[buu700]

On the other hand, why shouldn't voice actors benefit from this tech?

I can easily imagine a future where AI-generated impersonations are deemed by courts or new legislation to be protected by personality rights. In that world, voice actors could expand their business by offering deeply discounted rates for AI-generated work.

Alternatively, if/when tech like Play.ht is consistently good enough, maybe it just becomes a standard practice for all voice acting work to include a combination of human- and AI-generated content, like a programmer using Copilot or a writer using GPT.

[gamblor956]

I'm sure programmers would love to expand their business opportunities by offering deeply discounted rates for creating AI-generated code.

No? Then why do you assume that someone else would want to do the same in their profession?

As AI-generated content is not protectable under IP law, it's a non-starter for games, film, TV, or music for anything except background filler.

[buu700]

Sure, why not? If you could earn more money and produce more value to society with the same amount of labor, and the legal/regulatory environment supported it, I wouldn't see a reason not to.

If you had a solo contracting business, and the technology existed to fully outsource a development project to AI based on carefully documented requirements, using it would be a cheaper alternative to subcontracting. Rather than writing every line of code by hand, you would transition to becoming an architect, project manager, code reviewer, and QA tester. Now you're one person with the resources and earning potential of an entire development shop.

I have my fair share of complaints about AI coding tools, but that isn't one of them. Maybe the increase in supply would result in a lower average software engineering income, but it wouldn't have to if demand kept pace with supply.

Furthermore, code is more fungible than a person's voice. If someone wants a particular celebrity's voice, that celebrity has a monopoly on it. Thus, it's not obvious that increasing the supply of one's voice acting work would decrease its value. (I suspect the opposite to be the case, until a point of diminishing returns.)

Although the voice acting case has a similar concern; will we get an explosion in new and/or higher-quality media, or will we see a consolidation to a smaller number of well known voice actors taking an outsized amount amount of work? Another issue, if we look beyond impersonation specifically, is that human voices may become marginalized over time in favor of entirely synthetic voices. I imagine that this would start with synthetic voices playing minor roles alongside human/human-impersonated voices, but over time certain synthetic voices would organically become recognizable in their own rights.

Again, I see plenty of concerns with AI in general, but more of a mixed bag than strictly negative, and there isn't anything inherently nefarious about this product in particular.

Personally, I'm optimistic about what society looks like in the long run if humanity proves to be a responsible steward of increasingly advanced AI. By the time we're at a point where 90% of people can be effectively automated out of a job, we'll have had to have figured out some alternative way of distributing resources among the population, i.e. a meaningful UBI backed by continued growth of our species' collective wealth and productivity. I can easily imagine a not-too-distant world that is effectively post-scarcity, where it's not frowned upon to spend years (or lifetimes) on non-income-generating pursuits, and where the only jobs performed by humans are entrepreneur, executive, politician, judge, general, teacher, and other things of that must be done by humans for one reason or another.

So am I happy that AI is encroaching on skilled labor? In the short term, not necessarily. But it's not necessarily bad either, it's the reality that we're in, and long-term I'm more optimistic than not.