The actor told an audience in London that AI was a “burning issue” for actors.
It just the beginning for sure. This future will be the end of artists and still everyone will clapping to AI productions like fools.
No one cared when spreadsheets replaced a huge chunk of office workers.
If the results are the same what’s the issue.
Artists feel special because until recently computer couldn’t automate them. But it’s the same as any job.
Making art is something people enjoy, for one thing. Good art also has something of the artist in it, something to it other than “it was made from this prompt”.
Art is just combining previously learnt techniques together with a specific subject. Since AI essentially knows all the techniques it could be better eventually.
Nothing is stopping people making art for fun.
Art is just combining previously learnt techniques together with a specific subject.
If that’s what you look for in art then sure, but I disagree with that definition. A child’s drawing of her dad has aspects to it that a picture of that dad taken in a photo booth can never have. A poem about war is much more meaningful when it comes from a refugee. The Wikipedia page for art lists several ‘purposes’ and most of them are not something AI art can ever fulfil.
You can’t say ever. It could learn every diary and report from war ever and write amazing stuff. It’s just a matter of time. It’s currently limited by computer power quite significantly.
It could do that, but its writing would be hollow because those stories are meaningful due to the lived experiences behind them. For example anyone who’s read The Diary of a Young Girl could write something similar in Anne Frank’s style, but it wouldn’t be nearly as impactful because learning about an event is very different from living through it.
It’s limited by the trends of human art. The art and text AI that we have are based on pattern processing. They output what is expected based on what we feed it. They aren’t able to come up with entirely new styles or philosophies. They don’t even have a cognitive ability to have any philosophy. An AI describing a tree or depicting an image of a tree doesn’t have an understanding of what a tree is, they are not aware of the world, they can only replicate human words and images.
A breakthrough needs to happen for them to be capable of anything more, but that’s going to be its own can of worms.
The people who lost those jobs cared.
If not for the wages, people hardly have any attachment to most office jobs. But when it comes to artistic endeavors, a lot of people dream of being able to make a career in those fields. Frankly, that sort of comment itself seems like it comes from envy, like artists ought to be taken down a peg for daring to work with something they are passionate about. I couldn’t think of a single artist who bragged about being above automation.
As someone who works in an office job, if AI could free me to work on something creative that would be wonderful, but if it will instead replace already existing creatives and leave us both without anywhere to work, that is not really helping anybody but executives profiting over it. What benefit does that even add to my life? Remixed porn? Meme generators? It’s not the same level of benefit as industrial automation, if any. The human element of art enriches it in an unique way that AI trying to distill a style from countless samples won’t be able to do.
This hits the nail on the head. A major component of art is that it’s an outlet of human creativity, something we find fulfilling to both produce and consume. If creativity is delegated to machines, what’s left for us humans? At some point, we’ll grow tired of Taco Bell and re-runs, and what then?
It’s not the same as any job. It’s putting your face and your words behind something you cannot consent to. If someone spoofed your username and started posting offensive things, I’ve no doubt anyone would be upset. That’s just your username. Now add your real life photo, your face, and your voice.
You would have to be a sociopath not to care if suddenly your friends and family received a video of you performing offensive acts or shilling for a political cause you are vehemently opposed to.
AI will annihilate most data entry workers in the next few years as well.
I wish i could trust AI to do data entry.
AI is very stupid and breaks in ways you wouldn’t expect
Some AIs are more intelligent than the average person.
Ask a normal person to do the tasks ChatGPT can and I bet the results would be even worse.
Ask chatGPT to do things a normal person can, and it also fails. ChatGPT is a tool, a particularly dangerous swiss army chainsaw.
I use it all the time at work.
Getting it to summerize articles is a really useful way to use it.
It’s also great at explaining concepts.
It’s also great at explaining concepts.
Is it? Or is it just great at making you think that? I’ve seen many ChatGPT outputs “explaining” something I’m knowledgeable of and it being deliriously wrong.
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That’s why QA will still exist.
Plus when I say “AI will kill data entry jobs” I don’t mean ChatGPT3.5/4.0, I’m talking about either a dedicated Saas offering or a future LLM model intended for individual Enterprise environment deployment and trained specifically on company data alongside Cloud and Data engineering.
Keep downvoting the guy who literally works in IT and is seeing these changes happen in real time, I’m sure you all know better than I do.
Literally what computer programmes are. A large part of development is making sure end users do things correctly.
It’s a perfect task for AI. In fact most of it is achievable with standard coding.
These troglodytes probably couldn’t even find their way around a terminal, don’t worry about what they think can and cant be done with LLM’s.
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Not “knowing” doesn’t have anything to do with AI performance. That’s a very human centric view.
I work in enterprise IT networking and systems and don’t give a fuck about your shitty home server.
AI will do the bulk of the work, and humans will QA it. It’s not that fucking hard to understand. No one here except you is focusing on the fact that it can’t actually think for itself, no one ever said it was going to do its job without any kind of oversight.
Go back to being a hobbyist and let us professionals decide what can and can’t be done.
Studios basically want to own the personas of their actors so they can decouple the actual human from it and just use their images. There’s been a lot of weird issues with this already in videogames with body capture and voice acting, and contracts aren’t read through properly or the wording is vague, and not all agents know about this stuff yet. It’s very dystopian to think your whole appearance and persona can be taken from you and commodified. I remember when Tupac’s hologram performed at Coachella in 2012 and thinking how fucked up that was. You have these huge studios and event promoters appropriating his image to make money, and an audience effectively watching a performance of technological necromancy where a dead person is re-animated.
Did Tupac’s estate agree? Or receive compensation?
Who cares if his estate agreed to it? HE didn’t. His estate shouldn’t have the right to make money off of things he never actually did.
Let the dead stay dead, it’s just an excuse to not pay new, living artists.
That’s literally how estates work.
Once I’m 6 feet under, if it could give my family a better life I’d say they should be able to agree to whatever they want on my behalf as long as it doesn’t go against my will.
I know that legally they have the right. I’m saying they shouldn’t have that right because reanimating a digital facsimile of your corpse just to puppet it to make money is fucked up. This includes shit like the CG Tarkin and Leia in Star Wars as well as the Tupac hologram
I think it’s important to remember how this used to happen.
AT&T paid voice actors to record phoneme groups in the 90s/2000s and have been using those recordings to train voice models for decades now. There are about a dozen AT&T voices we’re all super familiar with because they’re on all those IVR/PBX replacement systems we talk to instead of humans now.
The AT&T voice actors were paid for their time, and not offered royalties but they were told that their voices would be used to generate synthentic computer voices.
This was a consensual exchange of work, not super great long term as there’s no royalties or anything and it’s really just a “work for hire” that turns into a product… but that aside – the people involved all agreed to what they were doing and what their work would be used for.
The ultimate problem at the root of all the generative tools is ultimately one of consent. We don’t permit the arbitrary copying of things that are perceived to be owned by people, nor do we think it’s appropriate to do things without people’s consent with their “Image, likeness, voice, or written works.”
Artists tell politicians to stop using their music all the time etc. But ultimately until we really get a ruling on what constitutes “derivative” works nothing will happen. An AI is effectively the derivative work of all the content that makes up the vectors that represents it so it seems a no brainer, but because it’s radio on the internet we’re not supposed to be mad at Napster for building it’s whole business on breaking the law.
I don’t think permits and concent alone can be used in labor relationship, because the unbalance position of power employees and employers have with each other. Could the workers really negotiate better working conditions? They really can’t, not without an union anyway.
I think a more interesting (and less dubious) example of this would be Vocaloid and to a greater extent, cevio AI
Vocaloid is a synth bank where instead of the notes being musical instruments, they’re phonemes which have been recorded and then packaged into a product which you pay for, which means royalties are involved (I think there might also be a thing with royalties for big performances and whatnot?) Cevio AI takes this a step further by using AI to better smooth together the phonemes and make pitching sound more natural (or not - it’s an instrument, you can break it in interesting ways if you try hard enough). And obviously, they consented to that specific thing and get paid for it. They gave Yamaha/Sony/the general public a specific character voice and permission to use that specific voice.
(There’s a FOSS voicebanks but that adds a different layer of complication to things like I think a lot of them were recorded before the idea of an “AI bank” was even a possibility. And like, while a paid voice bank is a proprietary thing, the open source alternatives are literally just a big file of .WAVs so it’s much easier to go outside their intended purposes)
When I read striking actor Stephen Fry my brain responded Why yes he is! Rather!
Am I a bad person?
Found the Hugh Laurie!
Oh man I didn’t realize that WASN’T what it meant until I read your comment…
“it wasn’t me planning the terrorist attack over the phone, it was someone stealing my voice with an AI”
This is, unfortunately, the world we are about to be in.
I guess voice recordings will have as much value as text messages
His voice wasn’t stolen, it’s still right where he left it.
If you made a painting for me, and then I started making copies of it without your permission and selling them off, while I might not have stolen the physical painting, I have stolen your art.
Just because they didn’t rip his larynx out of his throat, doesn’t mean you can’t steal someone’s voice.
We’re getting into samantics but it’s counterfeit not stolen.
It would be more like if you made a painting for me, and I then used that to replicate your artistic style and used that to make new paintings without your permission and passed it off as your work.
Jfc the pedantry.
I think it was a joke
No, the use of words matter when having a debate. “Theft” is an emotionally charged word that has a lot of implications that don’t actually map well to what’s going on here. It’s not a good word to be using for this.
Seems to map pretty well. I’ve looked up a handful of definitions of theft and looking at it from an emotionless perspective it seems to fit. To take something without permission or the right to. I don’t really see where the removal of a finite resource is required.
Thats why I figured that comment was just a dad joke.
When you steal something the person you stole it from doesn’t have it any more. That’s why copyright violation is covered by an entirely different set of laws from theft.
This isn’t even copying, really, since the end result is not the same as anything in the source material.
Lots of people may want it to be illegal, may want to call it theft, but that won’t make it so when they take it to court.
“When you steal something the person you stole it from doesn’t have it any more.”
Idk “identity theft” is a crime but you don’t actually remove the persons identity from them either. And also digital reproduction like in the case of piracy doesn’t remove a copy from the author but that is also illegal and is also considered theft. So I’m not really sure where you’re getting this idea that something isn’t both considered theft and a crime if it doesn’t remove a copy from the original owner, there are multiple examples to the contrary.
The point is loss. You have to show you were damaged. In this case fry isn’t losing anything.
And also digital reproduction like in the case of piracy doesn’t remove a copy from the author but that is also illegal and is also considered theft.
No, it is considered copyright violation. That’s a crime too (well, often a civil tort) but it is not theft. It’s a different crime.
If you want something to be illegal there needs to be an actual law making it illegal. There isn’t one in the case of AI training because it isn’t theft and it isn’t copyright violation. This is a new thing and new things are not illegal by default.
Calling it “theft” is simply incorrect, and meaningfully so since it’s an emotionally charged and prejudicial term.
What word or phrase would you have used in the headline ?
“Copied” or “mimicked” would be more accurate.
Hornswaggled?
I’ll go for ‘captured’ which is both figuratively and literally accurate
Copyright infringement, which, in this context, is still a seriously concerning crime.
It’s not copyright infringement. You can’t copyright a style, which is basically what a voice amounts to.
This is something new. It’s a way of taking something that we always thought of as belonging to a person, and using it without their permission.
At the moment the closest thing is trademark infringement, assuming you could trademark your personal identity (which you can’t). The harms are basically the same, deliberately passing off something cheap or dodgy as if it was associated with a particular entity. Doesn’t matter if the entity is Stephen fry or Pepsi Max.
It is, as a matter of fact. When Fry recorded his voice for those audiobooks, they were copyrighted. Reproducing the contents of those works as they have is, arguably a violation of copyright.
And when you compare Steven Frye to Pepsi Max, that’s a false equivalence, because you’re comparing a copyrighted material to a trademarked brand which are two different things.
Still, to your point of theft, nobody is taking anything from anyone. They are using something without permission, and that still falls squarely as copyright infringement, not theft.
Reproducing the contents of those works as they have is
This did not occur.
When they reproduced Fry’s voice with an AI based on what they captured from the copyrighted audiobook, that’s precisely what happened. Just because you refuse to understand or admit it, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
That’s not reproduction of content so isn’t a copyright violation. Not shouldn’t be. Literally right now is not.
The whole reason people are so up in arms about this is that we do not currently have laws or even standards that accurately police this kind of thing.
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!
Good bot
Paywall.
Archive
And that archive is blocked at my work because it’s in Russia.
Apologies. Do you know a better way I can link stuff behind paywalls.
Also, am I being a jerk when I link to Archive? I don’t wanna spread shady links unknowingly.
Nope you didn’t do anything wrong.
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I don’t. Anymore.
The site is in Russia and I’ve blocked all sites from Russia from reaching the company. It really cuts down on malware.
Ah, so you’re in charge. Then you can unblock it 🤷♂️
Oh, my bad. I wasn’t complaining about it. It was funny to me that I have to go through this many hoops to read this article, but my comment made it look like I was mad that the site was in Russia.
Firefox handles the pop-up without issues.
This is from a guy who advocates Linux as it is Open Source! The only violation here would be if another used that voice claiming it to be Fry. That would be fraud. Otherwise there is no issue.
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Since it is paywalled I can only guess from the title.
I don’t understand the problem. He was payed for reading books and now we all have his voice. What did he expect?
Is there an AI imitating his voice making money? Is it being represented with his name? If not, what would be the difference with some person imitating his voice, whould that be stealing too?
Basically I don’t see any problem with me buying those books training local model and give it other books to read. That can not be illegal, right?
Giving it to other people mentioning his name would definitely be fraud. But stealing? I don’t know.
Selling it to other people under other name… I don’t see a problem.
But than we come to AI generated images and I do start thinking in that way. Thou if they can find someone that looks like him, and other person sounding like him… they are all good?
Agree. The AI hate is becoming absurd and irrational. People really being played by the “think of the poor artist” propaganda.
No harm, no foul imo
I haven’t seen him in anything for ages, is being on strike a euphemism?
Not a lot on his bio since 2020…
Looks like he’s been busy with quite a few upcoming projects https://m.imdb.com/name/nm0000410/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_7_nm_1_q_stephen%2520fry
Oh cool. I knew he had a job in cricket but thought he’d retired from the media as he used to be on TV all the time
https://www.lords.org/lords/news-stories/stephen-fry-launches-mcc-campaign-to-reward-commun
He can’t do much as an actor without a voice.
Most of his work in progress is voice though
https://m.imdb.com/name/nm0000410/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_7_nm_1_q_stephen%2520fry
It was a childish joke about him conflating a violation of his rights with “stealing his voice”.
Ah
