GTA 5 actor goes nuclear on AI company that made a voice chatbot of him

https://www.pcgamer.com/gta-5-actor-goes-nuclear-on-ai-company-that-made-a-voice-chatbot-of-him-im-not-worried-about-being-replaced-i-just-hate-these-fkers/

by pavel_lishin • 3 years ago

80 83 3 years ago

pcgamer.com

oniony• 3 years ago

WAME should publish an apology on YouTube, but in Ned Luke's voice.

comboy• 3 years ago

but done with some voice actor

kevingadd7• 3 years ago

Yes, antagonizing high-profile voice actors seems like a good way to avoid establishing a bad precedent in court. Judges love seeing intentional, spiteful harassment from a for-profit corporation

pavel_lishin• 3 years ago

Sorry about the hyperbolic headline, but it does conform to HN guidelines :P

ShamelessC3• 3 years ago

Site is a shit show without an adblocker.

nouryqt• 3 years ago

Archive link should filter out all the annoyances when it's finished: https://archive.is/wip/5RNMP

ShamelessC3• 3 years ago

Awesome thank you!

nashashmi5• 3 years ago

Browse it without JS!

almost_usual• 3 years ago

Scumbag AI company? I’m shocked.

belter• 3 years ago

AI is the new Crypto...

rvz• 3 years ago

Another AI company on the grift, with unauthorized voice cloning.

Good luck in court. There is absolutely nothing fair use about that so this AI company needs to find another excuse for their scheming before the lawsuits pile up to bankrupt them.

shitlord• 3 years ago

Where exactly is the legal boundary? Are you allowed to clone the voice of a former politician like President Obama for use in a museum exhibit? What about dead people like JFK or Michael Jackson? This particular instance of voice cloning seems hard to defend, but some guidance would be helpful.

netbioserror• 3 years ago

I realize it's a company, but aside from a hacker's toolkit, this may be the first big, catastrophic moment in history where normal non-technical people come face to face with the uncontrollable nature of open source and the absolute ephemerality of software. Given things like Stable Diffusion and locally-runnable language models have been around since the inception, it's not that the cat got out of the bag, it's that a bag was never even made. The non-technical crowd is going to have a very difficult time understanding that AI proliferation is completely out of their control and is not ever going to be in their control.

Another coin in the well for just how new and fertile the computer industry is. So many monumental things yet to happen.

nashashmi5• 3 years ago

AI renditions. Or more appropriately, artificial renditions. How close are they to the real thing? Is it noticeable, like kids wearing and acting out in Brad Pitt masks? Or is it unnoticeable, and therefore deceptive?

Solution is to have laws prohibiting deception by AI plus regulation that AI generators need to have explicit tells that this was generated by AI, for image, audio, and video.

Once deception issue is cleared, then address a person's claim of RIGHTS, that they own their face, their style of body movements, and their voices, and its depiction. No laws are made on this. The only law that could be leveraged is copyright law. If a person's voice, style of body movement, and face is copyrighted, copyright law can be leveraged. What is the process of copyrighting? Copyrighting a movie? Copyrighting an audio tape? Copyrighting on image? Is everything automatically a copyright? Or is the distribution explicitly made under copyright?

debo_2• 3 years ago

I appreciate that he stayed more or less in character while he was screaming on the internet.

Animats• 3 years ago

Tribute bands have the same problem.[1] Sort of. That's mostly a trademark issue.

There's a crackdown underway on Elvis impersonators.[2] Not clear how that will come out.

It's not clear that the actor has a case. He's just an employee. Rockstar Games owns the trademark.

[1] https://lawyerdrummer.com/2020/01/are-tribute-acts-actually-...

[2] https://www.reviewjournal.com/entertainment/entertainment-co...

kevingadd7• 3 years ago

Voice actors generally are freelance, not employees. He almost certainly did not sign away the right to use his voice or a simulated version of it.

itake8• 3 years ago

When Justin Roiland was fired from tv shows he voiced, was the tv show wrong to hire a different voice actor to make a similar voice?

Charlie_267• 3 years ago

I’m an actor and a software developer. And AI replacing us (the nobodies, the extras, ie not Tom Cruise) scares the shit out of me. Long live the theatre I guess.

nashashmi5• 3 years ago

AI won't replace you. It will enhance you and give you way too much work to cram into a small window of time. AI will be a series of trials and errors first, before it becomes something that you will learn how to finetune.

I remember the Web was this chaotic place of info "at your fingertip" and no one mentioned how difficult it is to find stuff. AI is just as fancy and shiny.

kevingadd7• 3 years ago

"AI will enhance you" is a really hard sell for voice acting. Voice actors are paid to use their physical training and experience in order to perform as directed in a unique way. Even if a voice actor were to go "now I trained this model on my own voice so I don't have to perform anymore", no sensible game studio or animation director would want to pay full price for an AI performance. The AI isn't going to be able to satisfy the precise demands of the director at a recording session, at least without a lot of domain specific training and extra work.

It's like telling a guitarist that AI will empower them because now the computer will play music for them.

An actor could probably additionally sell access to an AI version of their voice on the side, but doing that is devaluing their voice, arguably.

gosub1002• 3 years ago

Even if you're right that AI will "enhance" actors' skill, then that will raise the bar to an un-realistic standard that consumers will then expect. That's not a good thing.

Charlie_267• 3 years ago

I so want you to be right, but do you know what ‘enshitification‘ is?

j-bos• 3 years ago

The theatre's an intersting concept, like live music. I understand that every town once had plenty of performances and shows, but then came record record players, and the "best" would outcompete the local shows, ditto for movies and tv. Seems this is a continuation of such.

falcor84• 3 years ago

Assuming he's not immortal, I wouldn't be surprised if after Tom Cruise dies, his estate (Scientology?) will keep making Tom Cruise movies.

gosub1002• 3 years ago

Already happened (in multiple ways) with Tupac. Released posthumous albums and reproduced his likeness holographically. I think its inevitable that actors will do the same.

yifanl2• 3 years ago

I'm resigned that it was all inevitable, but also just upset that we spent all this effort learning to automate away the parts of life that are actually interesting first.

How did people decide that writing and art and music and theatre were the things that we needed to automate out? Especially with these fields, it's not even about removing drudgery - the very process of creating is the interesting part!

brayhite• 3 years ago

I’m gonna strike a guess that the more interesting part is also the most expensive part. Replacing that means saving money.

Charlie_267• 3 years ago

I don’t believe it’s the inevitable yet. What if it’s shit and you don’t want to see hundreds of AI extras? Never mind an AI Tom Cruise (who won’t be getting any academy awards if he’s entirely computer generated).

thefurdrake2• 3 years ago

It has also been super gross to me to watch these infant technologies be thrown at removing humans from creative tasks. The whole point was supposed to be to automate the mundane, boring bullshit so we could do more things involving higher thought, not less.

seoulmetro2• 3 years ago

No one decided that. Those are just the things with the most quantifiable datasets to absorb and also not quantifiable enough to have to provide sources for their origins.

ggambetta• 3 years ago

Hey, I'm a fellow actor/SWE. Wondering what's your story. Feel free to reach out, there's no contact details on your profile.

Charlie_267• 3 years ago

Nice to meet you. We need to make an AI agent that gets us all the work. I’ll send you a message.

debo_2• 3 years ago

cup of cold sick

I looked up what this means, and I really wish I hadn't.

BloodyIron• 3 years ago

WAME's response is offensive. I cannot honestly believe they thought this would actually go anywhere positive. I don't know if it was covered in the article (maybe I missed it) but the Voice Actor sure didn't seem to be _consulted before_ this was made. How the fuck did they honestly think the original Voice Actor would not even raise the slightest bit of concern?

Chances are people were paid to make this thing, and some fuck-head manager saw $$$ but didn't once stop to think about liabiility $$$.

Never heard of WAME before, but I suspect they're about to get WAME'd into the dirt.

Hamuko• 3 years ago

How did they also think that Rockstar/Take-Two would be fine with it?

Jensson• 3 years ago

Microsoft made a coding AI based on your code, yet software engineers seems to be happy having such bots. So software engineers seems to have a different mindset about these things.

neilv2• 3 years ago

The violation of creators and artists with AI tools (copyright violation, impersonation/likeness stealing) is a serious matter that a lot of people aren't taking seriously or respecting.

The biggest problem seems to be with companies exploiting that law and/or courts haven't kept up with technology, and companies trying to run past that and grab billions/trillions before the government finally steps in (and it's too late, like Uber and Airbnb ignoring regulations).

There's a lesser problem with random people piggybacking onto those company efforts, and contributing to the problem like a thousand papercuts, as well as helping to normalize the violations.

kevingadd7• 3 years ago

A good example of normalization is that a twitch/YouTube streamer with a large following set up an automated TTS system for his chat to read user messages using ai versions of the characters from gta5, which presumably includes Ned Luke. It's cute and very casual but that also makes it kind of insidious in that now any random user can put words into Ned's mouth without even learning how to use the tech, and it'll be broadcast to a big audience.

63• 3 years ago

It's not just one streamer doing this. There are services[0] providing tons of presumably unlicensed tts voices to any streamers who want them and I've seen them all over the place. It really bothers me how little thought people are putting into this before doing it.

[0]https://tts.monster/

itake8• 3 years ago

If a voice actor dies (or needs to be replaced, see Justin roiland), should their character die with them or can another person perform that role?

If there a difference between another human acting a character vs a model?

sundaeofshock2• 3 years ago

“If there a difference between another human acting a character vs a model?”

Yes. One is an actual living, breathing human who uses their lived experience in order to bring nuance and feeling to their performance.

The other is a machine.

azemetre2• 3 years ago

Is it really hard to use our imagination and move on to another person? In your example they replaced Roiland with a different sounding character (think English) on Solar Opposites and it wasn’t a big deal.

Nor is it hard to find people who sound similar either. AI voices have a hard time sounding emotional imo.

pierat• 3 years ago

12 year old pirates music in 2004, and gets slapped with $2000 "fine". https://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/internet/09/09/music.swap.sett...

Yet billionaires can commit copyright infringement by mass derivative works creation on a exabyte scale with absolutely no worry?

Rules for me, not for thee.

minimaxir• 3 years ago

Some notes on voice cloning since everyone seems to be wrong about both how it works and its potential impact on the industry:

- Voice cloning has many good open-source implementations so it's possible for any new company to spin up easily. (the "moat" is having a higher-quality model)

- Most implementations of voice cloning only require 10 seconds of clean audio, so they can be obtained quickly.

- Implementations like the open-source projects and ElevenLabs do not train a model; instead it creates an encoding which represents a person's voice, and is what is stored/loaded. The encoding is used with a "base model" (trained on an often-secret dataset due to legal liability) for the generations. It also makes it difficult to narrow down which voice is used if a malicious voice is used in the wild.

- As with all AI models, it's infeasible to remove a voice from the base model without retraining it.

- The audio output of SaaS voice clone models are 44.1kHz, which is CD quality. Voice acting tends to require much higher quality audio for mastering. Open source models are much lower quality.

On the ethics of voice cloning:

- Modern voice acting tends to be collaborative process between the actor and the audio director/producers to get the best performance.

- Current AI-generated voices cannot display contextual and important nuance, such as pauses and tone inflections. These often aren't things that can be added post-production.

- Voice actors tend to be contractors, with the clients being the company and "owning" the performance. Voice actors alone don't have legal leverage to get voices taken down, although companies like Rockstar do.

- Of course, getting the audio to say embarrassing things could land the voice actor in hot water with the company, especially those less tech-savvy.

And, as of last week, some observations from the SAG-AFTRA deal:

- Replica Studios notably doesn't have a individual-oriented product, instead requiring a significant cost and is more intended for teams.

- Replica Studios apparently doesn't encode the voice and does a full finetune of the model on a new voice.

itake8• 3 years ago

I’m confused as to what the issue is. The company’s typically own the trademark of the character (this is why Sean Connery is not the only 007).

Anyone (or anything?) can portray the character.

AlexeyBrin• 3 years ago

The other 007 actors did not used Sean Connery's voice (or face) each one had his own style of playing the character and a unique voice.

itake8• 3 years ago

Were people upset for Justin Roiland being unilaterally replaced by other voice actors (that try to recreate his style of playing the character and unique voice)?

What about Carrie Fisher's Princess Leia performance in her last movie?

Machine bad.

Human good.

neilv2• 3 years ago

Buried on page 5.

129. GTA 5 actor goes nuclear on AI company that made a voice chatbot of him (pcgamer.com) 72 points by pavel_lishin 3 hours ago | flag | hide | 73 comments

JieJie• 3 years ago

I get that most everyone these days is freaked out about AI. There is a lot of smoke and very little fire here.

If the voice actor in question here has the option of hiring a lawyer and suing the company for wrongful use of his image. He's a professional voice actor and there is quite a bit of legal precedent^1 on his side. If they're making money off his voice/image, he has every right to sue to have all that cash transferred to his bank account, plus damages for theft of opportunity.

If they're doing it, not as quid pro quo, but instead as a marketing gimmick to sell their product, well there is legal precedent on his side as well.

If they're giving it away, though, isn't that just the same as fan fiction? Do we really want to crack down on what is essentially a fan site? Is that the precedent you want to set? It could actually drive more business to the real guy: Maybe he can strike a deal with someone to sell the rights to his voice for whatever he can get for it? Maybe this actually drives up his ability to bargain for a higher price?

Please don't let shortsighted defense of the unknown prevent you from seeing the opportunities presented.

0: https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/using-name-or-likeness-anot...

GTA 5 actor goes nuclear on AI company that made a voice chatbot of him

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