Computers are back at it again, easing our lives while creating moral quandaries quicker than we can (ironically) process. 2023, it seems, is the year in which we contend with the rise of AI, as evidenced by the ongoing Writer's Guild of America strike, and now the voice-acting community finds itself at something of a digital crossroads.
Erica Lindbeck portrays the English voice of fan-favourite character Futaba Sakura in Persona 5 (and will reprise the role in Tactica), along with dozens of others across gaming and anime. A video surfaced online earlier this week in which an AI-generated depiction of Futaba's (Lindbeck's) voice sings Bo Burnham's bleak little ditty, "Welcome to the Internet".
Lindbeck asked for the video to be removed, and the original poster kindly acquiesced, deleting it from YouTube. This being the internet, however, dozens more accounts reposted it. Then Lindbeck, for her reasonable request, was harassed by other Twitter users to such an extent she eventually closed her account entirely.
Josh Keaton, AKA Spectacular Spider-Man, and MGS3 Revolver Ocelot, was suitably quick on the draw, hitting back at a since-deleted reposter with the below zinger. This was seconded by Yuri Lowenthal, another Spider-Man PlayStation fans will be familiar with, who has also been in just about everything ever. Jennifer Hale and David Hayter recently took a strong stance on the situation generally in comments made to Eurogamer.
The meeting of AI and art was always going to be a messy one, and we won't pretend to understand all of its implications, who is entitled to what, and where this ultimately goes. Creatives and heavy-weights within the audio community see the situation quite starkly, however, and were happy to wade in.
We won't link to the video that kicked the whole thing off, but we've seen it floating around and have to say it is fairly convincing. Fairly innocuous in this case, but it's still early days, and it seems like something the industry is going to need to grapple with moving forward. Sound off in the comments section below.
[source gamesradar.com]
Comments 50
This is going to be an absolute mire to figure out legally. If I use your voice as training data, does that give you a legal right to take down the results of that AI model? What if instead I just try really hard to do an impression of what you sound like, tweak it in a DAW until it sounds close, and then use that to train the AI? What if I find someone on Fiverr that does a spot-on impression and pay them to make me some recordings to use as training data? How would you tell these situations apart? How can you be certain that AI was even used? What if I just paid someone that sounds exactly like you to make my dumb meme? I'm not obligated to prove anything to anyone about the content I make unless you sue me and a court forces me to. Are you going to sue everyone that makes something that sounds kind of like you in case your actual voice was used at some point in the pipe?
I don't even like most AI generated stuff. Once the novelty of hearing Dagoth Ur spout memes or hearing the president do the GTA V Lamar roast wears off it's all so soulless and empty.
I get that you'd want something like that removed. Especially if someone were to make an AI sounding like you and being a jerk and possibly costing you your job.
I love Erica's va work so seeing her being bullied like this is a real shame.
AI is such a pain the ass, hopefully governments start to look into this.
@StrawberryTurtle How does AI really benefit humankind and not just corporations or entertainment companies trying to not pay talent?
A: It doesn't. It only works to our detriment.
Easy goddamned solution if you ask me. Dune prophesied this. and it is going to get much worse.
I thought AI was supposed to help us leave drudgery behind so we could focus on more creative pursuits, but it seems like we’re going to keep the drudgery for ourselves and let AI do art. Well done, humanity.
@WhensDinner The thing is, thats a very stressful and scary thing to put someone through. It opens the door to actions with severe consequences on a person who did nothing wrong just by existing. It would make them feel terrible. Why would you do that to someone just because you may get away with it? A little empathy goes a long way.
Just because you "can" do something doesn't mean its right to do. There are many things which are technically or probably legal but that are immoral because they cause harm to others. I wouldn't even say this might be legal anyway.
@WhensDinner to the first question the answer is yes, if you use someone else "something" to train your AI they have the right to take legal actions because that something belongs to them.
For everything else it would depend, in the case of videos there are now laws for impersonation so it doesn't matter if it's their voice of from an actor who has a very similar voice it would apply in the cases where the result is being linked in some way to the person but there would be cases for example where maybe you use the voice to do something completely unrelated to the person who was the original source or the reference. In those cases at least for now there aren't enough laws but it's just a matter of time for that.
And about how to know if something is AI generated, as any other technology there are tests to know so and the more advance AI is the more advanced these tests will have to be.
@WhensDinner "If I use your voice as training data, does that give you a legal right to take down the results of that AI model?"
Are you using that data as part of a commercial project you intent to monetize? Are you using it in a malicious or unseemly manner? Are you using it in any way that those results could actually be confused for the actor or actress it was trained on and cause them harm (personal or professional) or to lose work?
If the answer to any of those questions is "Yes", then the answer to your question is also yes.
Damn, poor Erica.. Well, Twitter is a cesspool of negative people anyway so she might be better off without it.
That said.. the rise of AI is concerning. What if they do replace voice actors/artists and perhaps even actors someday? I should really hope it does NOT come to that..
I think making ai voice with someone voice (especially va) is illegal.
@GeneJacket The answer to my first question is obviously yes. It was meant as a baseline to show how easy it is to move to a situation where the answer isn't so clear. While I think most can easily agree that using someone's voice against their will isn't right, what if the end result is the exact same but their voice wasn't actually used to make the product? Without ways to answer these questions we can't even begin to make a framework for what's legal and what's not.
@Cashews I don't want to sound rude,but this sounds like a boomers response.
No way do you genuinely think AI has no benefit to our everyday life.
@Amnesiac what is there going to be for us to do? The world is going to be like 'Downton Abbey'. It's going back to the gilded age with lords and their serfs cleaning all of their forks. Or mass warfare when people can't eat. Or our lives like a Cyberpunk game/novel but it won't be cool at all.
@GeneJacket No offense, but the questions that you asked were even more ambiguous than that of his original question.
@rachetmarvel How does AI benefit you or I that makes our lives better?
and I take no offense what-so-ever.
@Cashews Do a quick Google search, we have been using AI way before 2022.
It isn't a new thing.
@rachetmarvel so instead of listing one singular thing you told me to do a google search. check. got it. nada. zilch. thanks for the tip.
This is a huge minefield isn't it? I'll just say that I always find the "X sings such and such" as amusing and little else. Something that gives me a chuckle as I scroll my feeds.
@WhensDinner I mean...sure, but AI is one of the big linchpins in the current WGA Strike, and an even bigger part of the SAG-AFTRA strike that's likely starting within the next few days. We're not going to be waiting long to see AI clauses in contracts if creative industries want to keep churning out content to make them money.
@rachetmarvel I also don't think it has a benefit to humanity, just because something is more technologically advance doesn't make it better. You'll find that alot, if not all indigenous tribes live very happy fulfilling lives and don't understand the concept of suicide. Meanwhile us westerners with cars, sky scrappers, the internet and more are throwing ourselves off buildings, and putting bullets in eachother and ourselves daily.
@Cashews you do know AI can be used for a whole lot more than just fake voices, right?
At this point it's over. Most of the human race is simply no longer needed. It's just excess biomass with no function. The dream of unlimited slave labor for the nobles has been realized. No more filthy peasants to put up with! Only took 10,000 years but we're finally here.
@rachetmarvel you literally just told @cashews to ask the AI how AI is good and not bad for us....
@Cashews @gpimlott But we all know that Voiced AI is going to be used to troll, steal and abuse. We all know that this will be used to trick some parents/grandparents out of some money.
The even bigger question is AI in the hands of humans mostly a good or bad thing and we know with the internet it's like giving a small child a loaded gun this is not going to be a good thing.
@Cashews @NEStalgia AI is a tool, it can be good or bad.
If you have the licenses for the things you're using, you can use it to automate, simulate, and even create and recreate assets that are very repetitive for programmers, designers, and even QA testers and writers.
Ray Tracing is a good example of AI technology done right. DLSS is another, along with AI enabled performance modes that can actually simulate the frames that might be missing in moving images when using more performance draining features like the above mentioned Ray Tracing, resulting in drastically higher frame rates. I'm running 4070TI in my rig, and can run Cyberpunk at 90FPS, Psycho mode, with Path Tracing (basically Ray Tracing on steroids) thanks to DLSS made possible by AI, and it looks amazing.
It's getting better and better exponentially fast. You can look up what Nvidia is doing with RTX Remix to see just the surface of what is to come when utilizing AI, and if you don't want to look it up, basically, RTX Remix is a way to use AI to add better lighting, textures, and physics to aging software like Morrowind.
More regulation will come, when more and more people decide they want to sue third parties for using their likenesses, their art, assets, code, any IP basically. Unfortunately, that starts with suing smaller parties and companies to set a precedent, and than going after larger organizations once that precedent is set, because then it will open up larger organizations to seeking recompense for damages from other larger companies.
AI is only used to make talentless people feel like creators.
I suppose AI is quite a big threat to voice actors, companies could start using to clone their voice and not need the original actors any more.
Which is obviously one of the many huge court cases involving AI that we've probably got to look forward to.
Erica really not having a good year. First her boyfriend and now this crap.
What a bunch of entitled narcissists who think this girl doesn't have the right to her own voice. The internet has really been great for bully culture. I say down with online anonymity in public spaces. Force people to be responsible for what they post.
I hate AI.
It might not end up destroying the world with killer cyborgs, but it will still end up doing a lot of harm.
@Cashews AI has been used for medical diagnosis and its shown to be quicker and more accurate then the doctors.
You can't have the good without the bad.
What an awful situation. Erica has absolutely every right to ask it to be taken down and yet people harass her for doing so. Just depressing to see it happen.
Something really must be done about AI voice use. I don't know what but something has to give. Imagine if instead of singing this song somebody made her AI voice say something absolutely awful and mean spirited in the worst way and was convincing enough to pass as the real thing. That could legitimately not just ruin her career but also her reputation.
I get that AI is inevitable and all that but we really gotta check ourselves before we wreck ourselves as a species with this sort of thing.
@Cashews does the AI stuff ever get explained thoroughly in the main novels? Or do you need to read one of the other books for it? I've been meaning to start Dune Messiah already and probably will somewhere next month but the whole stance on AI and the use of it has been a bit confusing regarding the war that preceded it but every house still has a mentat 🤔
@NEStalgia The good news for me is that AI mostly sucks at accounting and taxes, because it has a very difficult time differentiating accounting rules and tax situations. The nobles will never replace me! Well, they might, but probably not.
@WhensDinner why can't you use your own voice for your training data?
@Xaessya @Constable_What Sure, and then after after some scores of millions were dead we learned how to tame socialism for the good parts. Sucks for those millions sacrificed for the greater good, but we stuck a stone slab in a park to remember their noble sacrifice, so it's all even.
You can use it to happily automate a few annoying tasks. You can also use it to dispose of the need loads and loads of people leading to mass poverty and despair while the folks that automated away their lives can now take 10% of the extra left over and buy more automation, which is precisely what company's have already been vowing to do. But the employment rate will be fine. Humans are much cheaper, more durable, and more replaceable than automated equipment for the dangerous work, there's billions of them with nothing to do!
The problem is the same people don't get the good and the bad. Some people get the good, because others get the bad. Not without a total replacement of the entire socio-economoic model to something other than anything that has currently been invented, as none of the current ones are compatible with what amounts to an unlimited slave labor force, which is what this is. Forget for a moment that it's machine and imagine it's simply a massive captured force of slaves dumped on the economy. Manufactured or human, the effect on the socio-economic model is the same. And a replacement system that's compatible with limitless slavery both needs to be invented, and will only be possible after extensive upheaval and warfare between highly efficient AI equipped forces, or simply the decimation of the peasantry by its masters in said conflict. But every such change has only ever occurred after populations have been ground into dust and pure despair, which seems inevitable with this.
@gpimlott I sure do!
You know you guys sound like stooges for the tech industry right?
"It has lots and lots of benefits not just art!"
Me: Name one.
You: ...
So again, name one benefit that the everyman is receiving from AI right now. Lots of future promises sure. But right now I can name 50 detriments just off the top of my head while no one here can name one benefit.
Sounds like a swell deal right?
@Cherip-the-Ripper Not in the original 6 novels. Maybe in the Brian Herbert ones but I don't count those as the original vision.
No, the AI Butlerian jihads are always this ominous warning, this ever-present thing that forms the Dune universe. It is implied it was awful and reached every corner of the universe. Every law reverberates that event.
That's what I love about Dune - they don't spell everything out.
@Amnesiac
I always said that nobody would care that the robots were coming for our jobs until they came for the jobs of artists.
How's it feel now? That lineup at Wal-Mart doesn't seem so bad now does it?
@Cashews I think @Constable_What named a few
@Cashews
Actually, I used Chat GPT to write a training document for office chairs that was accurate and covered all the bases. It saved me hours of research, compiling, and typing. So that's one benefit I guess.
@MikeOrator it is a benefit to you. I have a young child. Knowing she will use chatgpt to think for her is to great detriment to me. Let's net it out then.
I can think of one. Warfare. But that doesn't benefit us at all - the opposite. Unless it negates missiles one day. Doubtful.
@Cashews "How does AI benefit you or I that makes our lives better?"
Chatbots.
Improving recommendations on various services and storefronts.
Fraud prevention.
Moderation on online communities.
Personalized assistants.
Helping reduce gruntwork for people in a variety of fields.
Spam filters in your email.
Facial recognition.
Safety features in a ton of modern cars.
Combined with robotics, dangerous or precision work can be done with a minimum of error or risk to human life.
AI can be used to model complex systems such as the weather, or help improve our scientific understanding of disease.
etc.
There's so much more. I guarantee AI likely touches almost every aspect of your life without you even realizing it. As the person you were responding to said, none of this is new. The technology is continuously improving, and so much can be done with it to improve human life.
@Cashews
Like all technology, it's not the tech that is good or bad. It's how we choose to use it. However, to your point, the human race will always find a way to use new tech to exploit, oppress or destroy..
"AI art" is a blight on this world in my opinion. It exists for talentless hacks who have zero creative bones in their body.
@NEStalgia If you had slaves that could work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with minimal need for maintenance, and every sector of industry was using it the economy would flourish under capitalism. More money made, more taxes collected, more budget for social programs, less jobs sure, but more money overall. Countries everywhere are experimenting with forms of universal basic income, and even in the states stimulus checks were a real thing, this AI "slave force" has no need for money or comfort. With AI tackling the more mundane things, human beings can tackle things that actually will matter in a highly efficient capitalist society like people that are attempting to cheat the system.
For every doomsday scenario, there's an optimistic one. I merely provided context to the debate. There are good things AI can accomplish, especially in the video game industry... Nvidia is so ahead right now in terms of technology, and it's because of their investment in AI.
Also...socialism and communism are two seperate things, and many many men, women, and children died due to democracy, capitalism, and any other form of government. Imperfect solutions get innovated and itterated upon, you shouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water so to speak.
@Cashews automated warfare spares human lives on the side that is using automated weapons, which would quite literally benefit that side, an automated weapons industry would also benefit the economy of the side that is utilizing those weapons.
It's a detriment depending on perspective, but as I have said, AI is a tool, and thus either detrimental or beneficial but not inherently one or the other.
And I've already named several benefits you can use right now. Better performance AND better visuals in video games is the holy grail of features.
I also have an app that uses AI to filter and screen spam calls... It gives me a lot of peace of mind.
@wiiware Its starting to remind me of Scream ghostface
As usual an innocent person becomes collateral damage so a mob pathetic losers can get their jollies by bullying people.
AI just developed a new anti-biotic too. The people who are saying it has no benefits are clueless.
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