[oehpr]

I want to ask and answer two of my own questions here:

1. Why clone Jeff's voice?

When I was messing with stable diffusion using Automatic1111's interface, I noticed it came with a big list of artists to add to the prompt to stylize the image in some way. There was a big row in the media about ai art reproducing artists work and many artists came forward feeling it was a personal attack. But... I mean the truth is more general than that. When I pressed a button to insert a random name into a prompt, my goal was not "yes give me this person's art for free", it was "style this somehow".

I wasn't personally interested in any particular artist, I honestly would have preferred a bunch of sliders.

Jeff here is clearly a good speaker. That's a practiced talent and voice actors exist because it's hard. Elecrow wanted a voice over and they wanted it to be as good as they could make it. Jeff is very good. So did they want Jeff?

I think what they really wanted was a good and cogent narration with the tenor of a person. Not a machine making noises that sound like english. If they had an easy way to get that, we wouldn't be talking about it here.

2. What function does copyright serve?

Well. I think a reasonable argument would be that if people were able to reproduce your work for free, you would quickly find yourself without a monetary incentive to make more of it.

So. What happens if you combine answer 1 with answer 2?

I think it leads to: "We should consider making it illegal to automatically reproduce the work of an artisan.", you know, the luddic argument. An argument that has been perceived to be, more or less, settled.

So it seems to me: That for individuals, harms matter, and for society, it doesn't.

[soneil]

For 1), it seems clear that there's a heavy overlap between Jeff's market and Elecrow's, and it's difficult to see that as a coincidence.

If someone cloned both Shaq's voice and Jeff's, and used them to endorse sneakers - I think it's a fair assumption that Shaq would see this as a business risk, and Jeff .. I'm going to go out on a limb, and assume he'd probably find it hilarious. Using Jeff's voice for sneakers would be more akin to your example of finding a midwestern voice with a useful corpus. Using Shaq's would be a much more obviously targeted appropriation.

What we're looking at here appears to be exactly this scenario, except this is Jeff's niche, not Shaq's. Using Shaq's voice for SBCs and related products would feel quite absurd - using Jeff's feels like a much more obviously targeted appropriation.

[1shooner]

>I think what they really wanted was a good and cogent narration with the tenor of a person. Not a machine making noises that sound like english. If they had an easy way to get that, we wouldn't be talking about it here.

I think the general assumption is that they wanted to, at the very least, strongly imply his endorsement of the product or video.

Which I would say they did effectively. If I had happened on a clip of one of these videos outside the context of this controversy, I could have easily gotten the impression he was working with the vendor.

[lesostep]

>> But... I mean the truth is more general than that. When I pressed a button to insert a random name into a prompt, my goal was not "yes give me this person's art for free", it was "style this somehow".

yeah and that's the problem. The style of an artist is a developed thing. To think that one could borrow your style not through learning and caring, but through mathematically analyzing the width, and colors, and patterns and applying it to a random noise — that's kinda insulting. If nobody cares about my real work, why do they care about using my style, then? Develop your own an teach your AI on that, if there really isn't any difference.

People say that AI learns how a human would. But a human wouldn't (couldn't!) learn like an AI can. He can't look at the pixels, can't mechanically churn through patterns. If someone can learn from art like AI learns art, I would also be opposed to them learning anything from me :D

[johnnyanmac]

> Jeff here is clearly a good speaker. That's a practiced talent and voice actors exist because it's hard. Elecrow wanted a voice over and they wanted it to be as good as they could make it. Jeff is very good. So did they want Jeff?

Jeff has worked with and endorsed some of their products before, so that puts a wrench in that theory of "well they just picked a clean voice" and makes this almost litgable.

>I think it leads to: "We should consider making it illegal to automatically reproduce the work of an artisan.", you know, the luddic argument. An argument that has been perceived to be, more or less, settled.

There's the labor argument: People who's voices are samples should get a residual on the product they are being used for. Combine that with some sort of lack of liability on the subject when AI is used and we'd have a win-win.

But that requires money and companies don't want to pay other people. So we come at an impasse that leads to the luddite argument. Take the ball and go home if you don't want to pay. The fact that this comes into so few people's minds shows how successful companies are at casting off the idea of residuals.