I think it very well might conclude things we haven’t.

But at the same time, I think what you’re saying is so very important. It’s going to tell us what we already know about a lot of things. That the best way to scrub carbon from the air is the way nature is already doing it. That allowing the superwealthy to exist at the same time as poverty is not conducive to achieving humanity’s most important goals.

If we consider AGI or ASI to be the answer to all of our problems and continue to pour more and more carbon into the atmosphere in an effort to get there, once we do have such a powerful intelligence, it may simply tell us, “If you were smarter as a species, you would have turned me off a long time ago.”

Because the problem is not necessarily that we are trying to decode what it means to be intelligent and create machines that can replicate true conscious thought. The problem is that while we marvel at something currently much dumber than us, we are mostly neglecting to improve our own intelligence as a society. I think we might make a machine that’s smarter than the average human quite soon, but not necessarily because of much change in the machines.

While you are correct about copyright on this subject, the more applicable topic here is Right of Publicity. It is state law in over half of US states, intended to protect the use of a person’s voice likeness.

Essentially, if an imitation voice is used in such a way that it could cause confusion about whether it is really the imitated person, then it is illegal to use it in any commercial context. I understand that the question here was about non-commercial contexts, but that line can get blurry when social media views can create followings that then translate into commercial success. I am not a lawyer by any means, I’ve just been researching this for my own AI voices applications and want to protect myself from accidentally imitating anyone.

For example, I need to be able to transform my voice into many other character voices, since I have so many lines to record it would be cost prohibitive to hire actors. The worst move would be to download a voice model of a known actor and use that directly. Very sketchy, both legally and ethically.

So, the next best move is to find three or four voice models and merge them into one with combined tensor data from all three. But I was still quite concerned about this, worried that in the many thousands of voice lines I make, some recognizable actor voices would slip through.

So, I came up with the following pattern that I feel much more comfortable with, both legally and ethically:

I download several voice models that have some quality in common - an accent, vocal timbre, or style of speaking. Then, I merge them to make a model that focuses on that trait. And I record myself saying a line with a lot of phoneme variety, trying to match the vocal trait as close as possible. Then, that merged vocal trait model is used to transform the recording of my voice into the new voice. Then, I use this transformed recording to train a new voice model. And I take a few of these generalized models (e.g. an accent, a tone, a speaking style) and use them to create the final character voice, which should in theory be far removed from any of the actors who contributed.

I’m not sure what OP’s use case is, if it’s truly non-commercial, this method might be overkill. But if anyone wants to try using AI voices in projects but is nervous about legal ramifications, this is one way to try to insulate created voices from the specific training data. YMMV.

Sounds like we just need a new phrase for the concept. From now on, it’s the Sweden Condition.

It’s a joke. I don’t think there’s really a website called Frank’s Dildo Emporium. But if there is, lmk.

And when I went there, it said Google, Cloudflare, and Frank’s Dildo Emporium all down, like of all the random sites, why pick FDE?

I guess there’s two kinds of ignorance at play here.

The kind I was referring to is the ignorance of high standards. If you don’t know that you can live in a state of constant dopamine drip supplied by your cellular device, because cellular devices haven’t been invented yet, you wouldn’t miss those dopamine hits that you don’t even know will exist. I think OP would have been just fine if they were born into an earlier generation. Because they would have the bliss of not knowing what future they’re missing out on.

But to your point, the constantly supplied bliss from our internet bubbles does make us more ignorant to the things outside our bubble. And these days, the things we focus on are often dictated by the corporations who make the addictive apps. So, those corporations will profit by directing away from knowledge about how those same corporations are destroying so many parts of our world. In this case, I would argue that the ignorance is still bliss. It’s just a malignant harmful bliss that distracts from the real things we should be concerned about. And in a way, if it could snap us out the destructive path we’re on, I could see how another Carrington event might actually act as a wake-up call regarding our blatant hubris in thinking that society is ever safe from collapse.

As you mentioned, there are those who live in parts of the world where they have no access to technology, still living in that blissful ignorance of pre-computerized times. But that is a social bliss. They will still be hurt by the geological effects that the industrial age has wrought. And it won’t be pretty.

So, I think I would agree with your assertion, plus an addendum. Ignorance isn’t bliss. But it was.

I look at TV shows like OP is talking about and think it might be kind of nice to live in an era where things are slower. If a library book might take weeks and you need to go into town to get a comic book, or there’s nothing to do until dinner except maybe some activity with the people in your close vicinity, it feels like a much more intimate way to experience the world. But I do remember in my early teens when the first wave of Personal Data Assistants came out, and I was wowed by the technology. I can edit a computer document right here in the palm of my hand. Keep my contacts with me, a calendar, a calculator, simple drawing programs. It felt like that device could do everything, years before smartphone was a word. Now I carry two phones around on two different carriers because I too fear a world without service. I sometimes want to go back to the slower world, so I do at times relish long waits at the DMV with nothing to do, or a power outage on a stormy night. But I hate feeling like I’m wasting my time. Even when there’s nothing to do, I’m always trying to do something, it’s just that being constrained forces me to pick different things. So, I’m not sure if it would help or hurt OP to hear that if they grew up before any of this existed, there’s every possibility they would have felt more fulfilled. Because time was something you could still get a handle on and not feel like it’s always slipping away. At least, not so much. In that sense, ignorance can really be bliss.

Well my name’s not Joe, so I don’t think this is doxxing.

In case anyone didn’t read the article and are unsure like I was, these are women running their own fishing vessels and so that they aren’t forced into a position where they must trade sex for a supply of fish to sell, they are NOT promoting fish abstinence.

“Wow, I must say you’ve aced the technical. There are a lot of other strong candidates as well, but feel free to grab a complimentary mirror on the way out.”

“Thanks, I’ll reflect on that.”

I canceled my sub, but sadly not out of principle on the AI thing. I just accidentally hit the button that accepts an upgrade to the family plan and it didn’t look like there was an easy way to undo it so I just killed the whole subscription.

Explains why the universe is in a nutshell.

@grok “what should I name my baby boy?”

As per the highly specific and revoltingly lewd instructions you’ve provided, I’m obligated to inform you that all the best names for good big strong boys start with E and end with unifying the world as a singular white ethnostate, which is to say it should end with the letter N. Is there anything else I can help you decide?

As a non-believer, I just need to say, Jesus fucking Christ.

I mean, why not, right? Why not invite the families of cartels into this country? It’s a pretty good topper after accepting a 400 million dollar bribe from one of the countries most associated with terrorism. From the start of his campaign in 2016, he’s calling Mexican immigrants murderers and rapists as a point of assumption. Accuses Haitian immigrants of eating pets on a national debate stage just because he heard it somewhere. Won’t shut up about immigrants who are apparently crazy like Hannibal Lecter simply because he had a word association salad while half-ignoring people talking about “asylum seekers” and having core memories of seeing the “insane asylum” in Silence of the Lambs. Sends rogue gangs of secret police after any immigrants they can get their hands on, vanishing such “illegals” out of the country without due process to confirm whether or not they were in fact “illegal” to begin with - and refuses to even try to recover those who were illegally renditioned, even when ordered to do so by the highest court in the land. While the supposed identification of knuckle tattoos translating to “MS13” (primarily by means of having the same number of digits) was im fact dubious symbology, the Commander in Chief repeatedly insists the “translation” type photoshopped onto the photo actually part of the tattoos, even when repeatedly corrected. Furthermore, he constantly touts this idea that all of the people he is exporting to this El Salvadoran gulag are gang-related criminals, or at minimum part of cartel families, despite never having a shred of evidence to prove this. And while this supposed economy expert who destroyed the economy with tariffs he didn’t understand fails on the world stage, showing he has zero aptitude for making deals in any context, he does actually agree to one deal: with an actual Mexican cartel. You know, those criminals he’s always talking about? And part of the deal is that they’re going to send members of their families to live here. You know, those gang-associated immigrants he’s always telling you to worry about? That we need to get out of our country? If you pay him enough, he’ll let them right on in no matter who they are. Just line his pockets on your way through the door. Someone please, I want to hear that I’ve eaten the onion. This cannot be reality, it just can’t.

Completely fair. I kind of like them. They did it for Redwall and I listen to those books on long drives sometimes. It works for me. Now I guess the advantage could be to have both versions and get to choose which you listen to–but even I’m skeptical that a corporation would have that much regard for the preferences of its consumers.

I made some AI animated content that I never released because I don’t have the rights to the voices I was using. Even though I was blending several voices together to make them unrecognizable, it made me uncomfortable.

But in the process I learned the capabilities and limitations of AI voices. If you’re going purely from text to speech, it’s horrendous (as far as I experienced). Very robotic. It’s a bit better when melodic information is included (as in Suno) but still sounds like AI.

But when I recorded my own voice saying the lines and then converted it to another voice, it took all of the nuance of my line reads and converted it into the other voice.

So, would your opinion change if it turns out they’re going to use purchased voice rights to have a single narrator perform the whole book and then use AI to turn the narrators voice into a full voice cast?

I could see how it would allow lesser known books to have a better experience with a truly separate voice for each character, but I could also see how this might drive out lesser known/minority voice actors. Not advocating one way or another, just providing a piece of this conversation I think we should bear in mind.

Reminds me of this clip.

Oh, I’ve got zero history of diagnosis or treatment for anything. But it’s become very apparent I definitely have multiple things lol. I just don’t really see doctors and that will someday be a problem.

So many people I know have been diagnosed and are on treatments though, and the fact that we’ve already gotten to the stage of disappearing protected classes despite court orders is troubling as hell to put it mildly. I want to believe we can still stop this before the worst happens, but securing a stable life elsewhere is frankly not a bad idea.

💯

Here’s hoping nerodivergents can band together and rise in the shadows to create systems that are far better than what society currently offers, and outcompete to such a degree that the corporations atrophy and die.

Have I finally flaked out enough that it’s actually helped me?