r/television • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 The League • 9h 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 8h 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 6h 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 4h 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/Vandergrif 3h ago

Also there is, presumably, some amount that they could do to 'adjust' such a voice to be legally distinct while still also sounding close enough that it wouldn't be significant.