You do realize that the vast majority of voice actors are not famous right? These are people working in a highly competitive labor market that has one of the few influential unions in the US outside of trades. Most of these AI companies aren’t going after Johansson and the like if they have to pay instead of steal. They’re going for those who are less established and trying to get a break, making them easier to exploit.
Comment on They stole my voice with AI | Jeff Geerling
General_Effort@lemmy.world 1 week agoDo you want the rich to be richer? Because that’s how you make the rich richer. People like Scarlett Johanson will be able to license their likeness for millions or billions. Of course, we would have the same rights; the same rights to own a mansion and a yacht. Feeling lucky?
That’s the kind of capitalism that Marx rages against: Laws that let people demand money without contributing labor.
nickwitha_k@lemmy.sdf.org 1 week ago
General_Effort@lemmy.world 1 week ago
You do realize that the vast majority of voice actors are not famous right?
Yes, that’s the point. You are not defending voice actors by demanding likeness rights.
I am not sure why this is so difficult to understand. Maybe there is some confusion about the technology. You only need a few seconds of audio to clone a voice. You don’t need hours of audio from a professional. That’s why the tech can be used for scams. Likeness rights won’t create jobs for voice actors. Only free money for famous people. You can also generate random voices.
Leading AI voice companies like Elevenlabs require you to have permission to clone a voice. But how can they check if their customers are being truthful? In practice, it simply means that famous people, whose voices are known, may not be imitated. Likeness rights, by their nature, can only be enforced, with any kind of effectiveness, for the rich and famous.
OpenAI tried to hire Johansson. When she declined, they hired a different, less famous actress. Maybe they did that to defend against lawsuits, or maybe it gives better results. If they had engineered a nonexistent voice, it would be almost impossible to make the case that they did not imitate Johansson. But still, everyone is talking about that poor famous, rich person who got ripped off. What about the actress who actually provided the voice? I guess she can look for another job, because Johansson owns that voice type.
one of the few influential unions in the US
You mean Ronald Reagan’s old outfit? Do you even know who Ronald Reagan was?
nickwitha_k@lemmy.sdf.org 1 week ago
Yes, that’s the point. You are not defending voice actors by demanding likeness rights.
Knowing people who are not famous but are SAG-AFTRA actors, I’m going to have to disagree very much on that. A regular contractual battle is the “in perpetuity” clause for one’s likeness. This happens at all levels. Essentially, clients often try to sneak a clause in that grants them the exclusive right to use the actor’s likeness forever. While this does not mean that the actor does not receive pay, it binds them to the client in a way that prevents them from getting other work and diminishes their bargaining ability.
But still, everyone is talking about that poor famous, rich person who got ripped off. What about the actress who actually provided the voice? I guess she can look for another job, because Johansson owns that voice type.
If the actress was performing in an affectation to impersonate Johansson, she was effectively acting no better than a scab and enabling corpos to violate consent. Knowingly impersonating another loving actor for purposes other than parody is a scummy thing to do and the actress was ethically bound to refuse the job.
Being famous doesn’t make someone less of a person. They’re just people like the rest of us (though generally more financially lucky). We all have a right to our identity and likeness and to decide how our likeness is used. Legitimatizing the violation of that consent is not a path that benefits any worker.
You mean Ronald Reagan’s old outfit? Do you even know who Ronald Reagan was?
That’s a poor and fallacious argument there. California is Ronnie “Pull Up the Ladder” Reagan’s home state does that make all Californians Reaganites by association?
General_Effort@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Knowing people who are not famous but are SAG-AFTRA actors, I’m going to have to disagree very much on that.
How do likeness rights benefit non-famous people?
Turning likeness into an intellectual property implies the right to sell it. Apparently you want to argue for likeness, so I don’t see why you would use such clauses as an argument.
That’s a poor and fallacious argument there.
It’s not an argument, as you have recognized. I hoped it would make you think.
You know that not everyone in Hollywood is part of SAG-AFTRA, right? Have you ever wondered what happened to them during the strike? I guess they just have to fend for themselves. If the “union” doesn’t care about those guys, do you think the leadership cares about the small members?
Actors are a conservative lot. At the bottom, you have the “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” and at the top… Well, you know. It’s not common on lemmy to cheer for such a system.
corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
There’s no future where this affects me in the slightest. Okay, so jeff Goldblum can get a few more shekels for renting his voice. This doesn’t affect me: that’s his JOB, whether they stole his likeness and paid him, paid him and cloned his voice, or paid him to do the speaking. It’s the same thing, imho.
Talk to me when people who don’t have their voice recorded get an unfair leg-up for selling it. I’ll be okay with it then, too, but let me know.
General_Effort@lemmy.world 1 week ago
And it’s a landlord’s job to collect rent. It’s Elon Musk’s job to maximize shareholder value.
It’s ok if you watch out for numero uno. I’m not expecting more. But you are wrong to think that this doesn’t affect you. You can’t opt out of society. You won’t be able to avoid products with licensed voices. Your taxes will be paying for enforcement against “pirates”. And most importantly, every new privilege for the rich and famous changes society. With every step, the elite becomes more entrenched and the bottom more hopeless. It’s a matter of enlightened self-interest. If we only reject what directly hurts us individually, then the elites will simply build themselves a new feudalism.
nickwitha_k@lemmy.sdf.org 1 week ago
Are you really conflating people who make their living based upon their acting skills and likeness with landlords?.. Wow.
I am asking this in good faith as a neurodivergent individual:
Could you please clarify where you’re coming at this from?
Is it that you feel that actors and other creatives are less legitimate as workers than others?
Is it that you think that LLMs could be a path towards AGI that could save humans from themselves?
Is it something else entirely?
Myself, I am coming at it from the perspective of someone who has worked in the tech industry for a while, and is familiar with the underlying technologies and how hyped they’ve been. I additionally personally know several professional actors, SAG-AFTRA and non-union, who have been materially impacted by AI and corpo bad faith in recent years (especially streaming services and game companies). On top of that, as a millennial, I have experienced significant financial setbacks due to unfettered corporate greed and know many peers who are much worse off than myself because of price gouging and stagnant wages.
My main motivations in AI conversations are undermining hype and ensuring that people take ethics into consideration, while looking at technologies that do have some actually interesting use cases and could lead to other interesting things.
General_Effort@lemmy.world 1 week ago
No. I am talking about rent-seeking.
Rent-seeking is the act of growing one’s existing wealth by manipulating the social or political environment without creating new wealth.[1] Rent-seeking activities have negative effects on the rest of society. They result in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, stifled competition, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality,[2][3] risk of growing corruption and cronyism, decreased public trust in institutions, and potential national decline.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
You could argue to what a degree landlords or Elon Musk are engaged in rent-seeking. Likeness rights are a clear example, though.
Imagine in the near future. Some famous person licenses their likeness for a show, game, movie. Maybe the producer hires an unknown actor that is then digitally altered into the famous person, like a more advanced version of Gollum. Or maybe the VFX artists can do it on their own. These guys work. The famous person does nothing. They might be dead, while the rights-owners still collect license fees.
Grimy@lemmy.world 1 week ago
The real risk is the voice being sold to Disney or Sony Music, and then youtube videos are getting removed because of similarities.
Voice tones aren’t all that unique in most cases and theres too much room for abuse imo. The Scarjo and open ai scandal is a good example of this. The voices weren’t that similar and I’m just not interested in having celebrities own whole spectrums like that.