A reminder that if you have any accounts where that company uses “voice phrase as password”, call them and have it disabled. Usually they have other options like a secret pass phrase.
I also taught my whole family a passphrase to verify that any call “from family” is actually that family member and not a shakedown scam.
Super easy precautions against really painful consequences.
Good one. I will ask my mother when she's in doubt to tell an old joke of my dad (she to me or me to her), including word plays. We know all of these inside out, including the very way he'd tell these. Only insiders know these jokes, though my wife's father is from the same year and some jokes my dad had her dad had as well. It took some magic away, for sure, but he was still my dad who was chronically ill and kept using humor to deal with life. A gifted talent I don't seem to possess.
All of this can be resolved by adopting a wider principle of self ownership. Something society does not actually want to do on a wide scale because that amount of liberty often means people do with that liberty things we do not like and wish to bar them from
However a overriding principle of self ownership would mean I own my voice, I own my face, I own my body, I own my labor, I own my data, I own everything about me, and I ... and I alone get to control how that is used.
And yet this makes little to no sense on its own merit. Humans are not animals that are hatched from an egg ready to live as a rugged individual in the wilds. You are a social creature that learns everything you know by stealing bits of information from the world around you (or were you born with a sack of gold and you paid your parents to raise you?).
You look and act and sound like thousands of others out there. You bleed information into the wider world around you, and now you seek to restrict others access to it.
In actuality I am an anti-social creature, I am contrarian, and very ODD
>>that learns everything you know by stealing bits of information from the world around you
No primary I learn everything I know by accessing information freely given to me by others in the world around me via voluntary exchange. Either freely accessible knowledge people put out for all to access, or by exchanging currency or other value with the holder of said knowledge for which they share that knowledge with me
I don't understand how this solves the issue of others wanting to own you. People often want this, and the only way to achieve this is not to convince people they should have self-ownership because that does not preclude people owning things that are not theirs.
We do not have this self ownership principle in our system of laws. It should be something on the order of the US 1st Amendment in weight and scope codified in the very foundation of the legal system
I've played with voice cloners extensively and my view is that, except for very rare voices, they are repeated in different people - sometimes with the same intonation and prosody - even originating from different languages.
Who owns your voice? Well, who owns your face? Such things are covered by copyright law. You dont have total control over your face. I can use Fry's face in a parody film or critisism of him as a person. Even the cited article uses an image of his face (the embedded youtube clip). The rules for parody, critisim and nominative uses go far.
Deepfakes have already been to the supreme court (see Hustler v. Falwell). Cutting back on such uses risks cutting deeply into freedom of speech. As with Falwell, the answers involve educating the public so that they can tell fake from real, not giving famous people the ability to blackball every work they feel too similar to themselves. Lots of people talk like Stephen Fry. He doesnt get to own that accent or mode of speech just because he is the most famous any more than Lindsay Lohan can own blonde valley girl (she sued gta V over that image).
I wonder if at that point people will rightfully lose confidence in the authenticity of digital media, or if people are doomed to believe what they see...
This is one use case I can see for immutable and distributed public ledgers aka blockchains.
By having a publicly associated wallet which can sign the release/link/buffer of an audio file one would be able to assure legitimacy of the output and the rest of the world can carry on without worrying they are being bamboozled by a deepfake.
However, blockchains have been going so deep down the path of cryptocurrencies and get rich quick schemes that their real use cases are being ignored for random tokens.
The blockchain I envision being used for this purpose I stated above would have no token, it would just be… a blockchain.
I guess you could have the ‘mining/POW’ part take place during the signing of the data and would be done by the signee.
You mean all those Warhammer 40k lore videos with David Attenborough weren't legit? :)
It is crazy if you need a good example of what Stephen Fry id talking about look at the "Attenborough Lore" channel. I honestly can't tell other than I doubt he'd do voice overs for dozens of 40k videos and the narrator is listed as "AI".
> I can use Fry's face in a parody film or critisism of him as a person.
This might feel like nitpicking but given the topic... there are places where there is no notion of 'fair use' like this. There are a whole variety of answers to the question of how much of your identity is yours (and how much is even separable from yourself). One shouldn't take whatever IP regime you're familiar with as the only possible truth, cuz there’s a world of possibilities
If I’m right, if you take a photo of Leonardo DiCaprio you can’t just use it in a commercial to promote a product without his permission even though you own the copyright of the photo.
Nor can you place an actor in a movie without their permission - they did that with Crispin Glover in Back to the Future 2, he sued the studio and I believe won or the studio settled.
Tell that to all the celebs that take great efforts to manage and alter their faces. Plastic surgery, exercise and healthy living do alter and "create" faces. Tell that to makeup artists who get payed to paint faces.
Natural voices and faces don't seem like copyrightable works. A face resulting from plastic surgery, or a voice you made up for a role; they seem like they could be copyrightable, though also they seem closely analogous too materials you use to create a work, rather than a work in themselves.
Difference between "someone sounds like Fry" and "have trained a model on his voice and hoped he won't notice". In second version his rights to his voice would be violated
Yes, but trademark has very similar rules to copyright. You can use trademarks in much the same way, such as saying "I hate Coca Cola" (nominative use) or commenting "This security vulnerability brought to you by Windows Vista, the most secure operating system ever" (parody use).
or the danger of photoshop... I think we managed to live with the idea that you can't trust a random photo fairly well. AI is just doing that to audio (which was never very reliable anyway) and video.
Which is healthy, people are too trusting of videos. It is particularly easy to manipulate people in a video by adding music, selective editing / context omission, etc.
I believe trademark is the best framework for protection here. A voice is part of a brand. If you imply that your product is from a specific brand then you may be in violation of their rights. I cannot add a swoosh to my new shoes if it too closely resembles the Nike brand because it is both false advertising and a trademark violation. No one should be able to use a specific voice without appropriate permission.
Unfortunately the ultimate test here is "confusion." Will a reasonable person be confused as to the origin of a product. Satire must be sufficiently obvious to receive protection and branding sufficiently different as to not cause confusion.
These tests are well established in the visual realm, they need to be consistently applied to audio as well.
> No one should be able to use a specific voice without appropriate permission.
You can’t use their name or endorsement without permission. The challenge is if I do an impression and never say “this is Stephen Fry” then I’m not using their likeness, I’m just emulating.
Does Oasis need the Beatles permission for sounding like them? No. But if they performed as the Beatles, then that’s a problem.
What is this thing "specific voice"? Is there a scientific definition, something beyond them just sounding similar to a layperson? There are literally billions of voices on this planet. And a person's voice changes drastically across their lifetime. Any such rules would need exact definitions with enough granularity of data to ensure nobody gains rights over the "specific voice" owned by some other person.
The post you're replying to answered your question.
>Unfortunately the ultimate test here is "confusion." Will a reasonable person be confused as to the origin of a product. Satire must be sufficiently obvious to receive protection and branding sufficiently different as to not cause confusion.
You could take solace in this part from the end, maybe?
“Ironically, perhaps, it is AI, for all it’s threats, that will offer the best chance for a solution to itself. And, it is to be hoped, to the climate apocalypse, too.”
I think we should less worried about people believing deep-fakes are real and more worried that politicians (and others) will be able to claim things which they actually said are deep fakes.
That depends on the relative frequency of the two modes. If 90% of videos of each precidential candidate were a deepfake good enough that you cannot tell if it's real or not, then that is a worse problem than the possibility that one real video can be denied.
In both cases, though, the solution would be to find a way to allow people to tell deepfakes from real videos. For instance by having some sort of certificate provider agencies digitally sign them.
This would still make it hard to tell a deepfake from an unsigned video, of course.
Readit News
I also taught my whole family a passphrase to verify that any call “from family” is actually that family member and not a shakedown scam.
Super easy precautions against really painful consequences.
Deleted Comment
However a overriding principle of self ownership would mean I own my voice, I own my face, I own my body, I own my labor, I own my data, I own everything about me, and I ... and I alone get to control how that is used.
You look and act and sound like thousands of others out there. You bleed information into the wider world around you, and now you seek to restrict others access to it.
In actuality I am an anti-social creature, I am contrarian, and very ODD
>>that learns everything you know by stealing bits of information from the world around you
No primary I learn everything I know by accessing information freely given to me by others in the world around me via voluntary exchange. Either freely accessible knowledge people put out for all to access, or by exchanging currency or other value with the holder of said knowledge for which they share that knowledge with me
We do not have this self ownership principle in our system of laws. It should be something on the order of the US 1st Amendment in weight and scope codified in the very foundation of the legal system
Deleted Comment
Deepfakes have already been to the supreme court (see Hustler v. Falwell). Cutting back on such uses risks cutting deeply into freedom of speech. As with Falwell, the answers involve educating the public so that they can tell fake from real, not giving famous people the ability to blackball every work they feel too similar to themselves. Lots of people talk like Stephen Fry. He doesnt get to own that accent or mode of speech just because he is the most famous any more than Lindsay Lohan can own blonde valley girl (she sued gta V over that image).
At some point, it will become impossible to tell the difference.
By having a publicly associated wallet which can sign the release/link/buffer of an audio file one would be able to assure legitimacy of the output and the rest of the world can carry on without worrying they are being bamboozled by a deepfake.
However, blockchains have been going so deep down the path of cryptocurrencies and get rich quick schemes that their real use cases are being ignored for random tokens.
The blockchain I envision being used for this purpose I stated above would have no token, it would just be… a blockchain.
I guess you could have the ‘mining/POW’ part take place during the signing of the data and would be done by the signee.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It is crazy if you need a good example of what Stephen Fry id talking about look at the "Attenborough Lore" channel. I honestly can't tell other than I doubt he'd do voice overs for dozens of 40k videos and the narrator is listed as "AI".
This might feel like nitpicking but given the topic... there are places where there is no notion of 'fair use' like this. There are a whole variety of answers to the question of how much of your identity is yours (and how much is even separable from yourself). One shouldn't take whatever IP regime you're familiar with as the only possible truth, cuz there’s a world of possibilities
If I’m right, if you take a photo of Leonardo DiCaprio you can’t just use it in a commercial to promote a product without his permission even though you own the copyright of the photo.
Nor can you place an actor in a movie without their permission - they did that with Crispin Glover in Back to the Future 2, he sued the studio and I believe won or the studio settled.
Difference between "someone sounds like Fry" and "have trained a model on his voice and hoped he won't notice". In second version his rights to his voice would be violated
Which is healthy, people are too trusting of videos. It is particularly easy to manipulate people in a video by adding music, selective editing / context omission, etc.
Unfortunately the ultimate test here is "confusion." Will a reasonable person be confused as to the origin of a product. Satire must be sufficiently obvious to receive protection and branding sufficiently different as to not cause confusion.
These tests are well established in the visual realm, they need to be consistently applied to audio as well.
You can’t use their name or endorsement without permission. The challenge is if I do an impression and never say “this is Stephen Fry” then I’m not using their likeness, I’m just emulating.
Does Oasis need the Beatles permission for sounding like them? No. But if they performed as the Beatles, then that’s a problem.
What is this thing "specific voice"? Is there a scientific definition, something beyond them just sounding similar to a layperson? There are literally billions of voices on this planet. And a person's voice changes drastically across their lifetime. Any such rules would need exact definitions with enough granularity of data to ensure nobody gains rights over the "specific voice" owned by some other person.
>Unfortunately the ultimate test here is "confusion." Will a reasonable person be confused as to the origin of a product. Satire must be sufficiently obvious to receive protection and branding sufficiently different as to not cause confusion.
“Ironically, perhaps, it is AI, for all it’s threats, that will offer the best chance for a solution to itself. And, it is to be hoped, to the climate apocalypse, too.”
In both cases, though, the solution would be to find a way to allow people to tell deepfakes from real videos. For instance by having some sort of certificate provider agencies digitally sign them.
This would still make it hard to tell a deepfake from an unsigned video, of course.