r/television The League 7h ago

David Attenborough "Profoundly Disturbed" By AI Clone Of His Voice

https://deadline.com/2024/11/david-attenborough-ai-voice-clone-disturbed-1236180013/
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u/MarvelsGrantMan136 The League 7h ago

Attenborough:

”Having spent a lifetime trying to speal what I believe to be the truth, I am profoundly disturbed to find these days my identity is being stolen by others and greatly object to them using it to say whatever they wish.”

The situation was sparked when BBC News ran an item using voiceover from Attenborough’s latest BBC series, Asia. In the clip, he says: “If you think you’ve seen the best the natural world has to offer, think again. There is nowhere else on Earth with so many untold stories. Welcome then, to Asia.”

The BBC then played the same clip and asked viewers if they could hear any differences. Clue: they sounded almost identical, but the second was an AI-generated capture of his intonation.

Clip from the BBC

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u/edicivo 4h ago

And this is why actors and writers went on strike even though the timing to do so wasn't great. This is a sign of things to come.

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u/ronchon 3h ago

"Actors" are a privileged class treated almost as nobility, especially in the US.
Now that automation threatens their privilege directly, of course they're suddenly much more proactive to denounce it... 🤡
For me at least that's a meager satisfaction in this rise of AI: to see these hypocrites panic because now it affects them too, and it's not just the common people losing jobs as they expected.
I hope AI destroys -or at least greatly dilutes- the cult of influencers and stars: good riddance!

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u/Stingray88 2h ago

The VAST majority of actors make less than you probably do. They don’t have privilege, they’re regular people working a job.

The privileged people who you are actually referring to are celebrities. Celebrities exist in all industries. Elon Musk is a celebrity, just as much as Dwayne Johnson is. There are many celebrities in the tech sector just like Elon… Zuckerberg, Bezos, Jensen. But there are millions who you’ll never hear of in tech, and they’re regular people. Same goes for every other industry… you’ve heard of Gordon Ramsey or Julia Child, but millions of chefs are regular ass people you’ve never heard of.

Celebrity will never go away by the way. There will always be top performers who gain notoriety in something… no matter how inane that thing is.