In June 2023, Paul Skye Lehrman and his partner Linnea Sage were driving near their home in New York City, listening to a podcast about the ongoing strikes in Hollywood and how artificial intelligence (AI) could affect the industry.
The episode was of interest because the couple are voice-over performers and - like many other creatives - fear that human-sounding voice generators could soon be used to replace them.
This particular podcast had a unique hook – they interviewed an AI-powered chat bot, equipped with text-to-speech software, to ask how it thought the use of AI would affect jobs in Hollywood.
But, when it spoke, it sounded just like Mr Lehrman.
That night they spent hours online, searching for clues until they came across the site of text-to-speech platform Lovo. Once there, Ms Sage said she found a copy of her voice as well.
They have now filed a lawsuit against Lovo. The firm has not yet responded to that or the BBC’s requests for comment.
One day someone will invent a new internet with no bots, and people can be assured they are talking to a real human again. We will call it PersonNet!
Or we could go talk to our neighbors again like in the old days. Until the Boston Dynamic new Serialized Human Interface Technology robots start living 20 to a home and infiltrating neighborhoods to subvert dissidents and advertise for their corpo overlords.
Hmmm. Guess ill just live in my mind then.
Almost sounds like a sort of robotic gentrification… Hrm. Mildly concerning.
Automation is taking the creative jobs and leaving us with the dirty, dangerous, and low paid jobs.
It was supposed to be the other way around!
It was supposed to be blue collar workers that lost their jobs and lived in poverty!
Well ideally the resulting wealth would be shared and no one would live in poverty.
But that’s not happening either.
It kinda is a bit if you really look at quality of life changes in the last hundred years, even the last fifty - yes people feel like food is more expensive but a large part of that is diets are far better and more diverse for poor people. We have access to far higher quality stuff and this is a trend that’s been going strong since the start of the industrial revolution, do you know anyone that wears the same jute shirt every day? If so its a weird style choice not because they can’t spend less than an hours minimum wage to get a new shirt. Want to learn about house flys or rocket engines? I can point you to huge amounts of amazing free resources, it’s not too long ago you’d have to walk to the library to get a paragraph in an encyclopedia.
Sure it doesn’t feel amazing because we all want more, we want what the current rich have but actually look not that far back in time and we have access to far better things than the wealthy in terms of food, entertainment, and so many things. The rich also have far less power, again its easy to overlook but computer tools have eroded their control of media and government considerably which ironically is part of the reason we’re so aware of the existing inequities.
The 2nd part is plain wrong. GAFAM and a handful of others basically control the media now, both journalistic and entertainment media, it’s not a true ecosystem anymore, not to mention control of the economy. Who controls the algorithms and decide what will be shown, what will get viral, and what will not get shown, what will be shown but remain marginal, who earns money through their channel is the one who controls the media and public square. USA’s Government is still a one-party pro-corporation pro-imperialism dual institution, that is smart enough to allow a handful of not too dissonant outsiders to show around but vetoing them when actually necessary. Dissonant voices and opposition already existed before, it’s not because they still exist or maybe are more known that control has diminished.
And the first part is historically wrong and dangerous for the future. The start of the industrial revolution did not lead to an increase in quality of life, people were mass emigrating away FROM europe (where most of the industry was) TO get to USA, Canada, Australia, Latin America (less or little or no industry, but where they could obtain a piece of LAND, and live off agriculture, in a largely pre industrial way until the early 20th century). Life expectancy was lower in cities than in rural areas until the advent of modern medicine in the 20th century inverted the paradigm. Likewise, there is no ‘natural rule’ that innovation will lead to increase in quality of life for everyone everywhere, and a lot of that increase in quality came not from companies and bosses, but from worker movements that through blood and disruption managed to bargain and establish welfare laws, in a time where the bourgeoisie actually needed those workers to make the large sums of money. That is not really the case today, see automation and offshoring eroding those levers of power.
When polled what most people consistently want is to provide for their family without feeling like they’re struggling to do so. That standard varies by income class but for most people it simply means food, shelter, a night out with friends once a week, a night out with family once a week, and a vacation once a year. (It doesn’t need to be international or Disneyland)
You’re right that we’ve come a long way since the industrial revolution. However there’s two things you’re missing. The industrial revolution actually represented a lower standard of living for the workers moving into the cities, which is why we see the great statesmen of the 18th and 19th centuries begin to push for policies about sick pay, healthcare, unemployment insurance, and basic standards. They weren’t pro worker so much as they were trying to head unionization off by providing benefits the union speakers promised. Many of these people had times in living memory that they worked half the time and were able to drink at the pub and provide for their family. The top down benefits scheme of leaders like Bismarck didn’t work though because the owners were the ones setting the system up and they tried to give just enough to keep people quiescent. Not actually engage in the system with good faith.
So we fought literal shadow wars over the right to unionize and once we won that right things began to actually improve for workers. That brings us to point 2; we’ve seen how well we can share out the profits without going communist. We had a high water mark in the 1960’s and 1970’s of being able to pay for stuff with the fewest hours worked since workers had to move to the cities a couple hundred years prior. Since then though it has been a grinding degradation of purchasing power in the lower half of the economy. It doesn’t just feel like everything is more expensive, it actually is. The mode of income, (data point that appears the most in a set of data, in this case the income bucket that has the most people) sits around $30k a year. The household median is around $70k a year. Ideally we’d be clustered around that median except for outliers. In reality it seems that the dataset is relatively spare between those two numbers and then it has a more normal distribution after the median.
That means that all of our calculations based on the median don’t account for this group that’s stuck at half that number for some reason. The 70k-100k group might be saving less for retirement with the current inflation problems, but the 30k group is literally getting evicted. Recent studies show that homeless people are generally from the area that they’re homeless in, do not have a drug habit or picked one up only after becoming homeless, and they worked full time in the 12 months before becoming homeless.
We do live in a time of marvels. Which is why it’s so galling that we’re actively leaving people behind.
Says who?
Everyone that doesn’t belong in a ditch biting a live grenade.
That’s not even close to true though, it just makes it obvious you’ve never been on a building site, in a mine, smelting works, factory or pretty much any traditionally dangerous job.
Creative jobs aren’t widely displaced yet, there’s the hint of that in the future but as of now it’s still an increasing field, especially in content creation and marketing. Manufacturing jobs have been getting replaced rapidly, when my parents were kids a whistle would blow and machinists would flood out the two factories and fill the pubs and streets, now both factories have closed because one factory can make and transport them far cheaper with a thousandth of the workforce. We do have factories in this areas still, they make much more complex things but the majority of their workforce is in the offices because CNC and CV assisted QC replaced the need for people to lug heavy things or twiddle control knobs all day.
I have friends that fucked their back up in their twenties carrying bricks up ladders, this job was common twenty five years ago but is virtually nonexistent now because of automation (largely factory based automation allowing prefab pieces and labour saving tools to out compete people working for minimum wage)
Yes it’s a fun and funny thing to say and I understand the sentiment but look at old pathe news reels showing how farming happens and compare them to a modern farm, automation has been helping people avoid backbreaking labour for decades - they don’t even drive the tractors on a lot of farms these days.
I get what you’re saying. I did bristle a bit at first over the “traditionally dangerous job” bit because I very much did a dangerous job. But you’re right that I didn’t grow up in a manufacturing town or work a factory job. So it would seem automation has already hit the dirty jobs sector pretty hard, it’s just coming for the creative and professional class now. So our thinking about how it’s supposed to work is just behind by a generation.
I wonder how much of our current “affordability” crisis has to do with half the factories and 99% of the workforce being replaced but not necessarily compensated out of the increased productivity? Sure some people were able to step up to higher paying jobs controlling the automation but it’s a rule in economics that not everyone can be promoted or get higher paying jobs. It follows in some schools of thought that workers losing a job through no fault of their own should be compensated.
It’s a super complex situation, a large part of our economic crisis is actually because traditionally impoverished nations which we used to exploit freely now have growing economies, education, and workers protections so we’re not able to import raw materials so cheaply - even places like C.A.R., Bangladesh and similar have effective government polices focused on improving workers rights and fighting outside corruption - CAR for example has already implemented strong regulation on most it’s lithium mines and ongoing processes are tightening up conditions in the remaining areas.
This isn’t something we really like to address but it’s very significant in global economics and western markets, the math of it all is complex because while we’re not able to exploit these areas freely new economies allows for more trade however our western advantage is also now fading so where we once had huge auto markets, monopolies on high-end computer tech and even good steel this just not true anymore as advances in once 3rd world economies and tech makes it possible for world class manifacturing to happen almost anywhere.
Factory automation is actually what’s saving us from far worse economic effects of this global rug pull, it used to take several man hours to make products we can now produce in a fraction of a man second. I’ll draw some diagrams if you want but a key metric is production potential per capita which is the amount of things that can be made per person, if it takes ten people a day to make one thing then that thing should cost about ten days labour to buy that thing - of course also including the time taken to pack, transport, and all the other requires steps, and each step has its own costs that must be split into the cost, a truck or train journey adds not just the journey but the fraction of the cost of the vehicle and its many parts when split between its lifetime utility…
It’s even more complex math when we try to think of the best choice, a real traveling salesman problem, a very expensive train will reduce time and cost per journey so if in its lifetime it gets a lot of use then it’ll pay itself back but it it doesn’t then we’re never recapturing the initial cost. Manufacturing has been churning on this problem for the last few decades, it’s the same problem we get when deciding when to launch a trip to the nearest star - the first ship to launch will likely get overtaken by a far more advanced one launched 100 years later. Do you automate now or wait for the next gen tools that cost half as much to install and run?
So to go back to where we were, our easily exploited 3rd world labour force is drying up and so is our access to cheap resources and so is our high-value and luxury goods market - if we weren’t able to upgrade our tooling at the same time these markets evolved then it’d take a lot of people just to dig the coal needed to smelt the steel for a car engine and each car, tractor, delivery van would have to reflect that in its price and availability - even in pure communism without inequity the math simply doesn’t allow everyone to live well.
Automation has allowed us to drastically lower the time it takes to create things which means someone acting as a worker in that chain should be able to afford a far larger amount of things produced In that economy, if one person can supervise machines making a million resistors a day rather than making one per day by hand then every step in the economy that requires a resistor has the cost of that piece cut to one millionth.
There’s a number of reasons this isn’t very obvious in our lived experience beside the fact it’s offsetting the loss of exploitable poor people, rising living standards is a big one - even just the foods we regularly eat or have the option to eat are wild compared to fifty years ago. We rely on things that are hugely advanced like mobile phones, social media, public transport when previously the only option was to not talk to people or go places unless you’re super rich.
There is of course a other obvious reason and that’s the abaurd levels of inequality that we accept as normal, not just private jets and yachts but our whole society is structured to afford pointless luxury to some while others have to scrabble just to be alive, this is a form of stratification based on power which happens all through history and often causes old orders to collapse. The people with some economic power use it to exploit those without, in our economy things like increasing property portfolios by using money earned in rent to purchase more rental properties and that sort of behavior but also the increasing focus on luxury goods as that’s where the profit is, why make a business targeting poor people when tailoring it to rich people will earn you more? Hence so many absurd and pointless industries have huge budgets but poor people things don’t even get tried - those industries benefit from the work of everyone but only benefit the affluent.
I’ve already written too much but I will say if people learned how amazing open source is and could be then we could solve so.much of the inequality here and globally which would help us poors to enjoy the real benefit of automated manufacturing.
Think of coal mining as a prime example. People in mining towns will grasp at anything in their desperation for jobs, usually environmental protection, without seeming to understand the long term drop in industry employment from automation is the dominant factor. That, and when a mine plays out, the mining company employs elsewhere
I did VO work for years. I’m out of the industry now, but I’m pretty certain that there’s no real point in getting back into it because most VO actors will be replaced soon. The voice that they gave ChatGPT with simulated emotional inflections has convinced me of that.
I would probably be a little more protected because I specialized in characters, accents and impersonations, but really, for the most part, if you aren’t already famous as an actor, you probably won’t be getting much VO work in the near future.
but really, for the most part, if you aren’t already famous as an actor, you probably won’t be getting much VO work in the near future.
Time to start a Dungeons & Dragons podcast!
Might have worked out for him, but I think people on Lemmy are tired enough hearing from me as it is. I’d hate to inflict myself on the general public like that.
I, for one, enjoy seeing a familiar squid, even if we’ve disagreed once or twice ❤️
Thanks. Much love back. I was mostly being facetious. I have considered doing a podcast before but I honestly have no idea what I would do a podcast about or what people would want to hear from me. I also don’t really want to do it alone, but don’t have anyone to do it with.
Maybe one day…
Have you ever listened to the podcast “ologies”? It’s a woman who interviews people who are -ologists (proctologist, ornithologist, geologist, etc., as well as some non-ologist specialties that nonetheless fit the theme)
Maybe something like that would work for you :) then you aren’t stuck with a single topic, you don’t have to do it alone, and you don’t have to find one person to commit to it, it could be several. Just come up with good questions and have a semi-formal chat. It’s a very enjoyable model for learning new things you didn’t know you wanted to know about.
Thanks. It sounds fun, but it’s not really in my skillset. My skills would involve character voices and accents along with my comedy writing and improv abilities. So it would be some sort of comedy podcast. But honestly, I have been out of creative ideas for a long time.
That’s totally fair; I’m also not really capable of doing something like that consistently (even tho I would absolutely love talking to smart people - my degree is science communication, so talking to smart people to learn about things and pass them along is easily my favorite thing), so I get it.
That kinda makes me wonder if interviewing comedians would be funny… I’ve never really talked to any in person for the full impact, but some of them have that timing and wit that means any conversation can be funny. I certainly thought morning radio shows where they have guest comedians on sucked big time, but those are meant more for mass appeal, and they probably work for a lot of people or they wouldn’t have them on.
Nope. In fact I worry if you aren’t posting.
I think a lot about the fact that, on anonymous forums like this, any one of us that others have gotten to know over our time here could die and we’d never know. They’d just stop posting one day. I’m sure it’s happened to people I’ve befriended on forums over the year more than once. It makes me sad. I wish there was some good way we could let people we talked to know after the fact. I suppose tell loved ones to create accounts and make a post.
Oh shit, really?? Any work we’d know?
I never got any real work as a VO artist, but Lord knows I’ve worshipped those who have had some success.
In one case, in the sense that you would know those characters, yes. In the sense that you would know the work I did with them, much less likely. When I was voicing those characters, it was for flash webstoons for the skeleton of the company that was about to close up shop and just become another arm of its parent company. I don’t even think there’s an online record of most of it. I also had very early success on YouTube long before you could monetize anything, so my voice was heard there.
I’d say the other really big thing I did that people here might have heard my voice in was a PS2 game… but I don’t really want to dox myself any more than that.
There aren’t that many PS2 games let’s all start guessing lol
Wikipedia says there are over 4000, so good luck with that. It was a well-received game but it wasn’t exactly GTA.
John Madden had some pretty successful games, I bet FlyingSquid is the ghost of John Madden!!!
John Madden was no squid!
4000-1
Unless I was being highly deceptive and I’m actually Ice-T.
(I’m not Ice-T)
Holy shit! Flying Squid is actually Ice-T!
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Full disclosure, I know one of the people involved in this venture.
A different business model, it uses voice models of professional artists to replace vocal tracks. The artists helped make the models and get royalties.
What’s awful about this is, this technology would be amazing for some people.
My father had ALS, the first thing to go was his voice. As a result, the tools at the time to give him his own voice back (using text-to-speech apps) couldn’t make due with what we had, we would have needed to have the recordings of the specific sounds already in specific phrases.
Since then, there have been improvements in leaps and bounds. I could remake his voice today with what I have of him on video. I wish I could have done this for him when he was alive. My daughter could have heard him speak in his own voice, instead of a meh sounding tts voice or a family member reading what he said to her.
But instead of looking to doing amazing things like that for people, we get companies pulling this bullshit.
What is it with this post that the top two comments cant be upvoted any more.
Sorry, I would upvote but your getting all the love with 69 votes, 70 feels like a downgrade.
Why do you say instead of when describing something that exists and is available? It’s not even expensive.
I think what you mean is why is all the focus always on negative uses and never positive and that’s because you’re on a website with a hate boner for technology, especially ai.
Because this is where the money is universally going, and no, its not “readily available” for most.
I can do it.
ALS patients and their families, in terms of what’s covered, are getting mostly the same as what was available 5-10 years ago. This isn’t about focusing on the negative, this is just where things are right now. Services to recreate a voice for tts to folks with ALS or similar issues are insanely expensive, to the point of being exploitative.
So I say it because its the truth.
I don’t even understand how voice acting works in the intellectual property sense. How do you protect your work, or really even distinguish your work with today’s technology. You can’t use a trademark. I don’t see how it’s copyrightable. You can’t watermark it, and that probably wouldn’t help for an ai. I don’t even see how you can prove it’s yours in court.
Maybe I just don’t have a good ear for voices. I can recognize some but I could never prove that’s who it is or even suggest what would make it provable. And it seems like you could easily make trivial changes that would prevent a technical comparison.
Made a living doing VO for several years before AI ate most of the market. Basically you just work under contracts and hope for the best. If your client breaks contract maybe you can sue if you have the resources. I’ve sent a few C&D’s that successfully stopped some people from using my voice commercially after having paid me a non-profit rate. The majority of the time, the contract is enough to keep clients in line.
Silicon Valley and dehumanization. Name a more iconic duo. Seriously, though. Every part of the human estate that technologists touch turns to shit or gets pilfered. Throw this on the pile.
Sorry I can’t upvote your comment any more as it’s at the maximum 111. I would add 3 exclamation marks if I could!!!
The problem is systemic IMO. The whole VC model requires the enshitification cycle to work. Any technology that should reduce human labour and be a net positive for society instead always ends up in the hands of capitalists who’ll use it to extract maximal profit.
Like, on a fundamental level, automating people’s jobs is a good thing. The problem is all the benefits are going to a very small number of people.
I’m reminded of a comment I saw once where somebody was saying how when they were young, they were told that AI would do the miserable jobs so that people would have more time to make art and poetry, while today the AI makes art and poetry so that we can work longer hours at the miserable jobs.
And the AI bros say that this is just a necessary step towards automating away the crappy jobs, but it’s not like they’ll stop automating everything else if/when AI reaches that point. The AI will still continue to automate away the hyman experience of art and culture for the rich. They’re not going to suddenly decide to implement Luxury Gay Space Communism at that point. They’ll just cram everybody into Kow Loon style ghettos.
