this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
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Spotify is going to clone podcasters’ voices — and translate them to other languages (www.theverge.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/technology
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A partnership with OpenAI will let podcasters replicate their voices to automatically create foreign-language versions of their shows.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Very cool tech that could potentially do a lot of good.

However, we're talking about AI and big platforms here, so usual questions apply:

  1. How ethically sourced is the training data for this? Are we talking about billions of hours of audio where 50% of it was from speakers who never consented for their content to be used this way, tagged by third-world workers getting paid a dollar per day? Or did OpenAI suddenly change their morals?
  2. Spotify is moving slowly and carefully for now, but how long do you realistically expect a platform company to leave money on the table? If they can suddenly hit 10x the market by unilaterally flipping a switch on everyone's podcasts, they're just gonna wait until the estimated backlash costs less than the estimated upside. And then what? We've got podcasters waking up to an inbox full of angry Italians cuz of a botched translation? If we don't do this carefully, we have the potential for this tech to build bridges between languages only to immediately set those bridges on fire. And the economic incentives prime us to tiptoe as close to that scenario as possible.
[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Spotify is moving slowly and carefully_ for now_,

Is that so? As far as I know, the last few years they've been turning formerly open podcasts (you know, using the official podcast standard, xml feeds and all) into Spotify exclusives. So that you can only access them with an account (profiling), and have to listen to ads or pay for premium.

You're giving them too much credit / good faith, imho.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Haha, I absolutely agree. They're a platform company, and well... platforms gonna platform.

I've just been trying to keep my powder dry when it comes to AI discussions on Lemmy. There are a lot of users on Lemmy that are unconditionally pro-AI, so I don't wanna make too many assertions beyond my core criticisms.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ha, tell me about out it. I'm pro-AI, but I'm also pro-artist. So I'm fine with people building all kinds of things using these tools, but I'm not fine with companies plundering every piece of content they can get their hands on, without permission of the creators. That is not really a popular opinion to have on here. Lucky for me though, I'm on a Lemmy instance that doesn't allow downvotes. That does wonders for your state of mind :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's really strange, isn't it? You'd think that fediverse users, out of anyone, would be more skeptical of companies trying to consolidate access to user-generated content, take ownership over it, and monetize it. I imagine most of us are Reddit refugees in some sense. Did we learn nothing?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think it mostly a matter of "most of the copyrighted material belongs to companies, fuck companies", as well as a little bit of "I have nothing to ~~hide~~ steal". And of course a fair dose of "magic box makes pretty pictures, don't take it away". But maybe I'm just cynical.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

most of the copyrighted material belongs to companies, fuck companies

Yeah, that does seem to be the center of it.

I don't know what to say to those people.

Cuz they're not wrong. The practical effect of current IP law is to protect the business models of parasitic holding companies whose main role in producing art is to ensure that it is an effective financial instrument.

So from that perspective... Why would I respect Disney's intellectual property rights?

But I recoil at the idea that this means we shouldn't bestow any rights or protections to creative works. It seems to me that the biggest problem with IP rights is that creators are immediately bullied into signing over all of those rights to platforms/publishers/distributors.

And that immediate signing-over to mega corps... is exactly what is going on with OpenAI! But at massive scale!