The Chinese Voice Actor Forced to Prove He's Human

76 pointsposted 13 hours ago
by homarp
(sixthtone.com)

14 Comments

none2585

12 hours ago

The article uses Kafkaesque and boy I cannot think of a better way to describe having to prove to platforms your voice is real because it had been stolen at such scale that people assume it is AI.

avaer

9 hours ago

I got a human taste of this in open source a few times: someone would suggest we use project Y rather than building it ourselves. I look at project Y and it's someone trying to make a business out of my FOSS code.

This is getting worse with AI, as things move too fast for anyone to verify, and AI is getting better at washing things.

What are you going to do when someone takes your thing with AI and then you're asked to prove it's yours, disputing their mountain of AI generated evidence? The legal system is not prepared to handle what's coming.

ncr100

12 hours ago

There we are. A real-world impact to the technology we, as technologists, develop and speak/preach/mandate too-little IMO about how it should be used.

Kiro

11 hours ago

You thinking this is an epiphany makes me feel you severely overlook the impact AI already has on the world, affecting everyone. This seems very minor in comparison.

JumpCrisscross

12 hours ago

> we, as technologists, develop and speak/preach/mandate too-little IMO

Has anyone done an employee-coöperative tech start-up?

em-bee

12 hours ago

i'd love to join a cooperative myself. there exist a number of them. they mostly seem to do outsourcing/contract work. i suspect that they don't attract investors because the profit distribution would be different from the usual start-ups.

JimsonYang

8 hours ago

Voice acting has always been a dying art, but AI for sure is killing it

Unless the work is higher end theres just so much hassle working with humans. You got to do a casting call, wait weeks to get 100 applicants, listen to all of them, and pray that the VA still actually does a good job. Ive hired VAs in the past and unless the work is very high end, we choose AI and this trend doesnt seem to be stopping.

For consumers, they dont seem to notice or care. For instance, all those movie recap videos you see on youtube? All AI narration. Those still get 100k+ views

JimsonYang

8 hours ago

Btw I know what I said is inflammatory, but this is what Im seeing in industry. Only exception would be in high end work like key VAs in shows and movies

fineIllregister

8 hours ago

I'm curious to know what constitutes "higher end". Obviously a theater release isn't going AI yet, but where down the scale do they start using it?

JimsonYang

6 hours ago

I would say anything where the budget is more than 5-10k and has a production timeline of more than 3 months

Then your time cost of finding VA(1+ month) and paying them is a smaller fraction overall

jdw64

5 hours ago

I saw a similar story in Chinese media recently. It was about an actor who rented out their likeness rights to an AI company. Becoming an actor is incredibly difficult, starting with connections and all that, and they still had to make a living. So they sold their likeness rights to an AI company.

The AI company then used the actor's likeness to create AI videos with the actor's face. The problem was that the public judged the quality of the AI videos as low quality. Whether that judgment was true or just prejudice, it ended up tarnishing the actor's image as cheap as well. The actor became stuck as a low quality actor who could not land any major roles.

These days, users perceive AI as low quality, yet they create so much with it and consume so much of it. The irony is that if this keeps up, humans might end up imitating AI.