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Tim Friedlander has been involved in this and has written an article which is what I saw and Tim is joining us God I Tim, Hello, Hello, I'm here. So what's the backstory to this and how did you get involved? The backstory to the voices Voices dot A dot Ai Voices dot Com thing is goes back to about May when David Cicarellian Voices dot Com announced that they had were releasing Voices dot Ai and for the voice acting community that was a huge concern, basically for the main part being that many people have been uploading audio to their website through their website for twenty years, so theoretically voices dot com or either of these sites has twenty years of very high quality data and audio that they could use to synthesize our voices. So, through Nova, which is association that I run along with Karen Gilfrey and a board of directors, we reached out to David and Stephanie and had a week of conversations with them to get the assurance that they had never been uploading or using or doing anything with auditions or files that have been uploaded through their website. And out of that came our Fair Voices campaign or the Fair Voices Pledge that we launched, and we reached out to the other online casting sites, six other sites to get the same assurances from them and also to make sure that they had changed their terms of service. So voices dot Com at the time changed their terms of service to very explicitly say they would not be using any audio files uploaded through their site for machine learning or synthesized or synthesizing voices. Was that backdited or is that from that point onward? The terms of service were from that point onward, But they publicly at the time and in various blog posts and other written areas, I've said that they have never used audio files for that. The caveat being is that once the audio files are uploaded and sent to a client, it's possible that the client then could take those audition files and use them. We don't know and haven't seen any companies and you know, per se who we know we're doing that, but you know, over the last ten or so years, a lot of these companies have been working in the AI TTS sphere and very potentially could have been using that audio for training. We haven't seen it yet explicitly that we know of, but you know, the inability to track our audio files and to know where the audio goes once we've emailed it out or uploaded through a website, you know, makes it a real possibility. So to give this some perspective. Is there any sort of copyright law or anything in place at the moment that protects someone from having their voice turned into an AI voice without their permission. That's a great question. Short answer is no. We've been working with the Copyright Office. I gave a presentation to the FTC last week at a round table. I've spoken with multiple lawyers and people across across the country and across the world world. We're working with a group in Europe to help with the EU AI act. Most actors voice actors, we give away our files as a work for hire and the understanding is that that audio will be used for this very specific project. Unfortunately, that also basically gives the person we've given the audio file to the copyright and the ability to do whatever they want to with that. We're currently looking at the possibility that since most voice actors record from home, if in from like a music perspective, we could theoretically be the owners of the master files. But because a lot of times there's no contracts that are signed. But that's an early we're in the early stages of exploring that. But there are copyright law does not currently protect the voice actor. It protects the copyright holder, which ninety nine percent of the time is the company who hired us. Wow, And there's no The only other thing we could fall back on is right right of publicity. But those laws are only really in California and New York where the strongest laws. And then there's possibly biometric, biometric and privacy laws, but those really are only strongest in Illinois and Texas of all places privacy rights. So is there a wave like you know, we've talked about this before, having some kind of like fingerprint of your voice. You know, if anybody uses your voice, it's quite obvious it's yours because it shows some kind of a fingerprint in the WAVEFIM. Potentially, I don't know how that would work, but it must be someone who's got something nobody does currently that we know of. We've spoken, I've spoken with people at DARPA and at NASA. We're currently working. We've done We've gotten very deep in this conversation to try and figure out as a way to do this what we can do. And actually I have a I'm working on this with another company that I started about three years ago, to create voice prints that we can then use to match a human voice to a synthetic voice, and also to match a human voice to a human voice to say that they're the same person. You could, theoretically, if we can get that software in place down a voice, so if somebody tries to upload it to a synthetic voice sight, it would be locked and would be flagged as basically essentially dr M for voice is what we're trying to do. But you know, the only thing really that you could do that might stay is some kind of spread spectrum water marking that you could do within that, but it'd have to be embedded so deeply in there that you could you know, like you could rip ripless into pro tools or rip it into something else, right, and you know, transfer between audio files or different DAWs and strip out. If it's frequency, then it's very easy to rip to pull out frequencies. Most of the stuff that's out there. Water marking is pretty easy to bypass currently. Well, you just have to get clarity or something and it's gone, yeah, exactly, Yeah, So what's the compromise future from your perspective then, like, what where would it be a point where you know, Darren Robertson is selling his voice sample disc to AI people or what or would you would you not c AI at all? You know what we're I'm a musician primarily, you know, I came from I was in Seattle in the nineties and was on the cusp of you know, like playing live and doing and really really exploring music when Napster and everything hit and from a you know, from a consumer perspective, that was one of the most eye opening things that I've ever seen. The ability to now have access to a massive amount of audio that I'd never heard before. Not anti technology by any means, and definitely not anti AI. I've worked with a synthetic voice company. I have no people who are working with synthetic voice companies. The issue right now is that a lot of the foundational models, a lot of the foundations of these AI generative engines, synthetic voice engines, are built on somebody's data, and more than likely they're built they are being built on the literal voices of voice actors that we become the foundation of a lot of these models. What Nava has been asking for is con sent control and compensation, and it's the same thing that all artists are asking for. Musicians are asking for models are asking for is if you're going to take my data, and what makes the essence of me My voice or my image or the way I walk or the way that I speak, the cadence that I have, the way that I stand, all those things are very personal to all of us individually, and that data is basically being turned into data, right that what makes us as being turned into data and put into these synthetic voice engines or these synthetic generative engines or generative AI to produce images and videos and photos and voices that are based on real humans and sound like and look like real humans. So we try to find consent, control and compensation for those and really consent to say yes or no you can make a synthesized version of my voice. So if we're talking about my voices, we're not going to stop. It's already out I mean, the thing's going to happen. They're out there, yes, correct, How do you perceive we control it? The only thing that we can currently do right now, And this is part of what this discussion of the FTC came up with last week is is really I think from a consumer perspective, a consumer safety perspect If I think that there is so much danger in disinformation and false information and just absolute lies that are out there that can now be easily replicated and put into a video or an audio or something that is not very easily detectable. It's almost impossible to tell a synthetic voice from a human voice that that are done well. It's hard to tell a synthetic image from a from a you know, a factual image. The laws and regulations currently are our laws and legislation, I think is currently the only thing that we can really do on a broad scale too to help stem the tide of the damage has been done already and going forward, we have to have very clear contracts and agreements in place that either do or do not allow for the use of somebody's voice to be used as as in a synthetic voice or generative AI. That's partially what you know, what the w G A and ZAG after strikes are about. AI is the top of that list of things that are concerns, and it's a top concern for anybody who is in you know, in the arts right now that creates anything that any of that could be put into synthetic engine of some kind of have a new creation made out of that. We just came out of a pandemic where we relied on artists, on musicians and filmmakers and actors and voice artists, and the first thing we do out of that pandemic is try and replace those people. That's really essentially what's happening. That there is some accessibility. You know, there are places that you know, there is an argument to be made for, you know, doing things that a human couldn't generate. But when it's done to replace somebody, when it's done just to save money, that's where the concern comes in. And we know that money that those savings are not going to be passed along to the consumer. A video game is not going to be cheaper for somebody to buy because it has synthetic voices. A movie is not going to be cheaper at the movie theater because it's it's synthetically synthetically generated. So they cut out the people, they cut out the people actually make this work, and then that money just goes to the company that gets to save that money at the expense of everybody. Why would voices dot Com say the quiet part out loud? They're a bit like Uber basically going like hi, please worked for us, make us money, and then we're gonna put all of our money into figuring out how to make driverless cars so we don't need you, see you bitches. Yeah, exactly they did. I don't know if he may saw the news last week, but David Ciarelli is out more and uh Morgan Stanley as a Morgan Stanley who was the venture capital whoever give them the money, they replaced him at the top. You know, my guess is that you know, they either went all in on AI and it's not paying off, or they weren't seeing you know, it's just it is all purely speculation. This is just you know, what what we can, what we can have, you know, for conjecture in this place. So I don't I know nothing for fact, but you know, they invested a massive amount of money and then what eighteen million fifteen to eighteen million dollars seven years ago and if they went all in on AI, you know, I don't know if he's heard they lost it. Yeah, they lost all of it. I don't has anybody actually have you guys heard their AI, the voices dot AI, their samples, They're not terrible. I never heard it. They're terrible. They are they are, they are terrible, but they were done with consent control and compensation. Is it? Is it better or worse than voiceolow? I haven't heard that one, But most of what I deal with I deal with eleven Labs and play dot HT or the two that I use most often for examples for samples in that, and both of those are phenomenal. They are they are really really good. And voices dot AI is nowhere. If it sounds about I mean, it sounds about ten years old the technology from what I heard, and the you know, some of the voice actors who had their voices synthesize who participated in this are not happy with with how that voice sounds. Yeah, I was going to say, just a lightening up of it. There's an old gag that could that you be modernized. And you can ask the question, how many voice hyber artists does it take to change the light bulb? And the answer is none. You get an I to do it right drummer Joe, Yeah, we can update it. It just hasn't happened quite yet. I was going to say, yeah, exactly, I've heard that one before somewhere. But the thing that occurs to me, though, team is it's great that we're protecting voice actors and all that sort of stuff, But I mean, obviously there's a crapload more voice samples out there. I mean, how many podcasts are there out there, and and YouTube content creators and all the rest of it, all these places they could go mining for voices. How do we protect them? You know, currently we can't. Currently there is no protection for that, you know. I mean, you know, this goes into where you know, we talk about this being more it's with anybody who has recorded audio is at risk, and that you know, voice actors just happen to be the ones who make a living off of our recorded voice most of the time. But doesn't mean that others aren't making a living off of you know, what they have on the podcast and YouTube and even those who are just you know, hobbyists at this who just have a little bit of recorded audio. So some twitch stream you know, I'm I can currently record all the audio off this and make a synthetic voice of anybody on this on this conversation right now, as can anybody who's listening to it, right and it's easy. What work? Does it really kill? Like truly kill like in the short term, I can see it taking out a crapload of E learning and other things like that. It'll take it takes that out. That's you know, any of the stuff that is purely factual. I you know a lot of times talk about factual stuff where I just need information read. A lot of that stuff gets taken taken out right away. Which if you can be the if you can license your voice to that, then then you can still have a career as a voice actor. One of the things that I think is that the dangerous part of this, and this goes for any of the any of the arts, is that a lot of these places that are gonna that it's gonna be replaced first are where a lot of voice actors, a lot of artists learn. This is how you cut your teeth and you come up through the industry. You know, you do the free jobs, you do, the cheap jobs, you do, the entry level jobs. Those entry level jobs go away right away because also it's cheaper. But a lot of the times it's better. Unfortunately, it is better. The audio quality of a voice actor who's just starting out, who is using a USB mic in their in their living room with hard wood floors and the refrigerator running and the AC is gonna be at risk for sure. And I think you know rightfully, So I'll give you another one is the company that doesn't hire anybody, right, and they just see the AI voices as it's better than having Mary Joe read it because it's going to take her a long time and whatever, and so like just yeah, just type it into the system and there's our video. It's our instruction video and how to use our garden hose absolutely or something, and yeah, it's going to take out, like I don't see it initially taking out like real voice acting, but I agree, just like conveying voice, it's just going plenty of AI voices i'd rather hear instead of the president of the auto Workers' union, you know, for example, right, yeah, yeah, I mean, and there are you know. One of the things that we've seen I think has been most helpful in this is that those who work with voice actors already or don't want to replace voice actors, Those people who are already working in the creative sphere, who are the producers, who are the directors, They're the people they say I would never replace a voice actor, but it's all of those people who don't who have just need a voice actor for this one time, need a voice actor for this one training video, this one thing here that they would go to a friend or a referral or wherever it might be, to you know, the online casting site and cast somebody who's new. They're not going to do that anymore, and we're not We're not going to see It's very hard to tangibly find the damage to this because we're not seeing auditions going out where they're saying we're going to audition a human versus an AI, and the AI gets the job. They're just not even going to bother to do the auditions in the first place, and we're never even going to know if it was a synthetic voice. So this is partially why you know, again laws and legislation where there's a Senate bill out that NOV is endorsing Tenate Bill twenty six ninety one, which is a Labeling Act of twenty twenty three, which is going to require all anything AI generated to be labeled marked same thing as you would with food. I think, you know, consumers have a right to know if what they're taking in is synthetic or human, whether it's emotional, spiritual, you know, food. We have a right to know what we're interacting with. I think, I'm I mean, I want to know when I'm in the matrix personally, like right, right, exactly, Yeah, you want to know you're in the matrix. I'm sure it puts to be a lot of political issues too. I mean, you know, imagine sitting there listening to a radio broadcast of you know, Joe Biden declaring war on Russia when it's actually not really Joe Biden. You know, absolutely there's still sorts of issues that this raises well and you know that as well, but also it raises the it raises the possibility of doubt. And you know, if you know the Donald Trump tape from years ago, if he could say, well I never said that that's a synthetic voice, and prove that it's not my synthetic voice, prove I actually said that. Right, So you're running into put both sides of that, and we're coming into election. You know, there's all sorts of possibilities raised considering some of the possible candidates, right, yep, yeah, absolutely, is there a way of a voice actor to say, Okay, I'm going to actually upload to say, someplace where you can license a voice from. You actually give them all the information of your voice, and then there's a license fee. If people want to grab it and use it for something, then they pay you a license fee, the same way as you would do with library music. Absolutely, and that's I've been I've been pushing that that example for a while. I think that you know, it's not so it's kind of you know what. One of the ways that both Europe and with the GDP are and with FTC are approaching this is that we don't need to make new laws or new regulations, we just need to enforce the ones that exist and put this into use. The precedent, I think the precedent of music licensing can directly you know, go into into voice. You have a you have a licensing fee, have a usage fee, you have a generation fee. You know, if you generate new content from this, then I get paid a certain amount of the generation. There's there's companies out there that do that. The vocal id veroitone was one of the earlier ones that did that, and there's a licensing fee that they have in place for that, and the actors who do that have the consent and know where their voice goes. We're working with a TTS company who reached out to us and we're helping them with this exact same thing of helping to license their deployments so that the voice actor knows where their voice is being used, but also get paid for the original creation of that of that model, and then know where the voice goes from there. There's lots of possibilities. The one possibility that unfortunately, none of those things really exist right now. The only possibilities to happen is people are just gonna upload your voice anywhere they want to chrisynthetic voice and use it. And that's there's nothing really stopping anybody, you know, even the AI sits right now. All you have to do is click a button that says, yes, I have the right to upload this voice. And at one point do you stop anybody? Yeah? Yeah, I mean what point do you stop anybody? If you blend two people's voices or three peoples, It's at a certain point you're like it's nobody, yeah, absolutely, and it becomes you know, I mean that's what Siria, Alexa, Google Voice those are you know, they're all blended voices multiple people put in together and to create a new voice. So now you have to get into you know, now you're talking about, you know, songwriting splits. Right now you're going to talk about splits and points on a on a song. Right, So I've got three voices, we all get an equal split of of the usage of that voice? Or does it not become an issue because it doesn't sound like anybody there far, there's no conflict, right, voice actors you get're also gonna run into conflict. Right what if my my you know, my human voice is doing pepsi, My synthetic voice can't do coca cola? And if it does, who's going to be held responsible for that? And you know, or or a voice that just sounds like me? You know, at what point? How do you draw the line there? How do you even know? This voice sounds a lot like me? Like is it my voice? Or is it not my voice? It's a voice that sounds a lot like me? Do I becoming you know? Do I get into conflict because of the similarity? You know, it's just like like this, like actors are impersonated, it has to be like all voices are synthesized, right, yeah, exactly, Yeah, yeah, from a synthetic voice, saying that all voices are synthesized, including this voice. Yeah right, But can you see, like if you look into the feature of the the role of the agent, well, the agent all of a sudden become a library of voices that can potentially be used for AI. Would that be the shift? I have honestly have no idea. I think there's going to be a We're already starting to see a split of you know, human only no AI, and then those who are willing to have a conversation with it and explore it. I'm not, by any means advocating to replace humans with AI voices. But we also know that this technology has been around for years, right, and it's it's been being built for the last twenty years, ten years solidly for synthetic voices. It's here, and we can just pretend that it's not going to have an impact and hope that it doesn't have an impact, or we can go directly to these companies, which is what we've been doing. I've been speaking with the CEOs of these companies to try and talk with them about great This is why voice actors are concerned. This is why artists in general are concerned. But this is what we're concerned about. And we know you have a lot of money. Eleven Labs just you know, they're worth one hundred million dollars or they got they got investment of one hundred million dollars a month ago or so. Right, they have the money to pay the voice actors fairly for the foundation and if they can license that, the better better audio they have, the better foundational model they can create. So if those voice actors who want to do that have the right to say yes, it's the right to say yes as much as it is the right to say no. You still have the right to say yes if you want to. I think I reckon. There's going to be a scramble with voice actors all trying to get themselves uploaded onto one of these business sites so they can be licensed out. Yeah, some of them have. You know, right now there's really no clear understanding of what that licensing fee would be. You know, we've seen similar jobs on the casting sites that you know on once one job is paying five hundred dollars, on the next job it's paying twenty thousand dollars. And they don't appear to be any different. We just don't have enough. You know, a lot of people who are casting don't have enough information to know about where those files are going to be used. Voice actors don't know really enough about how they're going to be used either to know what to ask, and agents don't know what to ask either. Like just so much somebody un knownes out there about what to even ask to come up with what a fair affair usage would because there's so many potentially so many uses out there that we can't even comprehend right now that we can't even imagine of that that it could be that they could be used for. So it's it's really hard to tell them that generation is kind of what we're looking at, a kind of a generation fee, it's what we're kind of really interested in. Well, it's going to be interesting to watch how this all unfolds. But a massive can of worms, isn't it? It is incredible, it is It is a massive can of worms. Yeah, I mean, and you know, visual artists are being hit massively obviously right now there. You know, there's some of the most hard hit because those those images are so distinctive and the styles are so distinct that when they come out, there's obviously it was trained on those and you know authors there's two two lawsuits against you know, multiple lawsuits against AI companies right now from authors who have had their their books ingested and these and use its foundational models for to train these things. And the thing is, you know, once it's trained, you can't untrain it. WEP was it you saying that there's a film in the cam with James starring James Dean. Yeah, that's so, that's what I'm told is sitting there waiting to go. So James Dean is going to be a co star of a new mi wow. That so they just you know, you've used most motion captures, so they've got an actor that actually can walk and move like James Dean. They've just done a motion capture and then they just built James Dean over the top of his skeleton, so to speak, and that and if that thing becomes a hit, you can see they're going to drag him all out right, and then Elvis really isn't dead. Yeah, right, exactly. We'll talking about that for Rio like speech to speech too. Well, that's the thing, how would you license that team? It's performed by you know, it's James the you know, the James Dean performed by so and so you want to give the motion capture person the credit for it. Like speech to speech, I could I could narrate, you know, current Gildfair Vice President uses example a lot, which is I could she could narrate Audacity of Hope and then put Barack Obama's voice over it, so it would be the voice of Barack Obama performed Karen Gilfrey. Right, so as read by Barack Obama performed by Korn Griffley. Yeah, it's poppetry. Yeah. If I was the ad agency for seven eleven, I would actually get an AI of Elvis and have him in a seven eleven. And finally, it's true slippy in one hand, donut and the other Is that what you're saying? When does Elvis become public domain? A long time? A long time. So it's a space to watch, isn't it. It really is, and the space will be filled by AI. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting, And I think we've got I think we've got three months left. I think we have about three months before something dramatically, So you think there is a time frame on this because I was actually sitting here thinking, God, how long how long will this take to sort? But you're saying you think there might be a time frame on it. I think we've got I think we are. If anything, any legitimate and strong protections need to be in place before the end of the year. By the end of the year, it's going to be too late for us to have any kind of protection of the technology is moving too quickly. It's exponential, and you know it's going to be beyond our control or potentially beyond the control of those who actually who actually are running the systems. You know, at one point, you know, without fully taking your entire system offline and destroying your models, it could potentially get get the point where there is no control, there is no ability to consent, there's no ability to even know whose voice is being used. There's just you know, a multitude of generic voices that one company gets paid when you use their voice, but nobody has an idea who the human behind it is or where the content came from anymore. Watch these space people. Yep, indeed, ye, indeed, exactly. Well it's by the ways, this is actually reading on me on the holiday and this season, my eye not hard to do. The audio is sweet and Austrian audio recorded using Source Connect, edited by Andrew Peater's and mixed by Blue Dooo Radio image with tech support from George the tech bom. 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