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They stole my voice with AI | Jeff Geerling
(www.jeffgeerling.com)
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this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2024
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We are going to need much stronger image rights for individuals in the AI age.
There’s no way to stop the technology itself (although current development may plateau at some point), so there must be strong legal restrictions on abusing it.
Yeah, the genie is out of the bottle on this one. I can do voice cloning with consumer hardware and available models. That can't be undone, but good legal protections would be nice.
That said, the Johanson case is a bad example because it really didn't sound much like her at all. It was a chipper yound white lady sound, but to my ear sounded nothing like Johanson. It did sound kinda like a character she voiced, but I would not gave confused the two. They cloned the voice of someone they paid to give a similar inflection as the voice from Her. That's far removed from cloning Johanson herself. It is closer to people making music "in the style of".
Do you want the rich to be richer? Because that's how you make the rich richer. People like Scarlett Johanson will be able to license their likeness for millions or billions. Of course, we would have the same rights; the same rights to own a mansion and a yacht. Feeling lucky?
That's the kind of capitalism that Marx rages against: Laws that let people demand money without contributing labor.
There's no future where this affects me in the slightest. Okay, so jeff Goldblum can get a few more shekels for renting his voice. This doesn't affect me: that's his JOB, whether they stole his likeness and paid him, paid him and cloned his voice, or paid him to do the speaking. It's the same thing, imho.
Talk to me when people who don't have their voice recorded get an unfair leg-up for selling it. I'll be okay with it then, too, but let me know.
The real risk is the voice being sold to Disney or Sony Music, and then youtube videos are getting removed because of similarities.
Voice tones aren't all that unique in most cases and there's too much room for abuse imo. The Scarjo and open ai scandal is a good example of this. The voices weren't that similar and I'm just not interested in having celebrities own whole spectrums like that.
And it's a landlord's job to collect rent. It's Elon Musk's job to maximize shareholder value.
It's ok if you watch out for numero uno. I'm not expecting more. But you are wrong to think that this doesn't affect you. You can't opt out of society. You won't be able to avoid products with licensed voices. Your taxes will be paying for enforcement against "pirates". And most importantly, every new privilege for the rich and famous changes society. With every step, the elite becomes more entrenched and the bottom more hopeless. It's a matter of enlightened self-interest. If we only reject what directly hurts us individually, then the elites will simply build themselves a new feudalism.
Are you really conflating people who make their living based upon their acting skills and likeness with landlords?... Wow.
I am asking this in good faith as a neurodivergent individual:
Could you please clarify where you're coming at this from?
Is it that you feel that actors and other creatives are less legitimate as workers than others?
Is it that you think that LLMs could be a path towards AGI that could save humans from themselves?
Is it something else entirely?
Myself, I am coming at it from the perspective of someone who has worked in the tech industry for a while, and is familiar with the underlying technologies and how hyped they've been. I additionally personally know several professional actors, SAG-AFTRA and non-union, who have been materially impacted by AI and corpo bad faith in recent years (especially streaming services and game companies). On top of that, as a millennial, I have experienced significant financial setbacks due to unfettered corporate greed and know many peers who are much worse off than myself because of price gouging and stagnant wages.
My main motivations in AI conversations are undermining hype and ensuring that people take ethics into consideration, while looking at technologies that do have some actually interesting use cases and could lead to other interesting things.
No. I am talking about rent-seeking.
Rent-seeking is the act of growing one's existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth.[1] Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society. They result in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, stifled competition, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality,[2][3] risk of growing corruption and cronyism, decreased public trust in institutions, and potential national decline.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
You could argue to what a degree landlords or Elon Musk are engaged in rent-seeking. Likeness rights are a clear example, though.
Imagine in the near future. Some famous person licenses their likeness for a show, game, movie. Maybe the producer hires an unknown actor that is then digitally altered into the famous person, like a more advanced version of Gollum. Or maybe the VFX artists can do it on their own. These guys work. The famous person does nothing. They might be dead, while the rights-owners still collect license fees.
Oh! I see. We are starting from very different places on looking at the situation. I see one's likeness as a part of their identity that they have a fundamental right as a human being to agency over. I place it in a similar category to one's labor - can exercising one's agency over their body really be considered "rent-seeking"?
I see the uses of AI "plagiarism engines" in arts and creative trades by major corporations as just another way to alienate workers from their labor and exploit them.
By definition, I'd think.
Major respect for VFX artists, stage engineers, and all the trades under IATSE. They do huge amounts of very skilled work. They are the foundation on which all modern media rests and I'm glad that a greater share of them have unionized.
Here, I think, is a bit that I do agree with you on. One's likeness should never be able to be owned by anyone else. Die and it's public domain. Just like the ridiculous copyright terms that Disney secured, the idea of one's likeness outlasting their life, let alone someone else having agency over it is preposterous.
The scenario that you propose is part of why unions exist in the first place. SAG-AFTRA hasn't been doing amazingly on the subject but, they're definitely doing more than about any union that I've seen in relation to AI impacting a trade and making it more susceptible exploitation. I would suggest that in your scenario, both actors (and the producer) are acting in an unethical manner. The famous actor is pulling up the ladder behind them, not giving the junior actor the opportunity to gain prestige in their trade. The junior actor is participating in exploitation that should be grounds to strike the production. The producer is using the licensed likeness as leverage to pay and credit the junior actor less.
The situation should not happen and, if SAG-AFTRA allows it, actors should form a new union that treats all of its members when respect.
First of all, I am not impressed by this kind of emotional manipulation. You are talking about exercising agency, power, over other people's bodies. If someone, whether a VFX artist or a hobbyist, would use a likeness without a license, you want them stopped. At the end of the day that means that LEOs will use physical force. You may not think of something like copyright being enforced through physical force, but that is what happens if someone steadfastly refuses to pay fines or damages.
Enforcing intellectual property, like a likeness right, means ultimately exercising power over other people's bodies. The body whose likeness it is, may not be involved at all. In the typical case of a Hollywood star, they would be completely unaware of what the enforcers are doing.
Rent-seeking is an economics term. Rent-seeking is as rent-seeking does. You may feel that society - the common people -have to suffer for "justice", like people were expected to suffer for the diving rights of kings. But you can't expect people not to remark the negative consequences. Well, I guess if I were living in such a monarchy, subject to the divine right of a king, I would be quite circumspect. I wouldn't want to be tortured or imprisoned, after all. And yet it moves.
Usually, rent-seeking involves property, and yet the right to own property is internationally recognized as a human right.
We're probably not on the same page regarding terminology. This sounds like a Karl Marx idea. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx%27s_theory_of_alienation
Obviously that's not what you mean. I guess I'm just surprised to see these hints of leftism mixed in with conservative economics.
...is fundamentally a conservative organization. It's no coincidence that Ronald Reagan was president of SAG, before becoming president of the US. They will favor the in-group over the out-group and the top over everyone at the bottom. That's what the doctrines you are repeating are designed for.
I promise you that I am not attempting emotional manipulation. We just appear to be coming at this from very different assumptions on the nature of likeness. I see it in relation to one's identity, to which I see it as tightly coupled, where you seem to be approachining it from the perspective that it is an asset or a commodity. We're not talking about taking inspiration from another human being's performance but plagiarism of it and copying their external identity in voice or image, with the express intent of compensating them less (when it comes to the studios).
I don't see how that tracks.
Oh! You seem to be inferring that the hobbyist or VFX artist in this case has a fundamental right to the fruits of an AI-cloned actor's labor, with or without their consent. I cannot agree with that. By that reasoning, enforcing laws against fraud, forgery, and identity theft is exerting power over the would-be forger or identity thief by preventing them from assuming the victim's identity and draining their savings.
I do not see it primarily as an intellectual property issue (though there are definitely significant ethical issues related to IP in LLMs/plagiarism engines). I see it as an identity and labor issue. The studios and producers are pushing for the tech because they want to exploit people. VFX artists included.
Oh, it very much is. By taking away an artist or creative worker's very identity and reselling it, those marketing and leveraging these models are alienating these workers from their labor and their own means of production. Intellectual workers and creatives are still workers; cut one and we all bleed.
Not only that, those selling access to the myself are literally participating in rent-seeking for an amalgam of creative workers' stolen labor. Are IP laws fucked? Absolutely. Do they and identity protection laws and systems need to be overhauled to be able to handle modern challenges and technology? Yup. Does supporting corpos in their exploitation of fellow workers because a tiny percentage of them are disgustingly wealthy help anyone but the ultra-wealthy? Nope.
Is this a "everyone who doesn't agree with me is a bad guy" bit of ad hominem here? Because I'd really like to see how "workers should be compensated fairly for their labor, not have it stolen and leveraged to exploit other workers" is in any way in line with conservatism.
This is not a statement that meshes with facts. Political contributions from members are so far blue that it's not even close. And that's including the 2008 spike from old rich racists. At worst, there are a lot of neo-libs but there's also a fair number of soc-dems. I've never met any member who felt favorably towards Ronnie the Union-busting shitbag. Beyond that, I've yet to meet a SAG-AFTRA member that is anti-union, while finding someone who is pro-union as a member of a trades union is nearly as rare as finding a unicorn.
There is unjust hierarchy in play, yes. Voice and video game talent, especially, have and continue to be treated as less-thans and where the union should be doing around-the-clock membership drives throughout an industry and pressuring studios to sign union contracts for more productions, they instead, generally, do about fuck-all and are happy to make concessions that "real" screen actors would never face.
I get the feeling that maybe this is less about intellectual property and more about bucket-crabbing and potentially about justification of support of tech that is based upon ethically compromised foundations and is being leveraged as an ethically-devoid weapon against labor, not to the workers' benefit. If you consider yourself a leftist and/or pro-labor, I'd recommend some serious self-reflection because it seems like you have a bit of a hatred for a whole segment of laborers.
Also, to be clear, hobbyists aren't the problematic group in all of this at all. It's the producers and studios leveraging technology to exploit. However, sometimes we all have to do things that we would rather not or give up things that we want because doing otherwise causes measureable harm to others.
You do realize that the vast majority of voice actors are not famous right? These are people working in a highly competitive labor market that has one of the few influential unions in the US outside of trades. Most of these AI companies aren't going after Johansson and the like if they have to pay instead of steal. They're going for those who are less established and trying to get a break, making them easier to exploit.
Yes, that's the point. You are not defending voice actors by demanding likeness rights.
I am not sure why this is so difficult to understand. Maybe there is some confusion about the technology. You only need a few seconds of audio to clone a voice. You don't need hours of audio from a professional. That's why the tech can be used for scams. Likeness rights won't create jobs for voice actors. Only free money for famous people. You can also generate random voices.
Leading AI voice companies like Elevenlabs require you to have permission to clone a voice. But how can they check if their customers are being truthful? In practice, it simply means that famous people, whose voices are known, may not be imitated. Likeness rights, by their nature, can only be enforced, with any kind of effectiveness, for the rich and famous.
OpenAI tried to hire Johansson. When she declined, they hired a different, less famous actress. Maybe they did that to defend against lawsuits, or maybe it gives better results. If they had engineered a nonexistent voice, it would be almost impossible to make the case that they did not imitate Johansson. But still, everyone is talking about that poor famous, rich person who got ripped off. What about the actress who actually provided the voice? I guess she can look for another job, because Johansson owns that voice type.
You mean Ronald Reagan's old outfit? Do you even know who Ronald Reagan was?
Knowing people who are not famous but are SAG-AFTRA actors, I'm going to have to disagree very much on that. A regular contractual battle is the "in perpetuity" clause for one's likeness. This happens at all levels. Essentially, clients often try to sneak a clause in that grants them the exclusive right to use the actor's likeness forever. While this does not mean that the actor does not receive pay, it binds them to the client in a way that prevents them from getting other work and diminishes their bargaining ability.
If the actress was performing in an affectation to impersonate Johansson, she was effectively acting no better than a scab and enabling corpos to violate consent. Knowingly impersonating another loving actor for purposes other than parody is a scummy thing to do and the actress was ethically bound to refuse the job.
Being famous doesn't make someone less of a person. They're just people like the rest of us (though generally more financially lucky). We all have a right to our identity and likeness and to decide how our likeness is used. Legitimatizing the violation of that consent is not a path that benefits any worker.
That's a poor and fallacious argument there. California is Ronnie "Pull Up the Ladder" Reagan's home state does that make all Californians Reaganites by association?
How do likeness rights benefit non-famous people?
Turning likeness into an intellectual property implies the right to sell it. Apparently you want to argue for likeness, so I don't see why you would use such clauses as an argument.
It's not an argument, as you have recognized. I hoped it would make you think.
You know that not everyone in Hollywood is part of SAG-AFTRA, right? Have you ever wondered what happened to them during the strike? I guess they just have to fend for themselves. If the "union" doesn't care about those guys, do you think the leadership cares about the small members?
Actors are a conservative lot. At the bottom, you have the "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" and at the top... Well, you know. It's not common on lemmy to cheer for such a system.