Voice Actors Warn AI Could 'Steal Voices', Call for Laws Protecting a Person's Likeness (ew.com) 111
Something unexpected happened at this year's Comic-Con, reports Entertainment Weekly:
As film and TV actors skipped San Diego Comic-Con in support of the SAG-AFTRA strike, a number of voice actors gathered to show their support — and raise awareness about the threat of artificial intelligence on their industry.
The National Association of Voice Actors hosted a panel Saturday morning, where multiple actors and SAG officials spoke to a packed room about how rapidly changing AI technology can threaten both fans and creators... The panelists took a deep dive into the many different forms of AI, particularly in its use in voice work — from original voices like Apple's Siri to synthetic voices copying live actors. All cautioned that AI inherently is not a bad tool and can in some ways enhance voice performances, but fans and actors should push back against exploitative methods.
"Voice acting is the tip of the spear of how AI can either be used to lift people up and enhance the opportunities that actors have — or be used in a negative way to steal their voices and crush human creativity," SAG-AFTRA executive director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland told the crowd. "We need to be very vigilant about that. AI isn't implementing itself. People are choosing to implement AI. So, we've got to reject the idea that this is something that is going to happen to us, and there's nothing to be done about that. That is an absolute myth that is being foisted upon us by the people who want us to think we have no power."
Ultimately, the panelists explained, it all comes down to consent. Currently, there are no federal or international laws protecting a person's likeness, and many existing contracts allow a company to capture an actor's voice or likeness and use it "in perpetuity." NAVA and SAG-AFTRA are calling upon voice actors and fans alike to push back, both by establishing protective contract language and by pushing for global laws.
In addition, the site also reports that "Actors, cosplayers, and a congressman hit the streets of San Diego during Comic-Con 2023 on Friday to show their support for the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike."
The National Association of Voice Actors hosted a panel Saturday morning, where multiple actors and SAG officials spoke to a packed room about how rapidly changing AI technology can threaten both fans and creators... The panelists took a deep dive into the many different forms of AI, particularly in its use in voice work — from original voices like Apple's Siri to synthetic voices copying live actors. All cautioned that AI inherently is not a bad tool and can in some ways enhance voice performances, but fans and actors should push back against exploitative methods.
"Voice acting is the tip of the spear of how AI can either be used to lift people up and enhance the opportunities that actors have — or be used in a negative way to steal their voices and crush human creativity," SAG-AFTRA executive director Duncan Crabtree-Ireland told the crowd. "We need to be very vigilant about that. AI isn't implementing itself. People are choosing to implement AI. So, we've got to reject the idea that this is something that is going to happen to us, and there's nothing to be done about that. That is an absolute myth that is being foisted upon us by the people who want us to think we have no power."
Ultimately, the panelists explained, it all comes down to consent. Currently, there are no federal or international laws protecting a person's likeness, and many existing contracts allow a company to capture an actor's voice or likeness and use it "in perpetuity." NAVA and SAG-AFTRA are calling upon voice actors and fans alike to push back, both by establishing protective contract language and by pushing for global laws.
In addition, the site also reports that "Actors, cosplayers, and a congressman hit the streets of San Diego during Comic-Con 2023 on Friday to show their support for the ongoing SAG-AFTRA strike."
It varies (Score:5, Insightful)
While they have the right to not have their own performances stolen, what's really going to hurt is when they're replaced with original AI voices.
Machinima is coming for pretty much all of Hollywood, it's just starting a couple of decades later than I'd though it would.
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I wouldn't worry too much about that. AI has certainly improved speech synthesis, but it's not going to replace voice actors any time soon.
Re:It varies (Score:5, Informative)
Agreed. There's an AI-generated clip of Nixon doing the Apollo failure speech. While interesting, it completely lacks the emotion and gravitas that would have been present in a real reading. Its cadence doesn't match Nixon's, and while it is passable as his voice, it still sounds like a computer reading a text.
I'm sure this will improve over time, but it's going to require experts for a while to adjust things, and in many cases, the voice actor will be cheaper.
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I'm sure this will improve over time, but it's going to require experts for a while to adjust things, and in many cases, the voice actor will be cheaper.
Faster than you think. Better get the laws passed right now.
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That's awfully optimistic. I don't expect to see anything come close in my lifetime.
Was it directed? (Score:2)
There's an AI-generated clip of Nixon doing the Apollo failure speech.
Was it directed or was it totally up to the AI? The difference with films is that there is a director telling the actors to add a particular emotion or to do X when they say Y etc. That makes it potentially a lot easier for an AI since it does not need to figure out that it should be angry, sad etc just from the words like with a speech, it can be told what to do by a director.
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The moment you need a ton of annotation and clean up, I doubt you are going to be a match for the productivity of a voice actor (possibly with voice morphing).
Correcting for a picture just takes a glance, correcting for audio or video takes a lot more time.
It doesn't have to be fully synthesized (Score:2)
It won't replace physical actors because a lot of that is about the actors living out a glamorous lifestyle but I think it absolutely will replace most of the character a
Re:It doesn't have to be fully synthesized (Score:4, Insightful)
Modern AI software is putting us in a curious and horrific scenario where machines are going to act, sing songs and write poetry
What modern AI can actually do and what people think it can do are very different. There really isn't anything to worry about here.
It doesn't help that much of the language around AI is purposefully misleading. Unfortunately, the people who can fix that are also the people who personally benefit from the deception...
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When the time comes to deliver actually useful, valuable goods & services, I bet a lot of people are going to be very disappointed. But that's the way US consumer capitalism works, right?
Personally, I do the opposite & caut
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Yes the technology to fully synthesize the voices from scratch isn't quite there
Oh? I'm afraid you haven't kept up. This is an audio-book made by Microsoft using Azure Synapse Analytics and SynapseML distributed ML, The Tempest by Shakespeare https://ia601608.us.archive.org/12/items/synapseml_gutenberg_the_tempest_by_william_shakespeare/the_tempest_by_william_shakespeare.mp3 [archive.org]
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Shakespeare is actually way easier than modern writing for AI to preform because it's all in iambic pentameter, the cadence is predetermined.
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Oh... it's a lot worse than that. Embodied AI labor is going to do all the pointless and horrible menial labor of the worst kind too.
Special purpose robots run $2000 to $80000 right now with general purpose robots costing 2 million. But prices are dropping rapidly. A general purpose AI will cost less than a human being in roughly 15 years.
They'll be cheaper, able to work 24 hours a day, not require restrooms or near as much climate control (40 to 110 is fine) or light. And with the proper SLA, they ne
Re:It varies (Score:5, Interesting)
I wouldn't worry too much about that. AI has certainly improved speech synthesis, but it's not going to replace voice actors any time soon.
There is a big difference between replacing voice actors (plural) and replacing a single voice actor.
Replacing a specific single voice actor? It can't do so very well now, and yes will take some time to get to that point.
Replacing voice acting in general however, this exists now.
There is an Unreal engine plugin where all you have in your game is a unique NPC identifier along with your textual dialog data.
The hash is a seed to all the voice parameters to generate a unique voice.
It automatically added "voice acting" to all of your games NPCs.
The voice actors guild is scared shitless of this.
To be clear, this thing doesn't recreate an existing voice. It generates a new voice from semi-randomly selected voice pattern parameters.
Think of the advanced character generators some games have to make your players face and body.
You can tweak the sliders to get some features like a specific person, but not really what most would call "close"
Yet vastly open world games with thousands of "named" NPCs don't generally all get voice acted because of the stupidly huge expense that would be. Instead you get text dialog to read.
This tech lets them all be voice acted, each with a unique voice, with little extra effort.
https://www.replicastudios.com... [replicastudios.com]
So long as you aren't wanting a famous and well known voice actors voice, "extras" are essentially already 100% replaceable.
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By the way, I don't think
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AI can already make pretty good models, even animated ones.
They still need to sort out the whole 'hands' & 'legs' things first. Have you seen the output on Wierd Dall-e lately?
Re: It varies (Score:1)
Voice cloning will become like font cloning. Train using the actor's voice, then slightly change the numeric parameters -- "If you like Angelia Jolie, you'll love Angie Jolie".
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I don't know if it would even bother me if all of current Hollywood disappeared and was replaced by AI. As long as the movies and shows are still good, I don't really care. In the AI future there will still be creative people involved in the process, the jobs are just going to be different. Hollywood might turn into a land of artist/programmers. Yes, don't rip existing people off without permission - some people will refuse, others will be happy to be paid to be an AI voice model. Future Hollywood isn't goi
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If AI bots are watching AI shows, I guess I'll never know it is happening.
Re:It varies (Score:5, Informative)
jonsmirl blathered thusly:
Yes, don't rip existing people off without permission - some people will refuse, others will be happy to be paid to be an AI voice model.
Way to be completely oblivious to the current situation, jonsmirl.
One of the key reasons that SAG/AFTRA went on strike is that big studios (for which read "Disney") already incorporate language into their contracts with actors that requires them to sign over the rights to use their "voice and likeness" in perpetuity. That means "until the heat death of the Universe."
In a recent interview, Samuel L. Jackson stated that all actors should "cross that shit out [indiewire.com]" of the contracts they're offered, as he does. But he's Samuel L. freakin' Jackson. He can do that, and Disney will hire him anyway, and meet his salary and other demands, too.
Young actors just starting their careers may not have that option, because the big studios regard them as completely interchangeable. If one of them objects to having their voice and image digitally captured for the studio's use in perpetuity and without additional recompense to them for future uses, their careers are going to be a whole lot shorter than they would be if the studios were required to pay them for their wholly-digital appearances in future productions.
That - among other issues - is why they went on strike. Because the big studios (especially Disney) are already demanding the right to use their digital likenesses and voices in perpetuity without paying them another dime. As things stand today, it's part of the boilerplate language in actors' contracts.
It's abusive and should be illegal - but the psychopathic, MBA studio execs don't care that it's blatantly abusive, because, at the moment, it's not illegal ...
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SAG can't win this fight. The more they resist the faster AI models based on non-SAG members will be developed.
I write code as work for hire. Nobody pays me royalties when my employer ships it over and over. When it gets reused in another product no one pays me. My code is in billions of devices. If I want to own equity in my code, I can buy stock in my employer. I can make a living in that environment, why can't actors?
Could it be this mindset of doing something once and then being paid in perpetuity be th
Re:It varies (Score:5, Insightful)
>Could it be this mindset of doing something once and then being paid in perpetuity be the real problem?
'Fairness' is a social instinct we have. It's wired right in there, because communities of individuals who have it and are willing to fight to enforce it tend to be more tightly knit and supportive and that's a group survival advantage... even if it frequently goes wrong and causes social friction, on average it is a massive advantage that leads to large group cooperation and led to our domination of the entire damn planet.
Why should an actor not be paid forever for that one performance when the people they did the acting for keep cashing in in perpetuity? It's the rest of us who don't have that kind of arrangement who are getting exploited all to hell.
You SHOULD be getting paid for your work every time it is used to make fresh profits, because the people you did the work for are getting paid.
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I write code as work for hire. Nobody pays me royalties when my employer ships it over and over. When it gets reused in another product no one pays me. My code is in billions of devices. If I want to own equity in my code, I can buy stock in my employer. I can make a living in that environment, why can't actors?
The key part of this analogy is that your employer could hire someone else to maintain and add to your code. That's what voice actors are worried about, AI could churn out the voice in new seasons simply by sampling their character voice in old episodes, so voice actors now have less bargaining power in later seasons if the first season was a hit.
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SAG can't win this fight. The more they resist the faster AI models based on non-SAG members will be developed.
Sure, and that is not unreasonable, just as CGI replaced many model builders used to create scenes.
I write code as work for hire. Nobody pays me royalties when my employer ships it over and over. When it gets reused in another product no one pays me. My code is in billions of devices. If I want to own equity in my code, I can buy stock in my employer.
Or, you can do what I do, and develop products at risk and thus expect to be paid when someone uses taht product. You chose to forgo future money for current money, and that is your prerogative. I chose to take the initial risk for a payout at the end. In that case, no one has teh right to use what I develop without compensating me.
I can make a living in that environment, why can't actors?
You can, for now. But what happens when AI can write good enough code that
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I hope you also realise that if Disney owns your likeness, then any further work would have to be approved by them & they'd want a big cut of the revenue from that. It wouldn't be that different to bringing back slavery. Artists' contracts are already incredibly invasive & restrictive. Remember when Madonna & George Michael tried to push back against their contracts in the music industry? That's wh
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No one should steal anything. An artist would be stupid to give up all rights to their likeness in all roles, I would hope that they never agree to do that. However, I can see an anonymous extra doing that.
Using their image in specific role is a different matter. Who owns the character? Does the actor own the character, or does the studio own it? This should be negotiated and then the actor can choose whether or not to take the deal. Should a single actor have the power to destroy a whole series, thus des
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You are confused. I'll own that corporation. Now I'll finally have enough competent testers to get all of the bugs out!
No one in the entertainment business is dumb enough to sign away all uses of their likeness for all purposes. For a specific role, maybe, for all roles -- you'd be an idiot if you signed that. However, I can see extras coming from outside the industry doing that for supplemental income, but they aren't making a career from it. Pay me $250K and you can use my likeness all you want. That'd
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Any sentence that starts with "Nobody is dumb enough to..." is extremely suspect. If you make it "Nobody is dumb or desperate enough to..." I would be willing to bet money that it's false.
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Congratulations on being happy with a tiny fraction of the value your work generates while your employers make billions off of it, I guess?
You eke out a living while your corporate overlords are trying to decide whether they should buy the 60' yacht or go for the 80' superyacht, all paid for by YOUR labor.
The mindset that a corporation should profit eternally off of work they paid one-time pittance for is the real problem.
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Could it be this mindset of doing something once and then being paid in perpetuity be the real problem?
The real problem is your acceptance of abuse, which is not tolerance — it's enablement. Accepting being paid once for something that's going to make someone else money for years is the problem here. No one should have to do that.
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It is exactly the opposite in the real world. Do athletes get paid every time a game is rebroadcast? Does a telephone line man expect to be paid for every call on the lines? Does a truck driver get a percentage of the goods he carries? Of course not. The oddity here is the perpetual pay.
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It is exactly the opposite in the real world.
Yes, and you're here for that, because you've been brainwashed into thinking that's reasonable.
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This is not rocket science, the economy could not function if every transaction involved a series or perpetual rights. The normal case is then when you sell something it is sold in its entirety. Just look at all of the legal problems involved with clearing these perpetual rights in the entertainment industry. We even have a name for the hopeless cases "orphan works".
A far cleaner solution which is used by the rest of the world. Work for hire -- you get paid for the work you do and that's the end of the chai
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This is not rocket science, the economy could not function if every transaction involved a series or perpetual rights.
The economy is unsustainable when those who create value are not the ones who collect the rewards. All the wealth accrues at the top, and never trickles down.
There's any number of ways to fix this, but people like you resist all of them.
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Go start you own production company if you want to keep more of the equity. Nothing is stopping you.
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Nothing is stopping you.
Tell us you know nothing about anything without telling us.
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Does Disney also give up perpetual rights in this scenario? If not, why not?
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SAG can't win this fight. The more they resist the faster AI models based on non-SAG members will be developed.
Good luck making good profitable movies without any actors, writers, or directors who are currently working in the industry.
I write code as work for hire. Nobody pays me royalties when my employer ships it over and over. When it gets reused in another product no one pays me. My code is in billions of devices. If I want to own equity in my code, I can buy stock in my employer. I can make a living in that environment, why can't actors?
Actors make much of their money that way, but they also make money on royalties. The royalties make sense for actors because you can't really quantify the quality of performance in the contract so you need to incentivize it other ways.
And if the actor becomes famous that earlier work will benefit, so again royalties make sense.
Could it be this mindset of doing something once and then being paid in perpetuity be the real problem?
Nope, you completely misunderstand the issue. A better meta
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Cool, I'll take 1,000 of those clones. Wow, my own clone coder army!
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Begun, the code cloner wars has.
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Because Hollywood doesn't put out enough stuff for one day's pay per project to keep an actor afloat.
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Low pay is a valid complaint. A tried and true way to force pay up is for the union to restrict the number of available workers.
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Here's the thing,
I support actors and voice actors right to control their brand. However that stops at "their brand".
Someone doing a bugs bunny voice and 20 other actors can do it. If I stick 20 bugs bunny voices into my AI and produce the ultimate bugs bunny AI voice model. That is not the voice actors fault or problem. That is a "bugs bunny" model, not "actor name doing bugs bunny", if Warner doesn't want fans to make one, that's their perogative, but they can not both say fans can't do this, while they d
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I have a voice model I made of Gary Owens from a reasonable source. Gary Owens is dead. There is no way to get consent from a dead voice actor.
His wife, Arleta, and his sons, Scott and Chris, may disagree with that.
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If they're necromancers it's the first I've heard of it.
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They can not succeed in getting any laws passed that will prevent the use of AI on voice data.
That's not what actors are wanting; they want contracts that don't let studios use their work to create derivative works without getting paid for the derivative work.
But fighting it tooth and nail will result on the consequence that a voice actor can't use their own voice in an AI because it's become illegal to produce a voice model commercially.
Not really. They could still do that and license the model.
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The tell them not to sign contracts that contain that language. Fuck, that was easy. Now go back to work, while you still have a job.
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The tell them not to sign contracts that contain that language. Fuck, that was easy.
That's what they are doing.
Now go back to work, while you still have a job.
Once they have a contract they can accept they will.
Re: It varies (Score:1)
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Well, it's already happened for decades. Hatsune Miku is a performer with a vocoder based voice. You can buy the voice (English or Japanese) for about $200 right now today and program Miku to sing whatever you want. And there are performances
at least they have an union other workers need the (Score:5, Insightful)
at least they have an union other workers need them
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How's that boot taste?
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Ironic coming from a Bernie Bro.
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Lol, how far did you have to dig to be able to make such a witless and brain-dead reply?
Hollywood? Hollywood Unions? (Score:2)
Another actor can replace the original too. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Another actor can replace the original too. (Score:4, Insightful)
Many classic animated characters had their original voice actors retire or die. They were replaced with another actor who sounded alike.
It seems similar, but there's actually some fundamental differences.
There's lots of voice actors who are good enough to sound like a character. What actually enables voice actors to stay in a role and make good money is talent. Many other voice actors could create the same voice, but they may not be able to do as good a job of acting.
This is almost the opposite of what happens with live action television where actors end up paid largely on their likeness. Someone could be a terrible actor, but if they play an important character on a hit show they can make an outrageous salary because you can't lose the actor without losing the show.
Rich Little made a living impersonating others' voices. Was that ok as long as he didn't claim to be them?
Lets ignore the fact that being an impressionist is a very different skill from being one voice actor replacing another, you've still got the fact that you needed a fairly talented person to be able to do it.
I suspect that human voice actors will outperform AIs for quite a while, but it's definitely something to start thinking about
This sounds to me like the same debate over synthesized music vs acoustic. Recorded music vs live music for a Broadway play.
Not really because a human is still a driver of the creative element in all those scenarios. An AI voice actor is really taking over a substantial portion of the creative aspect.
Re:Another actor can replace the original too. (Score:4, Insightful)
Rich Little made a living impersonating others' voices. Was that ok as long as he didn't claim to be them?
He made a living as a comedian who parodied those people's voices and gestures. He did not claim to be them, nor did he in any way replace them or their work.
The Copyright concept of Fair Use would recognize that; the likeness concept needs to be put into a law.
There is another area of impersonation that is commercial: the use of voice impersonators in advertisements. I'm not entirely sure how that works legally, but there are licenses and lawsuits involved. However, not always. It may be union rules, or it may be trademarked characters, or special laws in California, or something else. In any event, advertisements are another place where AI will be used outside of feature movies.
Just Usual Technological Disruption (Score:2)
Actors that still get paid, Sherlock (Score:1)
Zapp Brannigan was supposed to be Phil Harman's character on Futurama before he was murdered by his wife. Voice actor Billy West does an impression of what Phil Harman's voice acting would have been like for the character.
Billy West still gets paid. An AI bot would not. Why is it hard to connect the dots here.
See also, Captain Kirk being played by Chris Pine and now Paul Wesley. Still workers getting paid, as opposed to AI bots not being paid.
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>They were replaced with another actor who sounded alike.
Or fell off the back of the stadium in a tragic t-shirt cannon accident in the first episode of the next season . . . :)
And there was that movie some time ago in which Daffy Duck tried to quit (or some such), and the studio kept his voice, leaving him mute . .
Literally millions of voices in the public domain (Score:2)
So this may protect currently working actors from having their voices duplicated, it wont' do anything to stop using public domain voices.
Likeness rights are something that have existed... (Score:2)
...for some time. Sounds like the various actors and such need to make sure these clauses are in their contracts going forward.
Re: Likeness rights are something that have existe (Score:3)
Yes. Federal law already protects them with protection around intrusion, appropriation, unreasonable publicity, and false light. Notable actors and actresses have made claims on trademark for their likeness including voice, and copyright covers direct copies and derived works pretty well.
They are calling for additional protection both through contract and through additional laws.
The law currently has a gray area around appropriation when it comes to generated, synthetic voice. There is very little case la
Don't worry about the accent (Score:2)
... we can fix it [youtube.com].
The day will come (Score:2)
When AI can bang out code that’s good enough to replace programmers. The comment section of slashdot will be interesting.
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When AI can bang out code that’s good enough to replace programmers. The comment section of slashdot will be interesting.
I for one would be happy that humanity has achieved technological singularity.
However, the most likely case is "AI" will be good enough to replace the need to write boilerplate, which is fundamentally no different from using a decent library, framework or even higher level languages like Python. It's still a net plus in my opinion, but nothing particularly exciting. Actually solving problems will still require humans for the foreseeable future.
Synthetic human voice is not copyrightable (Score:2)
Just use audio voices from before the year 1927. Also, make AI faces based on pre-1927 photographs. I know most are black and white but it can be colorized according to the colors of people in the few pre-1927 color photographs.
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Have you seen the new movie starring Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks Sr.?
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I'm down. Where can I buy tickets? Mary Pickford is hot for a 131 year old. Doesn't look a day over 110.
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Yowzer! That dame is the cat's pajamas!
How unique is a voice? (Score:2)
Can a voice be accurate "printed" (I doubt it)?
I understand actors want money but most of them are mere aspirants. Like OTA radio DJs, they'll be mostly obsolete at lower cost to other creators. Creating your own movie or anime will become ever more practical.
They Tried to Warn Us (Score:2)
Ultimately, the panelists explained, it all comes down to consent. Currently, there are no federal or international laws protecting a person's likeness, and many existing contracts allow a company to capture an actor's voice or likeness and use it "in perpetuity."
The Amish are no doubt feeling pretty smug right now.
Improvement is on the way (Score:4, Insightful)
People here keep mentioning inflection and timing not being good enough, and suggesting that humans need not worry any time real soon.
But how this will work is that the AI voice will not be reading from a text script. Rather, it will be like a puppet that has a human doing the reding. The AI will follow the inflection and timing of the human voice input. This way, you still need a "voice actor" who understands the delivery technique of the original voice subject. But that actor doesn't have to sound anything at all like the real person. It's a skill, but it's much easier and much less expensive than getting someone who can do a good impression. (In fact, the AI will be able to do a better job than any impersonator.) And of course, this is infinitely cheaper than hiring the original actor.
Moreover, the AI will be trained on inflection and other delivery qualities over the corups of this transformed speech. It won't take long before the AI can do it with very minimal to nno human voice input at all.
Like everything else in AI, this is all coming faster than you think. Because it involves machines that can think faster than you. And infinite money to make those machines go.
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This is exactly the issue I have with AI generated art. At first, people said I shouldn't worry about it, since all the pictures made by AI were essentially nightmare fuel. "It's totally based on random stable diffusion and does NOT use collage methods", they said. But then, a whole ton of AI systems started popping up where you give the AI a source image, and tell it to modify that image. After just a few short months, now we have floods of AI images out there that look pretty damn good. The AI is now
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The only potential legal issue with AI art is that it's trained on copyrighted material. In 70 years or whenever the copyright term of all modern art expires, the copyright question would be a moot point. And even before that, if the law demands it, then the AI could be trained on non-copyrighted work, or work specifically created for the purposes of training an AI.
The problem posed to artists is that AI does not copy the artists' works, but rather their style. Copies of their actual works would be protecte
Hollywood has to die (Score:1)
Hollywood has to die for movies to become good again. As in entertainment, national pastime. This is not the way it was seen to happen, but whatever path it takes, it will happen. Really, they don't need strikes or AI to continue the suicide, but whatever helps things also, oh well.
Laurence Olivier says "Inconcievable!" (Score:2)
Sky Captain & The World Of Tomorrow (2004) - Dr. Totenkopf Hologram Scene
https://youtu.be/KC3AgTsDqfw [youtu.be]
Oh great... (Score:2)
I wholeheartedly suppor
Contract Law and morons (Score:1)
> ...and many existing contracts allow a company to capture an actor's voice or likeness and use it "in perpetuity."
Yeah, I signed a contract once about buying my new car. It says things I don't like, like that monthly payment thing, and insurance requirement. Maybe if I was the "dog ate my homework kind" I'd find a group willing to get me out of that horrible commitment forced on me by... um... me buying that car and signing a contract.
Unions now server one function: to make unions richer. That's why
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They're not bitching about contracts they've already signed, they're bitching about the contracts they're being offered.
Pau Newman took care of this in his will (Score:4, Interesting)
In Paul Newman's will [abajournal.com] he stated his image could not be used in performances which never occurred and his executors should prevent any “virtual performance or reanimation of any performance by me by the use of any technique, technology or medium now in existence or which may be known or created in the future anywhere in the universe.”
While this doesn't help the living, anyone in the industry can use the same language to prevent themselves being used after their death.
Re: (Score:2)
>anyone in the industry
I doubt it.
that clause relies on a specific California law on appearance & likeness, which doesn't exists in most (all?) states and foreign countries.
AFLAC (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Gilbert got paid for the sessions he recorded. The new guy got paid for the sessions _he_ recorded. The issue is them not hiring a new guy, just using Gilbert's voice for new spots without paying him (or anyone else) for it.
it's done anyway (Score:1)
First, what happens to impersonators? What if you look "pretty close to identical" to Tom Hanks?
Can you sell your image or does Hanks wealth and star power prohibit you from making a living on your own image?
Second, it's obvious already that digital persons are the key. We already have vtubers that are completely digital, so the studios will just advance and promote entirely synthetic actors, phasing out over the next decade or three the whiny, entitled bitches that get sick, form unions, and post-facto c
Nuclear option (Score:2)
If my voice and likeness became a virtual A-Lister, while I was stuck waiting tables, I would probably lose it.
I would dress up as the character and make videos of me saying and doing HORRIBLE things.
If it were that easy... (Score:2)
Proponents of AI-based actors would have already produced look and sound alike videos of famous people approving of the process. Or as Abraham Lincoln once said "The thing about quotes from the internet is that it's hard to verify their authenticity."
Make up our minds... (Score:2)
"Ultimately, the panelists explained, it all comes down to consent. Currently, there are no federal or international laws protecting a person's likeness, and many existing contracts allow a company to capture an actor's voice or likeness and use it "in perpetuity." "
So there are no laws aside from, you know, CONTRACT LAW. GG WP.
I belive there's no specific law protecting likeness of a human. That fight isn't going to go like anyone hopes either. Pass a law like that and prepare for the avalanche of lawsu
A digital Luke Skywalker and Leia did not trigger (Score:2)
I found the cash grab greediness of Disney sickening and alarming already, the way they de-aged and paraded beloved Star Wars characters across the screen like soulless puppets. I am surprised actors did not stand up against that sooner.
Protecting likenesses will backfire (Score:2)