Actor Stephen Fry says his voice was stolen from the Harry Potter audiobooks and replicated by AI—and warns this is just the beginning::The actor told an audience in London that AI was a “burning issue” for actors on strike.

  • bobotron@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Don’t judge me too much but I have to admit I really like the Warhammer 40k Attenborough channel and there is no way that dude is allowed his likeness

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    Among those warning about the technology’s potential to cause harm is British actor and author Stephen Fry, who told an audience at the CogX Festival in London on Thursday about his personal experience of having his identity digitally cloned without his permission.

    Speaking at a news conference as the strike was announced, union president Fran Drescher said AI “poses an existential threat” to creative industries, and said actors needed protection from having “their identity and talent exploited without consent and pay.”

    As AI technology has advanced, doctored footage of celebrities and world leaders—known as deepfakes—has been circulating with increasing frequency, prompting warnings from experts about artificial intelligence risks.

    At a U.K. rally held in support of the SAG-AFTRA strike over the summer, Emmy-winning Succession star Brian Cox shared an anecdote about a friend in the industry who had been told “in no uncertain terms” that a studio would keep his image and do what they liked with it.

    Oscar winner Matthew McConaughey told Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff during a panel event at this year’s Dreamforce conference that he had concerns about the rise of AI in Hollywood.

    A spokesperson for the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP), the entertainment industry’s official collective bargaining representative, was not available for comment when contacted by Fortune.


    The original article contains 911 words, the summary contains 213 words. Saved 77%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • dangblingus@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I’m sure it wasn’t just the HP audiobooks. He’s been on television for 40 some odd years. There’s hundreds and hundreds of hours of recordings of his voice to train an AI model on.

    • drivepiler@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Hours of monologue with zero background noise is absolute gold for training the model though. You’d have to chop up and edit a lot of footage to get an inferior result with the television footage. Still, it’s entirely possible and it may possibly have been trained on both.

  • mvirts@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I mean humans can do and have been doing this exact thing forever. Computers make it faster and easier, just like everything else. This isn’t AI, this is training a speech model using machine learning techniques.

    • sfgifz@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      A few humans imitating other humans is not even comparable to the scale that computers imitating humans can reach though.

      • mvirts@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        True. I think the main difference is that a computer has no moral compass and won’t remember the large scale criminal operation it was a part of. I don’t think it’s worthwhile to fear or regulate this kind of ml application, the cat is out of the bag and the best we can do is implement security controls like passwords with our important relationships.

    • Fushuan [he/him]@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      This isn’t AI, this is training a speech model using machine learning techniques.

      … That’s AI. AI is a subset of ML. Machines Learn to gain Artificial Intelligence.

      • mvirts@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Maybe, I think of AI as requiring intelligence rather than being controlled by an operator, translating a human voice or text from one style to another. Maybe I’m wrong, it’s just a name after all.

        • Fushuan [he/him]@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Well, if you think about it, being able to morph an input text into the voice of someone is the job that some voice actors do, and the task of doing such a thing is something that I would define as intelligent.

          In any case, it’s not you or me who define the AI term, in CompSci AI is used to mention recommendation systems (which include search engines that do smart ranking, which nowadays is all of them), translation systems, NLP (chatbots, spam filters), Image processing (auto labelling stuff, object tracking, …) and so forth.

          Most of these systems weren’t considered “ai powered” before neural networks and deep learning (high layered neural networks), but nowadays most of those are: NLP uses NNs that convert words / text to vectors to then operate around those and decide on stuff (this includes search and translation), Image processing uses NNs too to be able to “learn” information about several images, to then be able to recognize humans, faces, track objects, generate fake images from an input, deepfakes…

          Usually, they are called intelligent systems and thus AI because of the way they are prepared, all of those require that some sort of NN is trained with some dataset to then generate a model with weights that is then fed to the NN alongside some input to archieve the desired result. That trained model, which is a bunch of numbers that decide how the input is transofrmed according to the NN, is the, so to say, “intelligence” that the machine as artificially learnt.

          That’s it, that’s literally it, disregard marketing and articles written by salespeople, AI is a system that uses some sort of model trained with a dataset, Usually a NN model although in my opinion, any model (random forests for example) should work too, but it’s true that NN models process data of higher complexity.

  • qdJzXuisAndVQb2@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Honestly, while these growing pains are unfair, I just have no sympathy for rich actors in this. I’d love to get rid of the ridiculous overpaid class of celebrities and operate with artificial stars. I do not enjoy celebrity culture or the elevation of voices and opinions purely on the basis of connections and/or acting talent.

    • CustodialTeapot@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      That’s fine. Totally agree, but this (AI actors/voices etc) would just replace the celebrities with just a smaller, richer, more controlling group of capitalist fucks.

    • dangblingus@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Where’s the line for you? Stephen Fry is far from your typical “spoiled rich celebrity actor”. He’s relatively famous, very successful, but like, what dollar threshold destroys your sympathy for people having their careers undermined?