Voice clone of Anthony Bourdain prompts synthetic media ethics questions

The comment also includes examples of his stated beliefs that allow us to postulate somewhat closely.

>You're speaking on behalf of a dead person in objection to someone else speaking on behalf of that person.

The objection isn't to speaking on the behalf of the dead, it is to using phoney tactics to do so, playing them up for emotional value

Parent was not pretending to be said dead person, though.

Watch a few episodes.

There does not seem to be any disclaimer regarding the manipulation, and the OP article questions whether the director would even have mentioned it had it not come up tangentially in the course of this interview.

Any of those are fine - with disclosure. It seems pretty clear that in this case, they were less than transparent.

> “If you watch the film, other than that line you mentioned, you probably don’t know what the other lines are that were spoken by the A.I., and you’re not going to know,” Neville told the reviewer, Helen Rosner. “We can have a documentary-ethics panel about it later.”

...or we can have it sooner, on Twitter, and you'll get excoriated, and rightly so. I don't care if they train an AI to imitate Bourdain rapping the third verse from Modern Major General, it's a free country, but you have to be honest about it. You can't call yourself a documentarian and get cutesy about the authenticity of the material.

His widow did not provide consent [1].

[1] https://twitter.com/OttaviaBourdain/status/14158894550057164...

Historical recreations are fine.

Creating a digital voice model of abraham lincoln and then using it for ??? is not.

All of this is being done for profit means (the orville redenbacher, fast furious, star wars).

Just because we can doesn't mean we shouldn't stop and think if we should.

I don’t think my family should have the ability to make decisions regarding my likeness. My likeness is one of those things which is just totally 100% mine. I married my wife and had kids with her and would want her to have all of my money if I died but wouldn’t want her to be able to license my voice and face to promote Wheaties cereal or something. It shouldn’t be allowed unless the person explicitly grants those rights while alive.

Ofter you see what you want to see in the world. As much as I adore Bourdain, I have to admit he was undoubtably jaded and there were trips where that colored everything. For many, depression comes in waves and lasts for periods of time. He showed a lot of the good and bad in these places, but everywhere has a bit of both.

I have not seen the movie yet, but I would take a guess that they wanted to recreate the voice-over similar to his television shows.

Hmm, perhaps even the recipient of the letter involved. I think this would have been a better dramatic choice.

I don't think so. There are still other ethical considerations. Bourdain likely would not have liked this, as others in the thread point out. So it is weird to honor someone with a documentary but not honor their wishes

Disclaimers help. And it's not like they were making up words. But I still feel it was probably a poor creative choice.

I have a machine with two GPUs and a frozen OS with a tensorflow python app that clones voices, and I'd say the quality passes if you run it through a phone bandpass filter.

I've had an idea to use propellerhead recycle to chop the output cloned voice into syllables, and then "play" the chopped parts in rhythm, through autotune.

The issue is you get Eifel 65 sounding autotune if your base vocals are monotonic or way off key. The only way I can think of fixing this is to use something like audacity's pitch changer that doesn't affect the speed of the sample - rough the lyrical tones in with audacity/recycle, then autotune it where it needs to go.

I'd like to say I'm too busy to get this workflow going, but mostly I'm lazy and someone else will do it first - and better - I can't improve the AI cloning software.

AI-generated Nirvana song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GogY7RQFFus

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/nirvana-ku... I don't remember if these songs had lyrics, but there are AI generated songs in the style of Cobain and Jim Morrison

Would you settle for Ronald Reagan? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mAZVp-n-5TM

This here. Machines can only become the enemy when they gain sentience, form a civilization, and declare independence.

Until then, it's not the machines that are the problem. It's the people behind the machines, people making business decisions about operations and deployment of the machines.

It should be covered under "right to publicity" laws [0]. TFA touched on this. These are the laws that prevent people from capitalizing on celebrities' names or likenesses without permission. This is applied even if the person is dead. Impressions of a person's voice generated from actual recordings of the voice is new ground, but it reasonably falls under "likeness."

There are two noteworthy limitations here:

1. The laws require a plaintiff to sue. If Bourdain left control of his public likeness to someone (like a family member or agent), they would have standing. I have no idea if anyone receives them by default if he died without explicitly granting them.

2. You don't need permission for using a person's name or likeness in relevant news or commentary. So this documentary might be protected.

IANAL, so if anyone knows relevant case law, please share.

And, of course, these are just the laws we have now. Whether we need new laws is iffy to me. I can just dislike this documentary using a generated voice because it's deceptive. Bourdain never recorded those words, but people watching the documentary could easily believe otherwise. It's not like TFA's example of a Civil War soldier reading a letter. I know he died before quality voice recording. And many documentaries label readings of modern documents with "Dramatic reading by actor" or similar.

[0] https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/using-name-or-likeness-anot...

That seems like an impossible thing to do - how would you define "your voice" and how much would it have to be changed to no longer be considered "your voice"?

What would happen between two people that sound similar, or even identical, to our imperfect human senses?

Or better yet, own copyright to your voice (and perhaps face) without having to register anywhere.

You wouldn’t download a voice

Has it always been considered an ethical violation to have an impersonator read something a celebrity wrote? This can't be the first time that's happened.

People would pay for that. To get a voicemail from someone you loved would be great. Even better a conversation.

We hang photos to remember. A voicemail or more would help our kids hear grandma.

In an academic setting, and with enough precedent, yes.

To discuss it now would only benefit the commercial interests who purposely baked this outrage manna in their advertising oven.

What you listed are just ways we've learned to live with the forgeable nature of signatures. Now voice recordings (and even videos) will have a similar fate in the future.