521
Spotify is going to clone podcasters’ voices — and translate them to other languages
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
521 points (96.3% liked)
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Is this good or bad. I can see this being used to steal your voice and use it without your permission.
Assuming that nothing nefarious happens, I can still see this being a problem if the translations aren't top quality. Imagine that speakers of another language are offended or you're embarrassed in front of them because something you said was incorrectly translated; then it's rendered in your voice so it seems you said it.
Handle it just like horror podcasts usually do. Disclaimers before and after the podcast. Disclaimers in the podcast description. Notices in the ToS.
"This podcast has been translated into *your language* with the help of OpenAI. This is an automated service. As such, it may contain transcription and translation errors which may result in dialogue not intended by the original podcaster. Please report errors to *support link here*."
Be more concerned about this being like what Hollywood just pulled, where Spotify includes a usage clause that gives them the rights to the podcaster's voice in perpetuity.
And, it doesn't even need to be wrong. Sometimes very innocent things have a specific meaning or connotation in certain languages. Be it innuendos or euphemisms.
Using 3/5 in connection with Black people would mean basically nothing in Germany, but would perk up ears in the USA. On the other hand 18 and 88 is not that well known in the USA as anything particular, but in Germany you can't have it easily on your car plate, especially if you're from Hamburg (HH).
So you could quite correctly translate things, but they still get a different connotation depending on culture and language.
Perhaps that could be resolved by a disclaimer. Something like, "The following lyrics were generated by an AI and thus may be mistranslated." It wouldn't be perfect, but it might help.
It would help with accessibility, and it might help protect some lesser spoken languages because those people can grow an audience as well.
The tech will develop regardless and people will abuse it for other means, at least this one feels like a positive use as opposed to say, a company making its own podcast series with a stolen voice.
If the creator can choose to generate other languages for their own voice, that's probably fine?
In the short term, AI is only trained on popular languages like Spanish. It will not help less common ones.
Currently it’s an opt-in tool, and I don’t think it is likely OpenAI or Spotify blatantly steal voices. The fact that the tech exists enables that though, a podcast is a perfect training tool for it. But you can’t really uncreate it.
It’s also the sort of thing that unions have been fighting. It improves the technology and makes it an easier sell for any studios or producers to use it elsewhere, like to replace the need to pay a celebrity to come in and record radio station call outs, and long term this specifically takes away jobs from people who translate and dub audio.
IMO it’s good it’s opt-in but ultimately anti-human.
100% chance they already stole voices and sold them to either data harvesting or to sell and train ai models and never passed that money along.
Im sure OpenAI has downloaded a ton of podcasts for training, but more specifically when I talk about stealing I am mostly talking about using their voices for other unauthorized work, like suddenly they are announcing train stops.
Anyone can copy there voices without permission currently. Seems more like a useful service as long as the terms and conditions don’t include anything about signing your rights away by using it
Oh sure it has that provision that it becomes property of Spotify and they can use it however they like.