Anyone Can Clone Your Voice Now

45 pointsposted 12 days ago
by bakigul

32 Comments

tefkah

12 days ago

I struggle to find non-evil applications of voice-cloning. Maybe listening to your dead relative's voice one more time? But those use-cases seems so niche to the overwhelming use this will likely have: misinformation, scamming, putting voice actors out of work.

apwheele

12 days ago

I would clone my own and do things like create scripted tutorials/presentations and audio books.

I do not personally prefer it, but a non-trivial number of individuals like video/audio presentations over writing.

testing22321

12 days ago

I’m currently recording my books into audiobooks the old fashioned way. I wonder good indistinguishable this would be.

solarwindy

12 days ago

The possibility to continue to sound like yourself after permanently losing your voice (e.g. from motor neurone syndrome) is one. Perhaps almost the only one.

yellowapple

11 days ago

Video game mods are the first use case that comes to mind for me. If you want to add new voice lines for a character, your options are:

1. don't (keep it silent);

2. recruit the original VA somehow;

3. recruit an alternative VA (who hopefully sounds close enough to the original to not be jarring);

4. splice voice lines together from existing voice lines; or

5. use text-to-speech.

Voice cloning is just Option 5 but with results much closer to Options 2 and 3.

socks

11 days ago

At my workplace, a colleague in another team used an AI tool to voice/video clone my companies CEO, CRO and CTO (I assume with their permission) and created a mandatory 30 minute training video that they expected us to watch with these monotone fake company leaders doing the presentation. It wasn't even a joke.

c0balt

12 days ago

Selling a voice profile for procedural/generated voice acting (similar to elevenlabs "voices") of a well-known person or pleasant sounding voice could be a legitimate use-case. But only iif actual consent is acquired first.

Given that rights about ones likeness (Personality rights) are somewhat defined there might be a legitimate usecase here. For example, a user might prefer a TTS with the voice of a familiar presenter from TV over a generic voice.

But it sounds exceedingly easy to abuse (similar to other generative AI applications) in order to exploit end-users (social engineering) and voice "providers" (exploitation of personality rights).

pogue

12 days ago

Eleven Labs pays the estate of the people's voices they use, correct?

I have their app on my phone and it will read articles in Burt Reynold's voice, Maya Angelou's voice & etc. I'm under the impression that they consented to this and their estate's are being compensated (hopefully).

dyauspitr

12 days ago

If you want to make a podcast but don’t want to spend the time reading out the script and then painstakingly audio engineer every part of it.

kevinrineer

11 days ago

Why would you want to make a podcast then? You don't need to offer a sub-optimal product if you don't want to make it.

dyauspitr

11 days ago

I like writing out the scripts and doing the research. I don’t enjoy cleaning up the audio.

octoberfranklin

10 days ago

Resisting involuntary biometrics.

If you're in the USA, your credit card company captures your biometric voiceprint without consent or even notification when you call customer service. This technology makes that pointless.

nailer

11 days ago

In Descript it is used to patch words in videos.

Last year I proudly said it was "two thousand and five" during a video take, and didn't notice it at the time. I was able to add the "twenty" using Descript.

suburban_strike

10 days ago

Parody, but it toes the line of evil in being fake.

chistev

12 days ago

Black mirror episode

Bender

11 days ago

Anyone Can Clone Your Voice Now

A good reason to let any caller ID one does not recognize go to voice mail. Phones need an app that does voice-to-text-to-voice to prevent capturing the voice. I want mine to sound like Smeagol (LoTR).

nailer

11 days ago

I'm pretty sure Caller ID is forgable and would lead to false negatives.

Bender

11 days ago

Then the only winning move is not to play. Everyone goes to voice mail and or all communication is in person. Perhaps these fondle slabs were indeed a fad.

nailer

11 days ago

Or just not use PSTN.

bigbuppo

11 days ago

Yes, but can they be as annoying as I am? I think not.

pogue

12 days ago

They couldn't already do that? Or is this new Qwen model just that much significantly better?

tefkah

12 days ago

It is significantly better.

pogue

12 days ago

Is there a demonstration or a free way to try it without having to pay for a single test or anything out there?