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What do you think of this future?
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One of my all-time favorite books, which I guess might now be in pre-production as a movie, is Haldeman’s “The Forever War”, a sci-fi story of one soldier fighting an interstellar war for Earth, who, thanks to relativity and time-dilation in interstellar travel, gets to re-visit Earth every hundred years or so, though for him it’s just 2 or 3 years. He remains mostly the same, but he becomes more and more alienated from the world of his birth as time progresses normally back home.
During one of the earlier visits, the soldier, Major Mandala, is interviewed on a chat show, and he makes the mistake of saying what he actually thinks in response to the questions from the jingoistic host of the program. They wanted something to promote the war, not critique it, so they ask the major to sit and answer a few more random questions for about ten minutes. Mandala goes to his hotel room and later that night watches himself on the show he just attended. The technology employed is exactly like what we see in Adobe Voco and the new morph cut. Mandala’s every word has been changed into a rousing, pro-war, pro-government motivational speaking miracle. And it’s seamless, to the point Mandala wonders if he actually said anything.
This is really off-topic for the COW, but I’ll bite. As to Universal Income, it’s just another word for welfare or disability assistance. There will always be people in this world who can’t cut it in the 9-to-5, for various reasons, either temporarily or for what’s left of their life. They are never going to be competition for Zelin or Garchow. Or anybody. To leave them alone, scrabbling for survival is cruel. And counter-productive to an enlightened society and order, because it invites crime. It shouldn’t be left just to charities to help these folks out. We can and should have a system that can help anybody, at whatever level. If we don’t create it ourselves, market and social forces will evolve something similar, but it will be longer and more painful and less efficient in coming. Swinging back to on-topic: if someone on the lowest level of public assistance, working on second-hand gear, is talented enough to challenge one of you guys at your business, and actually take it away from you, it means what you do isn’t all that special. But let’s be clear: the public isn’t going to allow any special universal wage level to be high enough to let somebody undercut your business. A UW wage will probably afford you bare survival minimums: a single-room apartment, a bare minimum of food, clean water, medicine, some clothes, a bus card, and probably free web access for education, communication, and entertainment. Nothing much else. That’s not the profile of someone who is going to run any of us out of business.
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[Mark Suszko] “We can and should have a system that can help anybody, at whatever level. If we don’t create it ourselves, market and social forces will evolve something similar, but it will be longer and more painful and less efficient in coming. “
I whole heartedly agree. I hope I didn’t come across as callous. While the Adobe technology is shockingly impressive in the pure capability, it’s hard for me (and apparently others) to see any more than the harm that can be done.
Also, it will (or technology like it) eventually put us all out of a job, or close to it, and it’s not just because the technology has advanced, it’s because you will be able to tell a computer what to say in anyone’s voice and likeness regardless of morality. We will simply not be able to compete, no matter what resolution of monitor I want.
Bob and I were talking about this recent discussion with Elon Musk, which basically seems to put most anyone on the lamb because of a conscious decision to automate, yet it’s being packaged as more leisure time for everyone to innovate: https://fortune.com/2016/11/06/elon-musk-universal-basic-income/
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Imagine the Intellectual Property law suits. This technology will get crushed in the market place because it’s too risky for regular-normalized operations to use. I can imagine already the change order coming in.
Client: we don’t like that phrasing, so we have a new script.
Me: Let me just type in the new script and use the talen’ts audio sample….ok done. New VO read.
Talent: Hey you! You stole my voice, you owe me MONEY.
Me: I’m sorry. here’s your money plus damages.
Client: We don’t like that phrasing, so we have a new script.
Me: Sorry. we have to re-record and PAY the VO talent.
Client: what about last time?
Me: Yeah about that, I got sued and lost, so now is there any way I can get that compensated.
Client: LOL.
Me: I thought so.
A couple of days later.
Me: Posting on creative cow: whatever you do: always get a deposit upfront and always use real human beings to record the voice over, don’t use a replicant, so you don’t get sued.
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[Richard Herd] “Imagine the Intellectual Property law suits. This technology will get crushed in the market place because it’s too risky for regular-normalized operations to use. I can imagine already the change order coming in.
Client: we don’t like that phrasing, so we have a new script.
Me: Let me just type in the new script and use the talen’ts audio sample….ok done. New VO read.
Talent: Hey you! You stole my voice, you owe me MONEY.
Me: I’m sorry. here’s your money plus damages.
Client: We don’t like that phrasing, so we have a new script.
Me: Sorry. we have to re-record and PAY the VO talent.
Client: what about last time?
Me: Yeah about that, I got sued and lost, so now is there any way I can get that compensated.
Client: LOL.
Me: I thought so.
A couple of days later.
Me: Posting on creative cow: whatever you do: always get a deposit upfront and always use real human beings to record the voice over, don’t use a replicant, so you don’t get sued.”
Wouldn’t this all be negated by production agreements, release forms and whatnot? Once these documents are signed, you have the right to do anything with the audio and images you capture… within the bounds of the agreements, of course.
Shawn
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Dont like like that voice lets use Don Lafontaines hey how about Orson Wells nah I prefer Vincent Price.
We could get stuck in the past.
Ricardo Marty
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[Ricardo Marty] “Dont like like that voice lets use Don Lafontaines hey how about Orson Wells nah I prefer Vincent Price.
We could get stuck in the past.”
That’s harder to do than you’d think…I think. Roger Ebert was trying to do something like this before he passed, but it turned out that there were very few stretches of his voice recordings that didn’t have Gene Siskel interrupting him. ????
There are obviously some issues with this, but I don’t see it as much more problematic than hologram actors. Remember when people said the same thing about that? That we’d be inundated with them? I actually wouldn’t mind seeing a few more of them than we’ve seen so far, especially in advertising where I think the illusion could hold up for the shorter duration more easily…
…but I just think about the massive time savings, and I think of this as one of the most practical new features that anybody has released in a while.
Not that it’s been released yet. I do appreciate that they don’t think it’s ready for release until it’s 100% detectable. I can see where this would be quite a trick if the original file has been conveniently lost, and all that remains is a flattened recording. This kind of watermarking is ironically much easier to do with video files….
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[Shawn Miller] “within the bounds of the agreements, of course.
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Imagine how much that will cost to have unlimited access to a voice for forever, but yeah I guess you could write a contract that way.
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[Tim Wilson] “the massive time savings”
What massive time savings? This will be a time nightmare and extend and extend and extend re-edits. “ok now try this.”
“now that” “Can i hear the first one again.” “i need to let so-and-so on this.” Folks will say “let’s iterate that one more time”This is the same kind of reasoning that folks used when they said “word processing will cut down on the amount of paper we use.” We all know what happened. It’s so damn easy to hit print.
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[Richard Herd] “Imagine how much that will cost to have unlimited access to a voice for forever, but yeah I guess you could write a contract that way.
“And I would imagine people would agree to certain terms, like, “Sure, say whatever you want.”
Then when their voice is misused they’d say, “Well, I didn’t mean use it for THAT!”
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