| It raises awareness of the fact that such techniques are possible. The generative AI results of the past year straddle the invention/discovery divide -- I've seen snarky internet takes recently along the lines of "why are tech bros solving art and poetry instead of our tedious labor", but what people not clued into the field don't get is that: (a) This generative stuff is easier specifically because it doesn't have to interact with the real world. It's just data manipulation, there's a ton of it to learn from, and it's basically ok if a lady in a picture has six fingers or if the poem you generated has an incorrect meter on line 8. IRL interactions are harder to get data on, and nobody wants their bulldozer AI to hallucinate that the building next door is part of what needs to be demolished. (b) These generative tools can exist precisely because there is regular statistical structure in (art/language/music). It takes some work to capture it, but it's the information's structure itself that enables, e.g., cloning a voice from a few seconds of recordings. Making research that exposes that fact taboo just means that actors who exploit it anyway will have a bigger advantage in abusing it. It can also help to understand where a line of research comes from -- in VALL-E's case, it's an outgrowth of research into neural audio compression, an area with very clear advantages for information technology. If one starts shipping that technology and parts of it can be used for few-shot cloning of others' voices, it seems better that we're all aware of the fact. |