I also think it's kind of pointless as anything other than a demonstration of the speech synthesis (which is getting pretty good). The Feynman character especially shows that while these models can pick up a bunch of the details about the surface style, they certainly can't be clever or insightful, which is the appeal of the people being imitated.
With respect to using the voices or faces of dead people, I do think it's interesting that the estates of the deceased can have some control over commercial uses of personal images. The estate of MLK I think still controls use of the whole audio from some of his famous speeches. But my understanding is we haven't yet settled whether synthetic / derived artifacts which rely heavily on existing photos or recordings should themselves be controlled in the same way.
This is such an insane worldview. Lots of things are technically possible but socially or legally discouraged. You could infringe copyright. You could steal. You could walk around naked. It's not whining to say that something is outside of social norms.
When it's trivially easy to break the law and there are no obvious victims, and it can be done on computers, those rules go out the window.
Almost everyone who shared music on Napster would have never shoplifted a CD from a record store. Almost everyone who shares TV episodes on Bittorrent would never have stolen a DVD from a store or climbed up a power pole to illegally tap into cable.
Your single counter example is "people do media piracy". I personally do torrent media, and I'm pretty clear eyed that I do it because there are no negative consequences for me. It has nothing to do with computers or victims. There's no enforcement. If ISPs started fining people or cutting off access for pirating media I would stop because those consequences are worse than the benefit I get.
Who benefits from making deepfakes, and how do we respond to them? By simply throwing our hands up in the air and upvoting you're encouraging this behaviour by normalizing it. If people recognize it as deception that violates consent it will be discouraged.
When it becomes trivial to 3d print gray goo (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo) I wonder if you'll sing the same tune to humanity's destruction or if you'd admit that there's a spectrum and there's some threshold past which a technology becomes condemnable. Because right now your statement basically implies there is no such threshold (since clearly the person you're replying to thinks podcast.ai is past it).
Imagine an enemy nation-state of [insert your country] decides to create a "recording" of a political candidate admitting to pedophilia.
Yes, those of us in tech would be skeptical. But 99.9% of people don't read technology or political news and don't know this is possible. They haven't been inoculated against it.
What would happen? You can't make that stigma go away.
One of Trump's only drops in polling during his first presidential campaign was due to an audio recording. In his 2023 campaign, any recording that comes out could easily be AI-generated.
If that doesn't terrify you, I don't think you've been paying enough attention to the tactics of modern authoritarian regimes.
It will likely eventually be possible to create bioweapons like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_goo, but we would still condemn someone for doing so, your statement makes literally no sense.
With respect to using the voices or faces of dead people, I do think it's interesting that the estates of the deceased can have some control over commercial uses of personal images. The estate of MLK I think still controls use of the whole audio from some of his famous speeches. But my understanding is we haven't yet settled whether synthetic / derived artifacts which rely heavily on existing photos or recordings should themselves be controlled in the same way.