Stephen Fry speaks on his voice being ripped from Harry Potter audiobooks for AI narration and warns the worst is but to return.
AI stays a sizzling matter within the leisure sector because the SAG-AFTRA actors’ union strike reaches its third month (and the WGA strike writers’ strike its fifth). British actor and writer Stephen Fry just lately spoke on the CogX Competition in London about his expertise of getting his identification “digitally cloned” with out permission, utilizing his voice from his studying of the seven-volume Harry Potter audiobooks and creating an AI of his voice from that dataset.
“I’m a proud member of (SAG-AFTRA). As , we’ve been on strike for 3 months now. And one of many burning points is AI,” stated Fry, addressing the viewers throughout his speech on the CogX Competition on Thursday.
Throughout his speech, Fry performed a clip to the viewers of an AI system utilizing his voice to relate a historic documentary. “I stated not one phrase of that — it was a machine. Sure, it shocked me,” he stated. “They used my studying of the seven volumes of the Harry Potter books, and from that dataset, an AI of my voice was created, and it made that new narration.”
“What you heard was not the results of a mashup. That is from a versatile synthetic voice, the place the phrases are modulated to suit the which means of every sentence,” Fry defined. “It might due to this fact have me learn something from a name to storm Parliament to onerous porn, all with out my data and with out my permission. And this, what you simply heard, was finished with out my data. I heard about this, I despatched it to my brokers on either side of the Atlantic, they usually went ballistic — that they had no thought such a factor was attainable.”
“That is audio,” Fry stated he informed his brokers. “It received’t be lengthy till full deepfake movies are simply as convincing,” he defined, viewing the difficulty as “just the start of an rising risk to artistic expertise” and telling his brokers, “You ain’t seen nothin’ but.”
“We’ve got to consider it like the primary car: spectacular, however not the completed article,” Fry continued, noting that when automobiles have been first invented, nobody might have predicted how widespread and ingrained into society they’d change into.
“Tech shouldn’t be a noun, it’s a verb, it’s all the time shifting,” he stated. “What we now have now shouldn’t be what might be. In relation to AI fashions, what we now have now will advance at a sooner price than any know-how we now have ever seen. One factor we are able to all agree on: It’s a f***ing bizarre time to be alive.”
Whereas Fry’s account is chilling, he isn’t the primary celeb to publicly vocalize issues about AI and its place within the leisure business. Different actors who’ve just lately spoken up in regards to the matter embody Succession star Brian Cox, Oscar winner Matthew McConaughey, comic Simon Pegg, and SAG-AFTRA union president Fran Drescher.