AI Cloning Dead Streamers' Voices
The Ethics of Online Content Preservation
Today we are going to talk about two news articles that I’ve read. Both of which are very new, and very scary, but also very disturbing. I’m going to talk about Russia V.S. Ukraine politics working their way into the gaming world, and I’m also going to talk about AI’s cloning the voices of the dead in order to have them say racial slurs. Neither of which are particularly fun to talk about, but both I think are worthy of highlighting.
Ukrainian Devs Hacked and Blackmailed by Russian Hackers
This is a tweet that I just happened to see yesterday, and it’s quite a doozy. I am almost never on twitter, so the fact that I actually saw something happen in real-time is amazing timing. I can’t be bothered to transcribe the whole tweet.png, but I will summarize it. Ukranian based studio CSG Game World has been working on the massively popular upcoming title Stalker 2 for some time now. This article by Luke Plunkett from Kotaku does a great job of providing more context and information about the situation. The gist of it is that CSG Game World felt that they wanted to take a stand for Ukraine in more ways than one, and not release the game, or a translation for the game in Russian. Needless to say Russian fans were not happy about that. According to CSG they have been dealing with hackers and threats for a while now, and they had this to say in response,
WE ARE A UKRAINIAN COMPANY, AND LIKE MOST UKRAINIANS, WE HAVE EXPERIENCED MANY THINGS THAT ARE MUCH MORE TERRIFYING: DESTROYED HOUSES, RUINED LIVES, AND THE DEATHS OF OUR LOVED ONES. ATTEMPTS TO BLACKMAIL OR INTIMIDATE US ARE COMPLETELY FUTILE.
CSG Game World
So yeah, they basically told them to go fuck themselves.
Obviously, with all inflammatory journalism the obligatory We Become What We Behold must be mentioned (And give it a play if you haven’t it’s only 5 mins long).
I think its safe to say that for a group of developers who have had to go through literal human atrocities by the command of a rival nation. The fact that they are still committed to even putting out a videogame in the midst of the full scale war they are facing is incredible. Good on them for taking a stand.
Dead Streamers Wife Contemplates Deleting All Videos of them Online So They Can’t Be Made Into A Puppet
TotalBiscuit's Widow Weighs Deleting His YouTube Videos To Save Them From AI - By Isaiah Colbert
The late TotalBiscuit (John Bain) was a youtuber that I grew up watching. He was a fantastic personality, and generally a good voice of reason for the gaming community as it matured and grew into what it is now. Bain passed away in 2018, a loss that shook the entirety of the gaming world.
His wife and fellow internet personality Genna Bain took to the internet roughly a week ago with this tweet:
People are using the large library of content John created in order to clone his voice and use it to spread their political agendas.
This is a seven layer dip of a topic, but the one thing it isn’t is surprising. I’ve had my eye on the emerging AI revolution for a while now. Dalle 2, MidJourney, and ChatGPT hit the mainstream like a geyser, but I can say that these thinks have been in the works for a long time. I’ve watched them evolve from their primative forms to what they are now. All I can say that this is really just the tip of the iceberg.
Truly Dalle 2, Midjourney, and ChatGPT were revolutionary. I don’t want to take that away. Because when I saw those applications released for early testing, I was just as shocked as everyone else. A few months ago I got my hands on those AI voice cloners that could transform your voice into any persons in realtime. I used it to mess with my friends in online games, but I easily saw what could, and will happen. I said,
“What I am doing right now will be illegal.”
Tech advancements create legal wild-wests. The law is always well behind where technology is, and unfortunately it takes an eruption to have the law take action. Right now it is mostly harmless, but eventually someone will use the AI voices to have the wrong celebrity say some stupid, heinous, dumb shit. That person will likely be sued for everything they own, and set new legal precedent.
Such is the case that we are seeing right now for AI generated art. I predict very soon we will see stricter guidelines on copyrighting peoples voices. Not the words they say, but how they say it. Google already has a system in place to detect any snippet of any copyrighted song on the entirety of the platform. If an AI can produce it, an AI can detect it. In the near future you may need a license to utilize a voice in a piece of media, alive or dead. I feel games may be hit quite hard by this. Its a medium with a lot of voice acting. If voice actors have their voices copyrighted, will people be allowed to stream footage of the games?
Also how do you copyright a voice?
Things unfortunately will get worse before they get better. Already people have been using AI generated images to break California law and deepfake people into porn. As we know, porn dictates the next industry. Its AI.
Perfectly generated images, and human-like text are not the destination for this train either. AI video is coming. It still does not look like much, but take it from me. It’s already here.
You will be able to tell an AI text writer to write you a script for an AI generated show. You give that show to an ai video generator, and ai voice actors to create the media, publish it. Rinse repeat. If you think I’m joking then you haven’t seen watchmeforever. A 24/7 ai generated infinite Seinfeld channel on Twitch. It even has a laugh track. I do think you should give it a watch, its actually pretty awesome but in a scary dystopian kind of way.
I by no means think that this “AI Revolution” is all bad. Making media easier to create is always something that has backlash, but is almost always accepted anyway. It also doesn’t mean that the old ways die. Theatre, TV, and Movies are all still around. This is something that current kids will grow up with, and it will become normalized. You will be able to tune-in to your favorite auto generated show, each one will be a different flavor! They will always be one. Different shows might even use different AI writers as selling points. Who knows!
Thank you for reading. This article was not an easy one to write, and I’ve been having a bit of a rough day. But I’m committed to continuing to write! This article was informed by the years of insider research and industry watching that I’ve been doing.
The last issue I wanted to address is the “misinformation” idea that a lot of news outlets are freaking out about with regard to ai. The reason I have not talked much about that is because I don’t think that it will be a big deal in the long run. Misinformation was already a thing before the age of AI. News relies on trust, and news outlets are already telling their viewers whatever they want anyway. You don’t need an AI to lie to your viewers. The credible news outlets will have AI detectors and first hand reports of events as they happen. (Though news anchors may become a thing of the past)
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