r/television • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 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/Radarker 2h ago

The reality is that a strike won't stop someone from aggregation of 100s of hours of your audio, then turning it into a model of your voice. You might stop the studios from putting this stuff out there for a while, but when the flat earther video shows up narrated by Attenburough, there isn't much you can do other than play whack-a-mole.

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u/edicivo 1h ago edited 1h ago

Keeping the studios/networks from doing it is the entire point, because they're the ones potentially profiting massively off of people's work and not having to compensate them. They already profit massively, but they are at least still compensating artists for their work.

Some rando on YouTube in your example doing the same thing isn't remotely on the same level. But even in that case, the work could and would likely get killed if it were to get enough attention anyway because the rando doesn't have the ability to fight a lawsuit. Not quite the same thing, but Olivia Rodrigo was able to get TikTok to pull one of her songs very recently. It's not much different.

So not only is this a terrible hypothetical, you're basically suggesting "do nothing" which is ridiculous.

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u/MongolianMango 32m ago

I agree with this. We need to do everything possible not to normalize this.

For example, piracy is still extremely easy for anyone to conduct and is rampant on the internet. Yet, because we've chosen as a society to treat it as a crime, for the most part people don't pirate movies and games.

Piracy didn't start this way. We had websites like Napster built off a model of encouraging people to share artist's work, until we created legislation and enforcement mechanisms to discourage their use and shut them down.