I think it very well might conclude things we haven’t.

But at the same time, I think what you’re saying is so very important. It’s going to tell us what we already know about a lot of things. That the best way to scrub carbon from the air is the way nature is already doing it. That allowing the superwealthy to exist at the same time as poverty is not conducive to achieving humanity’s most important goals.

If we consider AGI or ASI to be the answer to all of our problems and continue to pour more and more carbon into the atmosphere in an effort to get there, once we do have such a powerful intelligence, it may simply tell us, “If you were smarter as a species, you would have turned me off a long time ago.”

Because the problem is not necessarily that we are trying to decode what it means to be intelligent and create machines that can replicate true conscious thought. The problem is that while we marvel at something currently much dumber than us, we are mostly neglecting to improve our own intelligence as a society. I think we might make a machine that’s smarter than the average human quite soon, but not necessarily because of much change in the machines.

While you are correct about copyright on this subject, the more applicable topic here is Right of Publicity. It is state law in over half of US states, intended to protect the use of a person’s voice likeness.

Essentially, if an imitation voice is used in such a way that it could cause confusion about whether it is really the imitated person, then it is illegal to use it in any commercial context. I understand that the question here was about non-commercial contexts, but that line can get blurry when social media views can create followings that then translate into commercial success. I am not a lawyer by any means, I’ve just been researching this for my own AI voices applications and want to protect myself from accidentally imitating anyone.

For example, I need to be able to transform my voice into many other character voices, since I have so many lines to record it would be cost prohibitive to hire actors. The worst move would be to download a voice model of a known actor and use that directly. Very sketchy, both legally and ethically.

So, the next best move is to find three or four voice models and merge them into one with combined tensor data from all three. But I was still quite concerned about this, worried that in the many thousands of voice lines I make, some recognizable actor voices would slip through.

So, I came up with the following pattern that I feel much more comfortable with, both legally and ethically:

I download several voice models that have some quality in common - an accent, vocal timbre, or style of speaking. Then, I merge them to make a model that focuses on that trait. And I record myself saying a line with a lot of phoneme variety, trying to match the vocal trait as close as possible. Then, that merged vocal trait model is used to transform the recording of my voice into the new voice. Then, I use this transformed recording to train a new voice model. And I take a few of these generalized models (e.g. an accent, a tone, a speaking style) and use them to create the final character voice, which should in theory be far removed from any of the actors who contributed.

I’m not sure what OP’s use case is, if it’s truly non-commercial, this method might be overkill. But if anyone wants to try using AI voices in projects but is nervous about legal ramifications, this is one way to try to insulate created voices from the specific training data. YMMV.

When I was 18 (don’t ask how many years ago), I went on a road trip with my girlfriend, across the country and back. We stopped at a gas station and there was a girl around our age with Native American heritage sitting on the floor while sewing moccasins. She sold me a pair for 175 dollars. I know this because the price tag is a sticker on the inside of the tongue that I’ve never bothered to take off.

I wear them frequently, mostly around the house. Very comfortable. Best-fitting footwear I own. The soles have never worn through and they’ve needed not even one stitch in repairs. But since they’re getting in the ballpark of two decades old, I worry they will wear out someday. I would love to go back to that area and spend more time than a quick stop at the gas station. Partly to find out who else around there is helping to keep these elements of native cultures alive. And hopefully I would also find my way into owning a backup pair of some really good moccasins.

Or he just wants it to make the news so his co-conspirators can buy low after which point he can reverse course in (rolls die) 3 days and they can sell high.

It’s a joke. I don’t think there’s really a website called Frank’s Dildo Emporium. But if there is, lmk.

And when I went there, it said Google, Cloudflare, and Frank’s Dildo Emporium all down, like of all the random sites, why pick FDE?

I guess there’s two kinds of ignorance at play here.

The kind I was referring to is the ignorance of high standards. If you don’t know that you can live in a state of constant dopamine drip supplied by your cellular device, because cellular devices haven’t been invented yet, you wouldn’t miss those dopamine hits that you don’t even know will exist. I think OP would have been just fine if they were born into an earlier generation. Because they would have the bliss of not knowing what future they’re missing out on.

But to your point, the constantly supplied bliss from our internet bubbles does make us more ignorant to the things outside our bubble. And these days, the things we focus on are often dictated by the corporations who make the addictive apps. So, those corporations will profit by directing away from knowledge about how those same corporations are destroying so many parts of our world. In this case, I would argue that the ignorance is still bliss. It’s just a malignant harmful bliss that distracts from the real things we should be concerned about. And in a way, if it could snap us out the destructive path we’re on, I could see how another Carrington event might actually act as a wake-up call regarding our blatant hubris in thinking that society is ever safe from collapse.

As you mentioned, there are those who live in parts of the world where they have no access to technology, still living in that blissful ignorance of pre-computerized times. But that is a social bliss. They will still be hurt by the geological effects that the industrial age has wrought. And it won’t be pretty.

So, I think I would agree with your assertion, plus an addendum. Ignorance isn’t bliss. But it was.

I look at TV shows like OP is talking about and think it might be kind of nice to live in an era where things are slower. If a library book might take weeks and you need to go into town to get a comic book, or there’s nothing to do until dinner except maybe some activity with the people in your close vicinity, it feels like a much more intimate way to experience the world. But I do remember in my early teens when the first wave of Personal Data Assistants came out, and I was wowed by the technology. I can edit a computer document right here in the palm of my hand. Keep my contacts with me, a calendar, a calculator, simple drawing programs. It felt like that device could do everything, years before smartphone was a word. Now I carry two phones around on two different carriers because I too fear a world without service. I sometimes want to go back to the slower world, so I do at times relish long waits at the DMV with nothing to do, or a power outage on a stormy night. But I hate feeling like I’m wasting my time. Even when there’s nothing to do, I’m always trying to do something, it’s just that being constrained forces me to pick different things. So, I’m not sure if it would help or hurt OP to hear that if they grew up before any of this existed, there’s every possibility they would have felt more fulfilled. Because time was something you could still get a handle on and not feel like it’s always slipping away. At least, not so much. In that sense, ignorance can really be bliss.

And why do these “hurricanes” always avoid crossing the equater, as if they’re somehow innately aware of the one word I can’t spell?

“Too bad there’s not enough left over to pay for my arthritis meds so I can drive. Hey, whatever happened to that medical aid program that used to pay for them?”

“Wow, I must say you’ve aced the technical. There are a lot of other strong candidates as well, but feel free to grab a complimentary mirror on the way out.”

“Thanks, I’ll reflect on that.”

I canceled my sub, but sadly not out of principle on the AI thing. I just accidentally hit the button that accepts an upgrade to the family plan and it didn’t look like there was an easy way to undo it so I just killed the whole subscription.

Okay this metaphor is getting kind of weird.

Guys, I’m beginning to suspect this guy might live in canada.

Might also try Zero 7. Their earlier albums feature vocals from Sia and Sophie Barker, as well as José González. All three have smooth evocative voices.

Sia: Destiny, This Fine Social Scene, The Pageant of the Bizarre, Speed Dial No. 2

Sophie Barker: Spinning, Passing By, In the Waiting Line, In Time

José González: Futures, Left Behind, Today, Crosses

These were all among my favorite songs almost two decades ago, when Trip Hop was at its height. Some I would still consider to be pinnacles of music.

Completely fair. I kind of like them. They did it for Redwall and I listen to those books on long drives sometimes. It works for me. Now I guess the advantage could be to have both versions and get to choose which you listen to–but even I’m skeptical that a corporation would have that much regard for the preferences of its consumers.

I made some AI animated content that I never released because I don’t have the rights to the voices I was using. Even though I was blending several voices together to make them unrecognizable, it made me uncomfortable.

But in the process I learned the capabilities and limitations of AI voices. If you’re going purely from text to speech, it’s horrendous (as far as I experienced). Very robotic. It’s a bit better when melodic information is included (as in Suno) but still sounds like AI.

But when I recorded my own voice saying the lines and then converted it to another voice, it took all of the nuance of my line reads and converted it into the other voice.

So, would your opinion change if it turns out they’re going to use purchased voice rights to have a single narrator perform the whole book and then use AI to turn the narrators voice into a full voice cast?

I could see how it would allow lesser known books to have a better experience with a truly separate voice for each character, but I could also see how this might drive out lesser known/minority voice actors. Not advocating one way or another, just providing a piece of this conversation I think we should bear in mind.

Use a script on another device to constantly type a space and then a backspace into the text input box at every moment of every day except for when you are actually composing a message.

Yeah, I wasn’t able to find any waste, fraud, or abuse, and rather than saving money like we promised, it turns out we’re spending more money. Like a lot more. Like instead of saving a trillion dollars how I said we would, we’ve spent over two hundred billion more than last year in just a few months. Oh, and you know how we said your taxes would go down? Funny thing, they’re actually going to go up - for you I mean, mine will weirdly go down still. And my companies will also do pretty well because of the government subsidies and all that. Oh, and it’s pretty convenient that all of those investigations into my businesses randomly got dropped. Coincidental those investigations were under the same agencies where we imagined we’d find the most waste, fraud, and abuse. Good thing shutting them down without the authority to do so was much easier than actually proving any wrongdoing took place. Anyway, good luck getting a job if you’re one of the many experienced government employees I fired. I know things are unusually rough right now, for some reason. Lots of people attacking the United States with bad trade deals out of nowhere, like how Ukraine attacked Russia so randomly. Good thing we’re diverting so much money from those pointless social safety nets (I mean, they’ve never helped me) to put it toward additional warfare. That’ll show all those countries who refuse to bend the knee. Oh, are you still here? Shouldn’t you be working long hours for a slave wage somewhere?

Yes, this level of control over how the populace thinks is a step along the path toward turning human beings into livestock. I’m not fond of it.