You are looking at the current implementation and not thinking about the implication.
One, this tech absolutely could be used to fool someone. Not everyone will be listening with a critical ear. Played back over a phone or injecting a phrase or two in otherwise spoken samples will fool many people.
I guarantee you someone will be using this to make their own MLP episodes on YouTube specifically designed to scare children or get them to do awful things.
Models presumably get better over time. It really won't be too much longer until people will be able to fake celebrities, politicians, exes, authority figures, etc. As a fairly benign example, if I had this in high school you better believe I could have called to excuse some of my absences.
I agree, I love the idea of generating some decent voice lines for my own games projects, but this also introduces issues of the rights of the original voice actors.
If you train a model to mimic a performance given by an actor, then use that model and fire the actor, isn't that potentially really problematic? (Also, it draws parallels to the Luddites who were not anti technology, but wanted to ensure that technology wasn't used in a way that reduced worker quality of life.)
And yes, I think there are helpful ways this could be deployed. I'm gender fluid, and I'd love to be able to adjust my voice digitally, but we need to be thinking about how this could cause harm first.
> One, this tech absolutely could be used to fool someone.
The problem I have here is that it's already not hard to fool people. I don't think it's feasible for us to say that we're going to put something that could be highly beneficial on hold just because we don't want to deal with social education efforts that we kind of already need to tackle anyway. Per your example, if we get rid of deepfakes, it's not clear to me that Youtube is going to be any more safe. I already would not allow a child to browse Youtube unattended, people already generate the videos you're talking about.
And I know that people are putting this in a different category than general CGI, voice modulation, or consumer-grade apps like Photoshop. I'm not going to argue that it's necessarily wrong for people to be worried, but no matter how many times people tell me that this is fundamentally different, I still have not seen any serious evidence that this technology is going to be more dangerous than Photoshop, and I think it's going to be way easier to detect than a decent Photoshop job is. Photoshop's content-aware paste/fill tools are better than this example, and they arguably require less work to use.
And again... I'm sympathetic to concerns about moving too fast, but I just don't think there's any world, even if you could get rid of deepfakes entirely, where we don't need to be worried about media literacy and general skepticism. If people today don't realize that voices can already be convincingly faked, then that's a really serious problem, and if democratizing that ability causes society in general to become more aware of the potential of disinformation, then honestly that might even be a good thing that we should be encouraging.
So sure, concerns, but in my mind people are focusing on one particular implication that I don't think is particularly likely, and ignoring that responding to that concern is probably going to look the same no matter what our position on deepfakes is.
> If you train a model to mimic a performance given by an actor, then use that model and fire the actor, isn't that potentially really problematic?
I think that's a very complicated question. I would not assume that the loss of work for voice actors, who can shift into voice generation roles, is going to be a big enough downside that it overrules the upside of allowing ordinary people to start generating their own vtube avatars or commenting on and building on top of existing culture.
> If people today don't realize that voices can already be convincingly faked, then that's a really serious problem, and if democratizing that ability causes society in general to become more aware of the potential of disinformation, then honestly that might even be a good thing that we should be encouraging.
I've wondered about that angle as well. You can't put the genie back in the bottle, so maybe the best way to combat the threat of deepfaked misinformation is actually to take the opposite approach and make it as easy as possible for normal people to generate their own deepfakes; that way it becomes common knowledge that such things are possible (similar to how photoshop is common knowledge today).
> If you train a model to mimic a performance given by an actor, then use that model and fire the actor, isn't that potentially really problematic?
And if you have to keep getting a person paid for something that a machine could do with (assuming, as per your post) 100% equal performance, that is not problematic? When the voice becomes as good as real actors, then yes of course they should become out of a job. Just like progress has been going on for thousands of years.
One, this tech absolutely could be used to fool someone. Not everyone will be listening with a critical ear. Played back over a phone or injecting a phrase or two in otherwise spoken samples will fool many people.
I guarantee you someone will be using this to make their own MLP episodes on YouTube specifically designed to scare children or get them to do awful things.
Models presumably get better over time. It really won't be too much longer until people will be able to fake celebrities, politicians, exes, authority figures, etc. As a fairly benign example, if I had this in high school you better believe I could have called to excuse some of my absences.
I agree, I love the idea of generating some decent voice lines for my own games projects, but this also introduces issues of the rights of the original voice actors.
If you train a model to mimic a performance given by an actor, then use that model and fire the actor, isn't that potentially really problematic? (Also, it draws parallels to the Luddites who were not anti technology, but wanted to ensure that technology wasn't used in a way that reduced worker quality of life.)
And yes, I think there are helpful ways this could be deployed. I'm gender fluid, and I'd love to be able to adjust my voice digitally, but we need to be thinking about how this could cause harm first.