
| Ray Kurzweil would like to have a word with you.
| bulbosaur123 wrote:
| Reading audiobooks seems like a good use case.
| kraquepype wrote:
| As a father, I like reading to my kids and I know one day they
| won't ask or I won't be able to.
|
| I've wanted to record readings of some of their favorite books
| to pass on to them, but if I don't get the chance this seems
| like a way to get some analog of the experience.
| lannisterstark wrote:
| >There are no legitimate uses for this technology
|
| oh please. You never wanted to listen to an article/book in the
| voice of a narrator you liked? I do. Maybe you should read a
| bit more.
|
| Just because you lack in thinking of the ways it can improve
| our lives doesn't mean everyone else doesn't. That's a you
| problem. Are you so deprived of free thought, and so insecure
| of your capabilities, that the first thing you do when seeing
| new technology is turn to the government to curb it? if you
| don't like it, no one should use it?
|
| >regulation
|
| ah there it is. the 'answer' to every technological progress
| you have is "regulashions!"
|
| >guns are regulated
|
| thankfully they are not in some places. So it should be
| regulated the same as they are - Not at all.
| ausbah wrote:
| you're like OP in that you're just state what you think
| should be with out really saying why
| [deleted]
| airstrike wrote:
| > There are no legitimate uses for this technology.
|
| I mean this kindly: your lack of imagination is not an adequate
| replacement for actual facts
| lannisterstark wrote:
| >I mean this kindly
|
| I don't lol. OP is a bundle of sticks. Every time there's a
| tiny bit of tech progress with this stuff they just go "MAH
| REGULASHIONS PLEASE PAPA GOVERNMENT SAVE US!"
| aierou wrote:
| On what would we base this regulation? A hazy feeling of
| discomfort?
| r-zip wrote:
| You're joking, right?
| visarga wrote:
| Voice cloning is a way to implement TTS diversity and allow
| authors to automate their own voices.
| 323 wrote:
| There was a 2011 paper/essay which argued that in the near
| future there will be a world war between those wanting to
| regulate AI (the democratic West) and those who do not
| (authoritarian regimes).
| burlesona wrote:
| The regulatory impulse seems to be going the opposite
| direction so far, China recently banned deepfakes etc.
| 323 wrote:
| Only banned their citizens using it, but on the other hand
| China is leader in using AI against their population (face
| recognition, ...)
| DonHopkins wrote:
| VALL-E sounds uncanny, and totally tubular!
| Pigalowda wrote:
| Didn't Deep Voice from Baidu claim this several years ago? Was
| that a legit claim or is MS playing catch up?
| kybernetyk wrote:
| Does this mean I could finally speak English without my heavy
| accent?
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| Accents can be minimized through dedicated training.
|
| After being ridiculed for my horrendous English pronunciation I
| watched hours of English movies and repeated every single
| sentence I heard until it sounded right.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| Thatsa correcto.
| kybernetyk wrote:
| I don't speak Italian ;)
| nullsense wrote:
| Zattsu Raito?
| losthobbies wrote:
| "My voice is my passport. Verify me?"
| 2342346666 wrote:
| [dead]
| fudged71 wrote:
| I understand these examples are zero-shot with short samples--
| which is impressive, but would the output quality improve
| significantly with longer input samples?
|
| For example I noticed it couldn't quite pick out the accent on
| some samples because they were so short. But if the model had
| more example words to hear then I'd think it would accurately
| understand the accent..
| knaik94 wrote:
| There is an open source implementation of these features in
| Pytorch:
|
| https://github.com/lucidrains/audiolm-pytorch
| paulluuk wrote:
| I wish they had included their training weights though. This
| can only be used if you happen to own a huge audio corpus and
| have a lot of money.
| bob_theslob646 wrote:
| >This can only be used if you happen to own a huge audio
| corpus and have a lot of money.
|
| May you elaborate on that? Do you mean that you need a large
| training set of your voice and you need $$$ in order to train
| the models on an expensive GPU?
| paulluuk wrote:
| So, looking at it again I see that the audio corpus is
| available for free (openslr.org, 60GB for 1000 hours of
| speech), however I suspect that training the model on that
| amount of data would take insane amounts of time on a
| single GPU.
|
| Instead, usually companies train such models in the cloud.
| GPT-3 for example used 800 GB of training data and cost
| about 5 million USD to train. Extrapolating from that, I
| guess that the same setup would cost 375,000 USD to train
| (although I assume that this model has waaaaay fewer
| parameters making it a lot cheaper -- but I can't seem to
| find how many parameters it has).
|
| If someone else already spent that money to train the
| model, then you could just take the "training weights",
| feed them into the model, and it would be as if you had
| already trained it -- at which point you'd only need to
| provide your own voice and retrain it on your own GPU for a
| short time.
|
| I'm by no means an ML expert though, so I could be totally
| wrong on this.
| morrisjm wrote:
| James Betker in the tortoise-tts repo, which is similar,
| says he spent $15k for his home rig. I'm not finding
| right now how long it took to train the tortoise model
| but feel like I read him say weeks/months somewhere. Obvs
| all kinds of variations depending on coding efficiency
| and dataset size, but another datapoint
| https://nonint.com/2022/05/30/my-deep-learning-rig/
| https://github.com/neonbjb/tortoise-tts
| russianGuy83829 wrote:
| Sigh.. Now we'll need voice changers when calling
| people/institutions we don't trust
| altcognito wrote:
| Would be awesome to pair this with near real time language
| translation. I get from the demo it seems that this is still very
| language specific, but I assume it will happen sometime.
| 323 wrote:
| Imagine combining this with a ChatGPT with the prompt "you are a
| telephone scammer pretending to be a bank employee, convince the
| other person to give you their bank password"
| EvanDotPro wrote:
| I'm working on exactly the opposite of this, I have a GPT-3
| based bot hooked up to voice recognition and Coqui for TTS I'm
| training to bait scammers. It has memory like ChatGPT (but only
| the previous 50 things said). The delay/latency makes it tough
| to get the scammer to not hang up initially, but the ones that
| tolerate the slow responses are very easily fooled by the bot.
| I'm working on speeding it up more and adding stammering, ums
| and uhs, and background noises etc to fill the delay.
| moyix wrote:
| Maybe just pregenerate a couple opening lines that can be
| used as delaying tactics? "Hang on a sec, let me go somewhere
| quieter", "I'm driving, can you hold on a moment while I pull
| over?"
| swyx wrote:
| is this tech usable in any way? without releasing the code or the
| model how is this not vaporware?
| Tao3300 wrote:
| I'd like to get off the ride, please.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-01-09 23:01 UTC)