[HN Gopher] Unauthorized "David Attenborough" AI clone narrates ...
___________________________________________________________________
Unauthorized "David Attenborough" AI clone narrates developer's
life, goes viral
Author : seasicksteve
Score : 202 points
Date : 2023-11-17 11:57 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| vbeeaz wrote:
| "unauthorized" is a weasel word because it implies that it should
| be necessary for the developer to ask David Attenborough for
| authorization to create a clone of his voice using AI.
| Willyfrog wrote:
| he probably has verbal authorization XD
| Almondsetat wrote:
| By this metric I should not ask for permission to train a model
| on your liking and share with your wife generated pictures of
| you having sex with other women
| jwestbury wrote:
| Intent matters a lot when it comes to both morality and
| legality.
| Boogie_Man wrote:
| Correct except for the "share with your wife" bit. That
| implies intentional deception, which does not appear to be
| what the developer is doing.
| TerrifiedMouse wrote:
| Right of publicity.
|
| https://www.inta.org/topics/right-of-publicity/
| orbital-decay wrote:
| Does fair use apply here? (I don't know) It's not like the
| author narrates a full-blown wildlife movie with the voice of
| David Attenborough. It's just a funny demo which doesn't
| depend on the specific voice (could be anyone), and also
| makes it clear the voice is synthetic.
| tantalor wrote:
| It is _not_ clear that the voice is synthetic
| orbital-decay wrote:
| Hold on, are we looking at the same video and Twitter
| message? [1] He clearly states what he's doing, and in
| the video he launches some program that appears to speak
| in Attenborough's voice. How clear is clear enough?
|
| [1] https://nitter.woodland.cafe/charliebholtz/status/172
| 4815159...
| petemir wrote:
| It's not clear from the voice _alone_
| TerrifiedMouse wrote:
| If you use a small clip of Brad Pitt in a 10 sec ad without
| his permission, he will probably sue you and win. So I
| don't think fair use is going to protect you.
| dcchambers wrote:
| Disagree.
|
| If this could be created without using recordings of his voice
| to train the model, then sure. I agree a "sound-alike" like
| that is fair game.
|
| But since actual recordings of his voice were used in order to
| train the model to recreate the sound, inflection, cadence,
| etc...it should be required to get authorization to use those
| recordings for this purpose.
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > But since actual recordings of his voice were used in order
| to train
|
| Tell that to all the ppl who contributed to Co-Pilots
| training set..
| dcchambers wrote:
| I have the same reservations
|
| That said, I think there's a slight difference in that this
| is targeting a _specific_ individual.
| empyrrhicist wrote:
| I mean, yeah? That's also something we need to seriously
| consider. These tools have the ability to copy the labor
| and property of others in a way that is economically
| important and socially challenging, and we don't yet have a
| legal framework to handle it.
| cma wrote:
| Should an actor playing a public figure in a biopic have to
| get permission to study the subject's voice from copyrighted
| sources in order to reproduce it for the film (without AI)?
| empyrrhicist wrote:
| Can actors audio-visually mimic their characters with
| increasingly convincing realism, and can they be
| artificially scaled, duplicated, extended, and applied for
| just the cost of a bit of hardware and electricity?
|
| It is not sensible to hand wave the "human like" learning
| process and ignore economic reality. This area requires
| careful thought about how our notions of individual rights
| apply to new technologies, and what kind of economic system
| can exist as a result.
| devsda wrote:
| One of the popular sentiments here seems to be that training
| AI should not be treated any different than a human
| understanding & learning the source material.
|
| Going by that logic, can the AI here be considered a "person"
| performing mimicry after being "inspired" by Attenborough ?
| empyrrhicist wrote:
| That attitude sounds... convenient for people (companies)
| training these models, but completely untenable at a
| societal level.
| krisoft wrote:
| > "unauthorized" is a weasel word
|
| Is not a weasel word. There is nothing unambiguous about it.
|
| > it implies that it should be necessary for the developer to
| ask David Attenborough for authorization
|
| Yes. It does. Now you might disagree with that, but it
| perfectly unambiguously means that.
| vbeeaz wrote:
| It is ambiguous because it makes it sound like we are talking
| legality here, but there's nothing illegal about making a
| project like this if you do not profit from it. Therefore, it
| is a weasel word.
| BSDobelix wrote:
| I think you're right, as long as it's clearly labelled as
| AI-generated.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| What? It means nothing of the kind.
|
| Have you never heard about unauthorized biographies?
| throw101010 wrote:
| I wouldn't call it a weasel word because it describes
| accurately the fact nobody gave them the authorization to use
| the likeness of Attenborough, and there are laws to protect
| people's likeness in multiple jurisdictions
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_rights) that might
| require such authorization (whether they could be applied in
| the case of AI remains to be tested, but apparently most of
| them do not question the "means" to impersonate but the act of
| it).
|
| It raises an interesting discussion about this though, how is
| this different from someone making an impression of him and
| doing a comedy show of it for example. They also had to listen
| to him for hours to reproduce the voice correctly, are they now
| infringing some copyright when they use this voice?
|
| To me, as long as you clearly state that this is an
| impersonation/parody, and there is no deception, I do not
| really see a reason to protect this, even for music. But I'd
| like to hear arguments for a protection and how it would be
| enforced, how do you judge of the likeness, how do you
| know/prove which source material was used for training for
| example.
| lancesells wrote:
| How is it different than an impersonator? 1. Let's say
| there's 1000 people that could, or would, want to truly
| impersonate him in the world as a job. Now there's 8 billion
| who don't need rest, who don't need to practice, who won't be
| indistinguishable from the real thing.
| meheleventyone wrote:
| Depends on how it's represented. If you booked David
| Attenborough and an impersonator showed instead you'd be
| annoyed. If TV shows started using an impersonator instead
| of Attenborough but said it was him both the audience and
| Attenborough would be annoyed when found out.
| lancesells wrote:
| I'm not sure what you mean here but let me make my point
| to the "no big deal" proponents.
|
| Would you be ok if AI was used to impersonate you across
| the internet? Would you mind if I made a twitter account
| in your name and phone calls with your voice or upload to
| Youtube videos of yourself? I wouldn't do anything
| illegal or to make any money. It would just be
| entertainment impersonating your likeness and saying
| whatever I would want you to say.
| devnull3 wrote:
| These things have suddenly going mainstream and lot of ppl
| (including me) are having existential question: what does it mean
| to be a human?
|
| PS: It will be fun to do in "damn nature u r scary" voice & style
| [1]
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vlFHlSm1r4
| davidhs wrote:
| We're becoming (cognitively) obsolete.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > existential question: what does it mean to be a human?
|
| One perspective that might be helpful is that humans have for
| many millennia pondered this question, so it isn't new.
|
| We have a more exacting (but not perfect) definition from a
| biological perspective. We also have philosophical theories
| about personhood[1] and mind[2]. One can hypothesized that
| these, and other characteristics, such as the emergence of
| culture, etc. also exist in other entities (whether on earth,
| alien, or technology like AI), so perhaps humans can be though
| of us as occupying a region across these different dimensions
| that represent a unique _combination_. But we don 't have
| exclusivity over a particular dimension (like reasoning, for
| example).
|
| Another perspective that might be helpful is that even if there
| are other entities that are very much like humans, it does not
| take away YOUR and MY experience of being human or the value
| and joy we derive from it. If anything, it can help us
| understand ourselves better. This introspection ability is
| another one of those characteristics that humans have.
|
| [1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/identity-personal/
|
| [2] https://plato.stanford.edu/search/searcher.py?query=mind
| devnull3 wrote:
| > so it isn't new
|
| I agree but so far mainly philosophers & intellectuals used
| to ponder. With advancement in tech many believed that
| intellectual or creative work is safe. I think now this is a
| jolt to a lot of white-collar folks who are looped in with
| the recent advancements in AI.
|
| Its not that intellectual or creative work will vanish but a
| lot of the current work will be commoditized.
| asylteltine wrote:
| Humans aren't special. I wish I could be a cyborg how cool
| would that be
| devnull3 wrote:
| I know, though lot of major religions do not think so.
| cube2222 wrote:
| This demo is frankly one of the most mind-blowing things I've
| seen so far in the recent generative-AI boom.
|
| Could be quite cool to use in games, esp. competitive online
| ones, for a more dynamic announcer.
| tunnuz wrote:
| That's so clever and cool.
| belugacat wrote:
| Right now this requires API tokens and being dependent on third
| party companies that will cut off your access if they decide they
| don't like you.
|
| The moment these models can run locally on the kind of cheap
| hardware that phone scam operations have will be the real
| Pandora's box moment. (I give it 3-5 years or so)
| agloe_dreams wrote:
| I kinda wonder how close you could get with Core ML on iOS.
| Apple already ships an iffy voice clone software.
| fotcorn wrote:
| The recently released XTTS-v2 model[0] from coqui.ai is coming
| very close to what ElevenLabs[1] can do. It runs reasonably
| fast on a recent GPU, and should also work on CPU. Requires a 3
| second (!) clip of the voice you want to clone. License does
| not allow commercial use.
|
| 0: https://huggingface.co/coqui/XTTS-v2
|
| 1: https://elevenlabs.io/
| alpaca128 wrote:
| > Requires a 3 second (!) clip of the voice you want to
| clone.
|
| Sure, if you want a guaranteed uncanny valley experience.
| There is no way a few seconds are enough to cover all the
| ways a specific person pronounces things. A person's voice is
| much more than just the pitch and with a 3 second sample
| anyone who knows them will be able to tell something's off
| within 3 seconds.
| dataangel wrote:
| No I suspect 3 seconds is often enough. It's not learning
| how you pronounce each word, it's seeing some
| pronunciations you use and from that guessing how you would
| pronounce other things based on how those pronunciations
| are clustered in its training data. In other words if in
| that 3 seconds it hears you say y'all it has a pretty good
| shot at inferring how you say a lot of other things.
| lioeters wrote:
| > it hears you say y'all
|
| The accuracy or realism of the emulated voice probably
| depends on how "rich" the recorded material is within
| those 3 seconds? I mean, if it includes a single long
| syllable, or some phrase that contains a variety of
| vowels and consonants.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| People speak differently in different situations, based
| on their mood and who they are talking to. They may
| change their voice when quoting another person, they may
| alter their accent if talking to a stranger, and there's
| many other details you don't even think about because
| you're used to them but it'll immediately sound wrong if
| it's not replicated correctly.
|
| Apple's announced voice imitation feature requires a 15
| minute sample if I remember correctly, and you can bet it
| would be shorter if they were satisfied with the results.
|
| > if in that 3 seconds it hears you say y'all
|
| I can guarantee that no 3 seconds of text of your
| choosing will ever be enough to reliably differentiate
| between all existing dialects and accents, let alone
| differences between individual people.
|
| There's a reason all the decent fake voice clips on the
| web are based on public figures with hours of training
| material - and even with those you can tell within
| seconds that it's fake, even if you don't know how you
| noticed it.
| davidmurdoch wrote:
| Do you know what an uncanny valley is?
| chankstein38 wrote:
| I know the parent comment said 3 seconds, but for what it's
| worth, the actual huggingface page says "a 6 second clip"
| which, admittedly, is still fairly hard to believe but I
| guess twice as believable as a 3 second clip.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| >anyone who knows them will be able to tell something's off
| within 3 seconds.
|
| Unfortunately the targets of these scammers is usually
| senile old people. I'm incredibly worried about my parents,
| especially my bleeding heart mother.
| JaDogg wrote:
| Control her finances. Take away her passwords
| Diris wrote:
| They also have code to finetune the model
| Ukv wrote:
| Could work for spear-phishing, or impersonating a widely-known
| trusted figure. I can't really see it working for cold-calls
| that pretend to be someone the victim knows (like the
| terrifying ransom calls), since the operations work at a huge
| scale expecting most people to not even pick up a "scam likely"
| call. Even if model tuning is free and instant, just having to
| find a voice clip of the person prior to each unanswered
| automated call would tank the quantity they're able to make.
|
| Though, for the same reason websites always attribute data
| breaches to a "highly sophisticated targetted attack", I
| imagine there will be some unevidenced claims that this is what
| scammers did to them - people don't want to have been fooled by
| something simple.
| no_time wrote:
| I just can't get excited over most trending submissions here on
| HN for the exact same reason over the last 2 years. This
| current advancement of AI doesn't feel like such a "new
| frontier" as other advancements in tech at their early adopter
| phase. The internet (the closest tech invention of similar
| magnitude imo) had an atleast decade long "wild west" before
| all the big players we know entrenched themselves with
| monopolies and legislation.
|
| With AI we barely begun and yet the cards are already dealt.
| DanielBMarkham wrote:
| I loved this when he posted it.
|
| Taking this a step further, and being facetious, I'm thinking of
| starting my own network! It's all me, all the time. Sometimes
| I'll be a nature show, sometimes I'll be in a spy movie,
| sometimes I'll have the guys from Mystery Science Theater 3000
| cracking jokes at how dumb I am. Can't be that hard to do what
| this guy did, only in twenty-four different genres, one for each
| hour of the day. Turn it on, let it play.
|
| I think it would be fun. Having said that, can you imagine
| somebody with mental illness, perhaps that makes them paranoid,
| having an AI interweave them into a spy thriller or murder
| mystery?
|
| People already took computers too seriously before ChatGPT and
| the like. Having some official-sounding narrator, somebody you
| know from previous appearances, helping you out in your fantasy
| life?
|
| As much fun as this is going to be, it also bothers me quite a
| bit.
| eli wrote:
| Have you tried to get a GPT to write a joke? It's got a ways to
| go.
| DanielBMarkham wrote:
| I read this recently. I can't vouch for the source and I
| haven't researched it.
|
| https://time.com/6301288/the-ai-jokes-that-give-me-
| nightmare...
| qingcharles wrote:
| That article is pretty incredible.
|
| The movie industry is going to be a wild ride over the next
| few years.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| The author just casually glosses over this point and never
| returns to it
|
| > One of the reasons I find these programs scary is that
| they seem to want to murder humans. They talk about it a
| lot, even when you ask them to be nice.
| asylteltine wrote:
| It's not funny because it's "aligned". You can't be funny
| with all those restrictions.
| calgoo wrote:
| I was not allowed to make a meme of me with a gas can in
| the datacenter lighting the servers on fire as it was
| decommission time. It instead suggested i give it a goodbye
| party. Funny and a little scary at the same time.
| eli wrote:
| It's not funny because it doesn't know what it's talking
| about and there's a big gap between "follows the rules of
| jokes" and "actually amusing"
| askiiart wrote:
| No, I used GPT-3 before ChatGPT was even released, and it
| was decent at making jokes. It even wrote some dialogue
| between various artists and poets ruthlessly insulting
| each other, but unfortunately I forgot to save it.
| ChatGPT is very similar, but with a chat interface and
| much more aligned, so I don't see why 3.5, much less 4,
| couldn't write decent jokes.
| Peritract wrote:
| If you're not capable of being funny within restrictions,
| then the problem is you, not the restrictions.
|
| Transgressive humour can be funny; _having_ to be
| transgressive for humour is lazy.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| I've found that if you tell it to do it in the style of a
| particular comedian, it does an OK job:
|
| https://chat.openai.com/share/f0d4069a-f05a-49df-824d-ac66c9.
| ..
|
| Don't get me wrong, that isn't comedy gold...especially if
| you don't know the kids show I asked it to base the set on.
| Still, I think it did alright.
| alexdunmow wrote:
| I have a feeling your API costs would definitely creep up
| quicker than you realise...
| wrp wrote:
| I want to have Emma Thompson narrating my life as in _Stranger
| than Fiction_ (2006).
| guilamu wrote:
| Same with Scarlett Johansson in Her.
| harshitaneja wrote:
| Little did he know, his life would be as mundane as the one
| before. (Edit: I wrote this but as soon as I did it sounds
| rude. Didn't intend it that way)
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| [dupe]
|
| More discussion here
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38281079
| losvedir wrote:
| Someone at work shared this and I thought it was hilarious and
| awesome. A number of other people found it disrespectful or
| gross. I'm sort of fascinated at the values divide.
|
| I can see why SAG/ASTRA, or voice actors, aren't going to like
| this technology, but it doesn't feel all that different to any
| other industry swept away by tech, whether that's farming, horses
| and carriages, mining, etc. In other words, I can see the
| negative economic impact it will have on some people, which we
| may (or may not) want to protect via legislation, but I don't see
| how it escalates to a moral question.
|
| "Disrespectful" to me is flipping off David Attenborough, not
| getting a computer to amusingly narrate mundane things in a
| decent facsimile of his voice.
| tolmasky wrote:
| How is it different than someone making a funny video where
| they impersonate David Attenborough? Those aren't generally
| considered disrespectful, right?
|
| Like, I get the potential scale is different. But this is some
| joke video, not someone trying to actually replace David
| Attenborough or something.
| asylteltine wrote:
| I agree and the difference is commercial rights and intent.
| Parody, jokes, etc are fine. Using this to replace him on a
| documentary, not okay. Fair use already covers this all they
| have to do is extend copyright protections to peoples
| likeness and voices
| epolanski wrote:
| > Using this to replace him on a documentary, not okay.
|
| I think it's legal if you're the copyright holder, e.g.
| Disney putting dead actors in their movies did not need
| anybody's permission, nor does any derivative work such as
| videogames as they own the image right to the characters
| they play.
|
| It would be interesting if they did a Planet Earth IV with
| Attenbrough's voice without his consent as David plays
| himself really...Not a fictional character.
| lsaferite wrote:
| > copyright protections to peoples likeness and voices
|
| What happens when you look or sound like someone (more)
| famous though?
| curiousObject wrote:
| This demonstration is respectful. It's funny. It's obvious
| parody.
|
| But, the tech can be used to make disrespectful content.
|
| Look forward to: David Attenborough narrates porn.
|
| I don't know what we can do. Ain't no easy answers. But do we
| want courts and $Lawyers deciding what is respectful?
| Lord-Jobo wrote:
| Courts and lawyers will do a bad job, and also the best job
| out of every option available. As it has been for 100 years.
| argiopetech wrote:
| I'm sure the Brits would claim since 1066.
| spacebanana7 wrote:
| Voice cloning seems much harder to regulate with copyright
| than most other issues because 1) there's a continuous
| spectrum of vocal similarity 2) the tools of voice cloning
| are available to hundreds of millions of people 3) there
| may be several real individuals who could claim a voice
| similar to David Attenborough was also similar to theirs.
|
| Using trademarks seems like a more realistic means of
| regulation. Allowing David Attenborough to sue anyone that
| falsely and publicly credits him as a narrator seems
| feasible within existing law, and extending this to cover
| anti-avoidance tactics like "narrated in the style of David
| Attenborough" wouldn't be that much of an overreach.
| themaninthedark wrote:
| Didn't courts already rule that AI art is not infringing
| on the original works that it was trained on.
|
| I doubt that people are gonna be satisfied with the same
| voices, instead you will end up with David Attenborough
| mixed with Morgan Freeman and Patrick Steward.
|
| I can't wait to hear the new compelling ads using this
| technology and I anticipate the scandal when people
| realize that one of the very charismatic voices belongs
| to an Austrian who was born in 1933 because I guarantee
| that his voice will end up in the training data.
|
| Here is an idea for someone who like playing with this
| stuff, personalized entertainment. Pop songs sung by a
| voice that is a mix of Shakira, Brittany Spears and Lady
| Gaga, written by Chat GPT-4.
| sonicanatidae wrote:
| To be fair, I would pay folding money to hear Attenborough
| narrate pr0n.
| bonton89 wrote:
| I believe Tom Hanks already had some one deep fake him into
| endorsing some medicare scam product. I'd be more worried
| about that than the unsavory narration which most people
| probably would assume was fake.
| anonymous_sorry wrote:
| Teaching people to distrust celebrity endorsements wouldn't
| be the worst outcome.
| bravura wrote:
| There are millions of years of evolution conditioning
| humans to trust things that are familiar. It's naive to
| think we'll adapt effectively and quickly to extreme
| manipulation.
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| Adapting effectively and quickly is kind of our thing,
| also backed by millions of years of evolution.
| Clamchop wrote:
| You're being a little flip but adapting to one thing
| usually comes with compromising something else. Hanks is
| just an example of trusting a leader or authority.
| Whether you think he's a good fit for that is immaterial,
| everyone will be compromised.
|
| Asking for critical thinking is all well and good but
| just the _knowledge_ that it's easy to generate gobs of
| high-fidelity forgeries, all corroborating each other as
| falsified evidence, could have chilling consequences by
| eroding faith in institutions and promoting
| misinformation and conspiracy theorizing.
|
| You can adapt and still end up worse off than you were
| before there was anything to adapt to.
| petepete wrote:
| Or Attenborough attributing the wonders of the planet to a
| god.
| gosub100 wrote:
| A great SaaS idea! It subtly injects "glory to the creator"
| type messages in existing science documentaries, for
| consumption by faith-based institutions.
| biofox wrote:
| Reminds me of "Cosmos for Rednecks":
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tX1Q8PQLAhQ
| Verdex wrote:
| The generalized kernel of your comment here leaves me
| deeply unsettled.
|
| Imagine the following:
|
| * AI discovers community's non-trivial shibboleths
|
| * AI detects pauses in video stream where 1) the speaker
| is off camera and 2) there's space for a non-trivial
| shibboleth to be inserted
|
| * Convert nearly all media from what it is into a lowkey
| propaganda piece where arbitrary community believes that
| their favorite celebrities are actually closet members of
| their community.
|
| Example:
|
| David Attenborough narrates a scene of ants using
| pheromones to encourage the colony that they need to dig
| out more tunnels. Then in a brief pause adds: "They must
| construct additional pylons."
|
| Most people just glaze over the line, meanwhile starcraft
| players are having a different reaction.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| God no.
| hn8305823 wrote:
| > Look forward to: David Attenborough narrates porn.
|
| Here you go:
| https://youtu.be/kwAEVII8FRM?si=oF0Vu5Zgk7fUgvDz&t=491
| (NSFW!)
| wincy wrote:
| A full year ago I heard an _extremely_ racist AI "David
| Attenborough" narration where he described an encounter
| between an Asian man and a Black man on a city street as if
| he were describing aggressive animals. It 100% sounded like a
| documentary though, a normal person would have no idea
| Attenborough wasn't actually narrating the world's most
| racist nature film. Now _that_ is disrespectful, and already
| exists.
|
| If I recall, soon after 4chan discovered this "hilarious
| trick", the API access for the AI narration tool was shut
| off. But those moats aren't going to last forever.
| Arialonomus wrote:
| I think, as often, the truth lies down the middle. SAG/AFTRA
| and the WGA were right in fighting to not give studios free
| rein to use AI to own their likeness or replace them in the
| process. Likewise, people who say using AI tech for
| lighthearted fun like this is "disrespectful" are just having a
| kneejerk reaction at this point. I struggle to see a how this
| is different from say, a song parody.
| Ajay-p wrote:
| This was fantastic but I understand that Mr. Attenborough would
| be upset. I would hope that one day my life will be narrated by
| George Guidall.
| mechhacker wrote:
| When I see a lot of this voice replication I am reminded of
| something.
|
| (Dune series spoiler)
|
| For example, Duncan Idaho keeps being brought back with cloning
| tech, over and over, for centuries, because Leto II just likes
| him. Over and over, the same man keeps being put by the (nearly)
| immortal emperor's side...
|
| I ask: are we stuck as a monoculture, not making new, interesting
| things, but simply replicating older ones?
|
| The technology is novel and interesting, but culturally, aside
| from the concerns about annoying the people being replicated, it
| seems a bit stuck.
| mjburgess wrote:
| "Not making new things" is moreso the default, see: all
| mythology, religion, etc.
| galdosdi wrote:
| This reminds me of something I noticed: disproportionately, the
| classics in a given field (ie, the work agreed upon to be
| particularly important, influential, etc) are
| disproportionately the ones that were made shortly after a new
| medium or technique was invented. For example,
|
| It's almost as if we default to tending towards imitation and
| recycling, and only each time a totally new technology changes
| what is possible do we really try new things -- but the well of
| newness is rapidly exhausted and so those artisans who are
| fortunate to be able to be the first to work with a new medium
| get to be the ones that create its classics.
|
| The question is why? Does a medium combined with a culture
| totally determine the kind of work that can be made? Or is the
| influence of the original classics impossible to escape? In
| other words, is this situation path dependent?
| purpleflame1257 wrote:
| I'm not sure that's true. Look at the printing press. Sure,
| Shakespeare is a classic, but most of the rest of what we
| read as "classics" probably centers around the mid-1800s (at
| least in English-speaking countries)
| coldacid wrote:
| Shakespeare was about a century and a half after Gutenberg.
| galdosdi wrote:
| Yes, that's exactly some of the time periods I was thinking
| of. The mid 1800s was a time when literacy was rapidly
| increasing and new serial magazines became popular. This
| new medium paved the way for the fame of authors like
| Dickens and Bronte, the sort you may be thinking of.
| zeroonetwothree wrote:
| This only works if you compress the entire 19th century
| into a single point. Otherwise you have, eg Sense and
| Sensibility from 1811 vs Heart of Darkness from 1899.
|
| If anything this claim merely shows the effect of "time
| compression" in which distant events feel like they
| happened around the same time.
| seanhunter wrote:
| You're cherry-picking to establish your conclusion. Lots
| of classic authors from that period (George Eliot for
| example) didn't serialise their works in magazines.
|
| Also the 19th century is not by any means considered
| generally superior to any other period in English
| literary history. Eg Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf and
| James Joyce are looking sternly in your direction from
| either side of that timeline for example.
| seanhunter wrote:
| That seems just very obviously untrue. Take an example, say
| literature: Are you saying the classics of literature were
| produced shortly after the invention of the pen/paper
| (clearly untrue)? Or maybe after the invention of the
| printing press? (Also clearly untrue).
|
| It seems like a banal observation to say when there is a
| technological breakthrough there are new discoveries made.
| Like say astronomy, every time we invent a new method to see
| further/measure better we discover new stuff. And
| equivalently in art as new media and methods are discovered,
| artists take advantage of them to produce new work. It's
| obvious both that this is the case and why that should be so.
|
| Otherwise, we are clearly going to evaluate works that have
| stood the test of time to be "classics" and have difficulty
| making an objective evaluation in many fields of how new
| works stack up relative to them. History winnows out the
| things which aren't that great and then you have a new
| generation of classics that "by pure coincidence" (not
| really) are closer to when the new medium or technique than
| your time of observation.
| Izkata wrote:
| Or just the earlier works have been forgotten. It tends to
| surprise people when I mention the 1939 _Wizard of Oz_ movie
| (one of the first(?) to showcase color and still known for
| that because of the transition) was an adaptation of just the
| first book of an older series.
| ljm wrote:
| I feel like the novelty will wear off sooner or later. I
| certainly got bored of doing "X but as Y" pretty fast.
| gosub100 wrote:
| I'm excited to see the first brand new content from an
| existing series. I really love the 80's cartoon Inspector
| Gadget. There are about 100 episodes and they are all pretty
| repetitive (so hopefully easy to train AI with). I would be
| enthralled if someone could create new episodes with:
|
| - AI generated storyline
|
| - Deepfake the original actors voices
|
| - Deepfake the animation, which should(?) be easier (more
| realistic) than the video deepfakes.
|
| This could be so cool, "hey AI, make an Inspector Gadget
| espisode where the dog gets lost in the forest and Uncle
| Gadget eats magic mushrooms he finds while trying to find
| him"
| ljm wrote:
| I'd actually find that quite disappointing. If you can
| generate practically infinite variations of a show using
| AI, it completely eliminates scarcity and makes the result
| meaningless.
|
| It's not even unique to AI really. The whole genre of games
| that depend on procedural generation are similar. Who cares
| if there are a thousand planets in Starfield if they're all
| just the output of RNG? There's no actual handicraft
| involved to set one environment apart from another. There's
| more music on Spotify than anyone could listen to in a
| lifetime; it just makes it harder to find new stuff that is
| actually good or else you stick to what you know.
| gosub100 wrote:
| > There's no actual handicraft involved to set one
| environment apart from another
|
| one of the reasons I don't like modern animation is the
| lack of effort in the actual animating. South Park looks
| like it was drawn by 5-year-olds who traced the outline
| of a salt shaker for the characters. Inb4 "it's supposed
| to be that way, it's all computer assisted and has been
| for 20 years", yes I know that. The point is there's no
| art involved in it. 80's and 90's stuff was hand drawn
| (AFAIK) and often outsourced to animators in Japan, and
| yeah it's primitive, but its literally handicraft. The
| only scarcity of shows like southpark is people with
| squeaky annoying voices. Even the writing is so
| repetitive and predictable. It was novel and funny in the
| 90's-early 2000's, but "kid saying adult thing in
| exuberant voice" is tired and old. Simpsons were doing it
| in 1989 ffs.
| latexr wrote:
| > one of the reasons I don't like modern animation is the
| lack of effort in the actual animating.
|
| The new Ninja Turtles and Spider-Man movies certainly
| contradict that, as do plenty of animations from Japan
| such as anything by Satoshi Kon.
|
| Yes, there's a lot more garbage today but that because
| there's a lot more of everything. The good stuff is going
| strong and there's innovation still happening.
|
| South Park is a bad example because it's atypical in many
| ways. They do the whole episode in under a week,
| including the writing and animation, and the cast is
| basically the creators.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teenage_Mutant_Ninja_Turtle
| s:_...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spider-
| Man:_Across_the_Spider-...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satoshi_Kon
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6_Days_to_Air
| throwaway4aday wrote:
| On the short term, yes. On the longer term (probably only a
| year or two at this rate) no because these models also allow
| you to generate entirely new voices. We'll likely see features
| like describing the voice you want with a prompt and getting
| several to choose from, remixing existing voices, combining
| voices and creating voices that are impossible for any human to
| have. The introduction of other forms of recording and
| reproduction didn't result in total monocultures, even music
| which gets a bad rap for all sounding the same only has this
| problem in the mainstream, scratch the surface and you'll find
| hundreds of weird new genres and styles.
|
| We could see a future where every commercial is narrated by
| Attenborough or Freeman but indie creators will be pumping out
| vast quantities of wild interpretations and new applications of
| the human voice.
| seydor wrote:
| The replication is the new culture. Pop culture has been
| refrigerated and reheated for the past 2 decades , and it will
| be gone with the boomers. The new entertainment will be new ,
| both in medium and in message.
| Fluorescence wrote:
| Attempts at cloning are often the dirty secret behind much
| lauded creativity.
|
| I like the stories of unique art/music that was created because
| someone was trying to clone something exactly... but despite
| their best effort, they just couldn't get it right and ended
| inventing something new that people loved anyway.
|
| We just have to make sure we are pretty bad at the cloning!
| mahogany wrote:
| Related: "hauntology"
|
| Mark Fisher didn't create this word, but he wrote a lot in the
| 2000s about our inability to imagine a new future after the
| failure of our previous visions.
|
| Using electronic music - a "future-looking" genre - as an
| example, he wrote (second paragraph explains it more
| generally):
|
| "...Twenty-first-century electronic music had failed to
| progress beyond what had been recorded in the twentieth
| century: practically anything produced in the 2000s could have
| been recorded in the 1990s. Electronic music had succumbed to
| its own inertia and retrospection. It was also clear that this
| was more than a moment in a familiar pattern, in which, as one
| genre wanes, another emerges to take its place at the leading
| edge of innovation. There was no leading edge of innovation any
| more. In music, as elsewhere in culture, we were living, in
| Franco Berardi's suggestive phrase, after the future.
|
| ...
|
| What haunts the digital cul-de-sacs of the twenty-first century
| is not so much the past as all the lost futures that the
| twentieth century taught us to anticipate. The futures that
| have been lost were more than a matter of musical style. More
| broadly, and more troublingly, the disappearance of the future
| meant the deterioration of a whole mode of social imagination:
| the capacity to conceive of a world radically different from
| the one in which we currently live. It meant the acceptance of
| a situation in which culture would continue without really
| changing, and where politics was reduced to the administration
| of an already established (capitalist) system. In other words,
| we were in the "end of history" described by Francis Fukuyama.
| Fukuyama's thesis was the other side of Fredric Jameson's claim
| that postmodernism -- characterized by its inability to find
| forms adequate to the present, still less to anticipate wholly
| new futures -- was the "cultural logic of late capitalism.""
|
| I don't know if I completely buy it or if it was Mark's (and
| other's) inability to cope with their ideals for the future not
| panning out. But it is interesting to think about, and I do see
| glimpses of it in most art forms. I don't know enough history
| to know how common this repetition of, and nostalgia for, the
| past is though. Perhaps a flurry of imaginings of a "new
| future" was the anomaly.
| seanhunter wrote:
| > I ask: are we stuck as a monoculture, not making new,
| interesting things, but simply replicating older ones?
|
| I really don't understand how you go from this story to that
| question. There are two, new, interesting things here:
|
| 1. The dev has made something which narrates their life. That's
| new and interesting
|
| 2. David Attenborough actually is still producing new (and
| amazing) nature documentaries. Planet Earth III has just come
| out and is astounding https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0gjwxhv
| martinclayton wrote:
| I fear an AI narrating my life would be less Attenborough and
| more Sir Robin's minstrels in "Monty Python and the Holy
| Grail".
| swayvil wrote:
| Sick reference, bro. Your references are out of control.
| Everyone knows that.
| swayvil wrote:
| My thoughts about my memories - that "model" - is arguably
| realer than reality (this tapestry of sensations) to me.
|
| And it only gets stronger as I accrue more memories.
|
| Eventually, yes, it might dominate entirely. My whole life bent
| to reproducing an idealized past. I have become a possessed
| thing.
| afavour wrote:
| > I ask: are we stuck as a monoculture, not making new,
| interesting things, but simply replicating older ones?
|
| I've been thinking about this a lot lately. It's such an
| interesting side effect of the streaming era that some of the
| biggest TV hits with teenagers are Friends and The Office. Not
| to knock either show but I'm fascinated by what it means for
| culture.
| spacebanana7 wrote:
| Content creators now need to compete with the best that's
| ever been created, not just the best that happens to be
| broadcast at the same time.
|
| This will increase the inequality amongst general purpose
| evergreen content, the winners will be bigger than ever
| before and continue to be watched for decades - but getting
| into that winning bracket will be hard.
|
| Conversely it's easier than ever to get views on perishable
| content, that which has short relevancy to current affairs or
| rests on a particular cultural trend. Live streaming too, by
| it's nature resembles the rivalry dynamics of broadcast
| television.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Good point, and it mirrors what happened with popular
| music. Growing up in the 80s, I was almost completely
| unaware of music from the 50s, and didn't care for what
| little I'd heard. But plenty of younger people today listen
| to even-older music from the 60s through the 90s without
| batting an eye.
|
| We'll see the same thing happen with movies before long. A
| cynic might say that, for various reasons, the best ones
| have already been made.
| optimalsolver wrote:
| I've always though that "Duncan Idaho" is the silliest name in
| all of science fiction.
| NikkiA wrote:
| Sillier than 'Hero Protagonist'?
|
| e: or Ford Prefect ?
| optimalsolver wrote:
| The latter is simply genius.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > I ask: are we stuck as a monoculture, not making new,
| interesting things, but simply replicating older ones?
|
| I think culturally we've done things like this many times in
| the past. It's why periods are described as _neo_ , as in
| neoclassical.
|
| Eventually artists pull us in a new direction and we're willing
| to follow because we too have become tired of the old.
| Tallain wrote:
| > I ask: are we stuck as a monoculture, not making new,
| interesting things, but simply replicating older ones?
|
| Probably, but I hope not (or at least not for long).
|
| I think it's normal for people to want to retell stories (see
| the way we pass jokes around like viruses, or the oral
| tradition, or the million "re-imaginings" of classics). I also
| think that inclination has been weaponized and turned against
| us. Producers -- movie, music, or other -- push or are pushed
| to maximize gain while minimizing risk. And what feels better
| than nostalgia? What feels better than a story that doesn't
| challenge you, doesn't prompt any sort of introspection, or
| hell, any inspection at all?
|
| I think it's a symptom of the push for profit over all else. I
| do think we ache for new things, but the ship of monoculture is
| a big one and takes a long time to steer. A lot of momentum is
| behind where we're at and it's going to take a lot to get away.
| make3 wrote:
| there like literally infinite amounts of new culture
| SergeAx wrote:
| I believe it is a temporary state of things, thought a sad one.
| ML made making mockups and mashups effectively effortless, but
| they are boring and should fall out of public curiosity spot
| soon, I believe. At the time Hollywood lawyers figure out how
| to put synthetic clones of big stars into AAA-movies, people
| will be too tired with sequels, prequels, spin-offs and stuff
| like that.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Duncan got significantly upgraded from time to time. Sometimes
| as a mentat. Or as a sex machine.
| tstrimple wrote:
| > because Leto II just likes him.
|
| I mean, there's a whole lot more to it than just that. Duncan
| is a key figure to The Golden Path Leto's breeding program.
| Without Duncan, the success of creating Siona is hollow. It's
| their nine daughters and thousand sons who are the human
| protection from prescience.
| globalnode wrote:
| intake orifice O_o
| techterrier wrote:
| Heres cockney gangster 'Bricktop' from the Guy Richie movie
| Snatch, talking about birdwatching
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRRrlrMDAd-a2sn1d81lTKA
| slhomme wrote:
| Loved it, I thought that was quite hilarious! I can see how
| people get a little upset about it though, but in my mind this
| kind of content is just unavoidable.
|
| I myself have been playing a lot with this kind of tech lately by
| creating realistic clones (voice + videos) of YouTubers and
| tiktokers. I think it has potential to go viral quite easily. I
| never published any of those though, because of ethical concerns.
| Just a question of time before other creators do this at scale
| though.
|
| I almost did that with cloning real TV newscasters from bbc / fox
| / cnn, etc... but decided not to. But I did create a 100% "fake"
| journalist for an app that lets you create breaking news on the
| fly [1]. The result is still a little rough, obviously, but I can
| already tell how in just a few months it'll be impossible to
| distinguish a clone from a real person.
|
| [1] https://fakenews.me
| lioeters wrote:
| One area where this kind of technique would be a game changer, I
| imagine, is for blind people to have their surroundings narrated
| in real time. For example, through a pair of glasses with a
| camera for input, and an earphone to listen to the continuous
| narration.
|
| I heard about an online service where people can sign up to help
| the blind by describing visual scenes that they capture on their
| mobile. There must be companies out there developing a similar
| service entirely run on machine learning.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| I know yours is a small comment in a huge sea, but how would
| the comments know what the blind wanted to see? If I could
| describe what i can see now it would be a long list left to
| right. Do i include the sunlight reflecting off an industrial
| chimney? Is the chimney important? I do enjoy hallucinogenics
| which, to me, remove the very filters that keep us sane. As
| much as I love the problem, filtration will always be the
| problem, unless the environment is extremely controlled (like
| an art gallery), but even then...how to describe the Mona Lisa.
| Let alone its frame.
| reidjs wrote:
| It's a hard problem for sure. I guess You fine tune to their
| preferences. Everyone gets the "Giant bus headed straight
| towards you!!!!" Alert. But let's say you're at the grocery
| store, maybe it's clever enough to read the aisle
| descriptions for example.
| lioeters wrote:
| That does sound like an interesting and tough problem, how an
| intelligent agent can know what is relevant to the listener,
| and what to filter out.
|
| I imagine it would work similarly to how human brains do, or
| at least how we think they do. To notice the "big picture"
| first, recognize large shapes then smaller details, or faster
| moving things then static things.
|
| > remove the very filters that keep us sane
|
| Haha, yes, I know what you mean. If our brains paid attention
| to everything coming in through the doors of perception, our
| mind would be flooded with information, way too much for
| practical purposes. Occasionally it is helpful to access such
| a mode of experience, but the filters are necessary for daily
| life in society. We can't be going around in rapturous
| ecstasy of gnosis all the time.
|
| A related problem might be too much filtering, or the wrong
| criteria for the filters, missing what's important.
|
| I imagine this could be solved by a conversational interface,
| where the listener talks with the ambient narrator to zoom
| in/out and focus on details as desired.
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| > I heard about an online service where real people can sign up
| to help blind people by describing visual scenes that they
| capture on their mobile
|
| For anyone curious, it's called "Be My Eyes". When there's a
| request, it will send a notification to a batch of people. I
| get about one notification per month, often I'm unable to
| answer it right then, and when I do I occasionally get a notice
| that someone else answered first. Tasks I've helped people with
| were things like going through an unsorted stack of bills and
| telling them the denominations, holding up a few T shirts and
| asking me which is the blue one, reading a pressure valve.
|
| Would recommend signing up. It feels good and there's no
| pressure to answer since it sends out the request to many
| people at once.
| nurple wrote:
| Even though it is going to be extremely painful, one thing that
| excites me most about AI is the distinct possibility that it
| obliterates the concept of artificial scarcity that so much of
| the world relies on to create money these days. IMO, AI is
| exposing the frail and unnatural aspect of this legally-protected
| rent seeking.
|
| No, I don't think the legal system will be able to keep up, and I
| also don't think the infoligarchs in Silicon Valley will be able
| to keep a lid on the box.
|
| Yes, I'm frightened that my skills in slinging code will be
| available via a simple query to a model(at least as frightened as
| a SAG), but I'm also heartened that if these glass ceilings are
| shattered that we may finally make the evolutional step necessary
| to break so many of us free of this amoral and inhuman treadmill
| of misery that simply has no reason to exist with the resources
| at our disposal.
| bathtub365 wrote:
| Artificial scarcity of what? Content?
| DeIlliad wrote:
| Using the phrase "artificial scarcity" to describe someone's
| skills is ridiculous. A voice actor or artist being paid for
| their skills is not rent seeking.
| nurple wrote:
| Sure, their creation is held behind legal walls in order to
| create, by definition, an artifical scarcity from which it
| derives its monetary value. If it was not protected by such a
| wall, and was not scarce, it would have no monetary value.
|
| No, I don't think the inherent value in their talent is
| artificial, but I _do_ think that the monetary system we've
| built around such things as a necessity to survive in our
| modern world is abberant and bound to fail.
|
| ETA: Just to give some flavor. Do you realize how much human
| energy is expended in finding ways to build these walls of
| artificial scarcity? It's frankly sad.
|
| I was watching a showmatch that a streamer I enjoy watching
| was invovolved in (ShahZaM a Valorant pro). For nearly an
| hour in the leadup to the showmatch we got treated to a
| realtime negotiation between him an the player organizing his
| team. From comments like "no I can't use that graphic because
| I'm sponsored by another PC builder", to "every dollar I get
| I'll increase the size by 1px", and the piece de resistance
| "Whaaaat?! we have casters?? I'm not even getting paid for
| this!", followed by a streamer-initiated 10(!) count roll of
| twitch ads.
|
| When the match was over, Tarik, the guy who organized the
| allstar team, was supposed to do an interview with the
| casters but had accidentally kicked off his own 10-pack of
| ads and they had to embarrasingly stall until his viewers
| were done watching them so they could see the interview live.
|
| It was a repugnant view behind the curtains of the
| rediculuous amount of work a lot of people go to in order to
| profit behind the artificial scarcity put in front of their
| skills. This is usally hidden from the viewer behind
| production, but happened to leak in this instance due to the
| slapdash nature of the event.
|
| Frankly, we can, and we must do better.
| Tallain wrote:
| >Sure, their creation is held behind legal walls in order
| to create, by definition, an artifical scarcity from which
| it derives its monetary value. If it was not protected by
| such a wall, and was not scarce, it would have no monetary
| value.
|
| That's... not artificial scarcity. By definition (and using
| your own words) it is _actual scarcity._
|
| A person's performance -- which is more than just their
| voice reading lines -- is not held back behind some
| imaginary wall. It's literally limited by the hours in the
| day, the person's ability to get from place A to place B,
| etc.; it's not like David Attenborough is a Santa Claus
| figure and can be in California narrating a documentary and
| in New York providing some random dude a personal voiceover
| for his life simultaneously.
| Ukv wrote:
| > It's literally limited by the hours in the day
|
| If a textbook isn't available because it's still being
| written by the author, then true, that's the real
| scarcity of the author's time. But if a textbook is
| finished but isn't available because effort is put into
| preventing the information from being freely shared, then
| that's artificial scarcity.
|
| Restricting access subject to payment is currently the
| most common method for extracting profit to incentivize
| creation, but it's not the only method and for digital
| goods it's incredibly inefficient.
| DeIlliad wrote:
| None of that is relevant to this discussion. We are
| talking about someone who spent time growing a skill and
| is charging people who want him to use that skill for
| whatever they are hiring them for.
| Ukv wrote:
| nurple said: "their creation is held behind legal walls
| in order to create, by definition, an artifical scarcity
| from which it derives its monetary value"
|
| In my example "their creation" is a textbook, and "legal
| walls" would be copyright/DMCA.
|
| There is also Getty/Universal Music/etc. attempting to
| enforce artificial scarcity in an area where real
| scarcity existed (in addition to plenty of artificial
| scarcity) but is beginning to be overcome.
| DeIlliad wrote:
| I don't see copyright or a record label as artificial
| scarcity. I think the artist should have every right to
| profit from their work.
| Ukv wrote:
| > I don't see copyright or a record label as artificial
| scarcity
|
| It's allocating resources towards preventing
| distribution. Maybe you'd agree that it's "direct"
| artificial scarcity, but believe without that necessary
| artificial scarcity we'd soon become worse off overall?
|
| > I think the artist should have every right to profit
| from their work.
|
| Sure - but you see that is not inherently the same thing
| as the specific method of profit extraction through
| requiring payment per access to the book/image/music/...,
| right? An artist receiving donations or public funding
| for releasing their work to everyone under a permissive
| license is still profiting from their work, for example.
| I'm not necessarily saying you have to agree that
| alternative methods are currently feasible in all or most
| scenarios.
| DeIlliad wrote:
| Sure, I'd agree selling access is not the only method but
| given that there is a story on the front page of HN about
| once a week about why open-source maintainers should be
| paid and how the current model isn't sustainable, in my
| opinion shows, that relying on donations or public
| funding is a fool's errand and not a viable alternative.
| Ukv wrote:
| > given that there is a story on the front page of HN
| about once a week about why open-source maintainers
| should be paid and how the current model isn't
| sustainable
|
| Opinion articles on HN notwithstanding, do you not think
| that free and open-source software has, as a whole, been
| fairly successful?
|
| Moreover, IP law doesn't just apply to art or code -
| evergreening of medical patents is enforcing artificial
| scarcity on information that could save lives. Textbooks
| that could teach millions being restricted to the few
| thousand that pay is also going to have a huge hidden
| impact.
|
| I don't know if there are viable alternatives for all
| scenarios, but given how much is on the table if
| artificial scarcity can be replaced - I think it'd be
| wrong not to actively try, encouraging any potential
| alternatives, rather than just being resigned to the idea
| that this much waste is necessary. At the very least we
| should oppose the attempts to enforce artificial scarcity
| in areas that currently managed to do without it.
| crtified wrote:
| No given individual has 'every right' to anything.
|
| Virtually everything we humans do was inaugurated by
| those who came before, and our wholesale, liberal
| replication of those prior actions defines our very
| existence.
| riversflow wrote:
| > I don't see copyright or a record label as artificial
| scarcity.
|
| Any concept of ownership beyond "what is possessed and am
| in physically controlled" is artificial. The law of
| nature is that might makes right.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >copyright or a record label as artificial scarcity.
|
| Lets say I have a plant and I grow that plant with a
| bunch of other plants and make special seeds. This isn't
| a common skill set. Now lets say I sell you those seeds
| and you grow plants with them.
|
| Now, which seems more natural.
|
| You take the seeds of those plants and grow more seeds
| for yourself.
|
| or
|
| I prevent you with laws on taking those seeds and growing
| more plants.
|
| When you put something out into the world, it is
| completely natural for people to take those objects and
| do what they want with them. It's only with more modern
| humanity that we reserve rights for the person selling
| after the sale.
| DeIlliad wrote:
| Artist aren't plants; Attenborough's voice isn't a seed.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I think what OP is saying is that once AI can replicate
| these performances (and my coding skills) these things
| will no longer be scarce. So maybe it's not artificial
| yet, but it will soon be. Assuming the AI itself doesn't
| get exclusively owned by companies that implement their
| own artificial scarcity walls.
| nurple wrote:
| Allow me to share my own recent predicament, on which I'm
| still deeply cogitating, and from where a lot of my own
| frustration flows.
|
| I am a content creator, I write software and build
| compute systems to run it upon. I was RIF'd last week
| and, if I'm really conservative, I have a year of
| expenses in savings.
|
| I very much believe in OSS exactly because it allows me,
| not to tap into a monetary stream, but to overall better
| our human community by sharing my work. IMO, this is a
| core and fundamental belief of OSS and it frustrates me
| to no end to see articles like "OSS is going to die
| without funding", the two concepts are diametrically
| opposed.
|
| So many, yourself included, have this perverted view of
| the world where there's no way it could exsist without
| our current monetary system, no alternative that would be
| more efficient, more fair, more equitable. I just refuse
| to believe that's the case.
|
| I do not bemoan other content creators their right to
| generate monetary revenue from their creations, in fact
| they have no choice. But that doesn't preclude my opinion
| that it should change.
|
| Indeed, what do I do now? I have 1 year to create a
| revenue stream off of which my family and I can live, or
| I need to go back to an industry that has corroded my
| soul in ways that sometimes make me wonder if it's even
| worth it anymore.
|
| The most effective path for me to generate sustained
| revenue is to abandon my desire to improve humanity by
| sharing and turn selfishly inward, all or in part, to
| create a Rube-Goldbergian golem of artificial scarcity
| around my "content". I have to build a payment system, I
| have to protect the code at rest and at runtime, I have
| to build licensing and consider segmentation, I have to
| market, I have to build systems around revoking access to
| those who lose their own monetary stream and deal with
| their data, etc, etc, etc.
|
| I know what it takes to build whole companies around
| systems like this, I've done it from the ground up on
| more than one ocassion to great success (at least for
| those who held the keys to the artifical scarcity doors
| that they paid me to build in front of my own work), and
| if there's anything that feels like more of a waste of my
| life than playing technobabel whisperer to clueless
| middle and upper-management, is considering building
| something like that again, even if I'm the ultimate
| keyholder this time.
|
| In a world where we do not have to fight like dogs for
| table scraps, all of this wasted time and effort falls
| away, and instead all of us content creators who skulk
| through it for the love of craft, can instead focus
| solely on the betterment of our community as a whole. We
| live in a world with the resources to realize a reality
| like this, but IMO we have all been blinded by a
| masterful twisting of our inbuilt self-preservation
| instinct by the ultimate farce in artifical scarcity:
| money.
| Tallain wrote:
| > So many, yourself included, have this perverted view of
| the world where there's no way it could exsist without
| our current monetary system
|
| I don't appreciate this assumption; lumping me into a
| group of characters based on nothing I've said /
| something you have assumed, based on no evidence, is
| quite counterproductive to a healthy conversation. If
| you're going to try to make an argument at least base it
| on the content of my post and not some inference you've
| made based on nothing I've provided.
|
| I'm sympathetic to your situation, and do wish you the
| best in staying on your feet. And I am quite, quite far
| from a capitalist / capitalist-apologist / what-have-you.
|
| It sounds like you're talking toward using AI tools to
| effectively "duplicate" yourself, to reduce the scarcity
| of your own time. I hope I'm interpreting that correctly.
| I'm 100% on-board with letting the computers do the work
| so we can all go off and enjoy our lives. It's dismaying
| that "productivity increase" means "do more in the same
| amount of time" instead of "do the same in less time and
| then go live."
|
| This is still a far cry from duplicating the creative
| work of others (cloning a performer's ability,
| potentially for profit), and it's still got nothing to do
| with _actual_ "artificial scarcity." Again, this is real
| scarcity. There are only so many hours in a day. You only
| have so much brain power to expend within those hours.
| These aren't pro-capitalist statements and I'm not
| insinuating that anything follows from them. I'm only
| being pedantic here. :)
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| So now we're just applying incel logic to every aspect of human
| creativity and expression? Do you also think that people
| refusing to make adult content of themselves for you is
| "legally protected rent seeking"?
| CaptainFever wrote:
| This comment is unnecessarily rude and off-topic. Of course
| there's a difference between human labour and easily-
| replicable things.
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| I don't think it's all rude or off-topic. It's just as easy
| to make deep fake pornography as it is to clone voices, so
| if someone claims they're being unjustly prevented from
| having the one one under this insane logic, why not the
| other?
| JaDogg wrote:
| Absolutely right. Copyright can be seen as a kind of nano-
| monopoly and is not truly capitalist. The rise in prices due to
| stagnation does not foster innovation. While capitalism has its
| merits, it does bring hardship to those less fortunate. It is
| essential to eradicate all forms of scarcity, thereby
| eliminating the necessity for an economy and finance, and
| subsequently, the need for politics.
| 4star3star wrote:
| Get your parents' voices recorded in natural conversation, folks.
| You'll be able to talk to them after they're gone.
| lordnacho wrote:
| Great, they can criticize me from the afterlife!
| DamnInteresting wrote:
| And, for better or worse, modern humans will lose their ability
| to let go.
| titaniumtown wrote:
| Original project originally discussed here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38281079
| mclightning wrote:
| Original, original, clone
| ryandvm wrote:
| I think I'll be using a Christopher Walken clone as my
| documentary narrator.
| MBCook wrote:
| Danny DeVito playing Frank from It's Always Sunny would be a
| hilarious narrator.
| jeffreyames wrote:
| This could be used as a consciousness override, replacing your
| own thoughts in realtime. I can think of some good applications
| and many terrible ones
| perihelions wrote:
| Did Dante get authorization to clone Virgil's likeness--to put
| words in his mouth, and send him to hell to narrate the damnation
| of Christian popes?
|
| How would one distinguish the two? To me, this is all just a
| continuation of human storytelling tradition in different media.
| gwd wrote:
| You're correct that this "creative re-application of cultural
| standards", along the lines of Dante / Virgil, is what's going
| on here.
|
| There are some key differences. For one thing, Virgil and
| everyone who knew him personally had been dead for 1500 years,
| while David Attenborough is still alive, and those who know him
| personally will live for another 50 years. For another, it was
| absolutely clear to everyone that Virgil didn't _actually_ say
| the things Dante put in his mouth; whereas as deepfakes
| improve, it will be more likely that people think David
| Attenborough actually _did_ say whatever has been put into his
| mouth with a deepfake.
| perihelions wrote:
| - _" For another, it was absolutely clear to everyone that
| Virgil didn't actually say the things Dante put in his
| mouth;"_
|
| It was far worse than that!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgil#Legends
|
| The whole thing's a mess. It'd be hard to draw a bright line
| between the crazy bullshit medievals* literally believed
| about Virgil, and the poetic, metaphorical bullshit Dante
| wrote about him.
|
| (*I actually had a Latin professor in the 21st century
| sincerely advocate that Eclogues interpretation. There's a
| _mode of thinking_ behind this stuff that, to put it
| tactfully, confounds people about what 's the difference
| between fiction and reality).
| grej wrote:
| When I call my bank, they use a "voiceprint identification" that
| requires me to say a sentence and then matches that to my
| voiceprint.
|
| I am wondering if that is a massive security hole.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| yes, even before this technology
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| I haven't seen any sort of argument for why it _would_ be
| secure. I guess it 's probably no worse than the other common
| banking practice, one-factor auth using a 4-6 digit numeric
| only password.
| davelondon wrote:
| "goes viral"
| thrill wrote:
| Voices are not copyrighted and do not require "authorization". If
| my nephew wants to go around sounding like Goofy all the time (as
| he does) he is free to do so, though it may cost him invitations
| to dinner - it'd be the same if he was using Attenborough's
| voice.
| leobg wrote:
| Interesting take.
|
| The counter argument is that the basic idea behind copyright is
| that the expression of personality through the way you
| formulate ideas is a part of "you".
|
| That somebody would start talking like you, or looking like
| you, and enrich himself by essentially cloning you just has
| historically, never been a problem serious enough to create
| legislation. Just as there was probably no copyright law before
| Gutenberg.
| seydor wrote:
| This would be more fun than many of the videos i'm watching. When
| will someone make a video generator for this?
| numpad0 wrote:
| Quoting another user from an adjacent topic[0]; I for myself
| believe in 1., it seems generative AI tools is slowly becoming
| popular as _lesser_ substitute to human arts, wherever there has
| to be data but any noise will do. No one listened to low-effort
| Text-to-Speech content pre-AI, some did for high-effort TTS
| content, and in neither case it was because the quality of
| synthesis was bad or good.
|
| > I think Max Tegmark said there's 3 main camps of people talking
| about AI:
|
| > 1. The people who think AI won't really work (at least in some
| fundamental way - it might make some stochastic melody but it
| won't have any creative spark to it).
|
| > 2. The people who think AI will be able to do everything better
| than humans (in every possible way, at least as far as a mere
| human can tell) and that this will be great.
|
| > 3. The people who think AI will be able to do everything better
| than humans (in every possible way, at least as far as a mere
| human can tell) and that this will be terrible.
|
| 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38289548
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