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I hereby resign?
Donald Trump saying “I hereby resign”? It could happen— even if Mr. Trump never speaks the words directly.
That’s the promise (well, not the exact promise) that a Canadian company by the name of Lyrebird is holding out for its speech synthesis software. The company’s website invites you to speak into the computer for one minute, and its technology will crunch your words into their component parts and spit out a reasonable facsimile of your voice, saying something completely different. Give it five minutes of speech input and the software will have you down cold, it claims.
It even backs up its claim with a working example— the computer regenerated voices of Donald Trump, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, developed from their public words. To my ears, the voices do sound Donald, Barack and Hillary-like, but they are obviously machine voices. Nevertheless, if the technology has come this far, who’s to say it won’t get to the point where it could easily pass for the original.
Not only does Lyrebird claim that the voice can be reconstructed, it also claims that emotional content—outrage, apathy, sadness, empathy—can be programmed into the voice as well. Too bad Mr. Trump didn’t use the technology in place of his own voice when he called military families a couple of weeks ago.
Legally, can a voice be appropriated, or does it ‘belong’ to you alone? It seems the voice is too intangible to be copyrighted; however, it may be a trademark, and your “moral” rights in the voice may also be protected. Tom Waits, the uniquely gravel-on-sandpaper voiced American musician, successfully sued a company in Spain for using a voice that sounded like his, on top of a song that was derivative of one of his, in a commerical advertising cars. Said Mr. Waits “I have a moral right to my voice. It’s like property—there’s a fence around it, in a way.”
Lyrebird says that its technology is intended primarily to support voice-driven computer and machine applications, but the prospects for its use—and misuse—are wider.
It seems to me that if I give up my voice to Lyrebird, I’m asking for trouble. The last thing I want is to have my reconstitued voice heard around the Internet calling on Mr. Trump to fight to keep his presidency, or professing my undying love for Hillary Clinton and only Hillary Clinton. So I haven’t.
Some might say that voice synthesis is just the vocal equivalent of Photoshopping, whereby you employ computer generated graphics to create a ‘false’ image from a ‘real’ one For example, you don’t have to search hard to find an image of Vladimir Putin holding a baby with a Donald Trump face and hair. Why would it be wrong to add the voice of a parent clucking in Putinese while a baby whines in Trumpspeak (or vice versa)? The world has survived Photoshopping, it is suggested, so why can it not survive voice synthesis? But it’s just putting one more obstacle to watch out for on my personal radar that I don’t want to have to worry about.
And the possibilites for serious mischief are abundant. What would happen, for instance, if the Russians started using voice synthesis to influence life in the County? What might stop them from hijacking “99.3 County FM” and simulating the voices of our local onair personalities? They could broadacst falsely balmy weather forecasts, thereby ruining the County’s grape crop, turning the LCBO into a losing propositon, causing the province to default on its debt, and eventually causing mass misery.
(While we’re verging on paranoia here, how do we know for sure that the Russians aren’t already seeking to extend their influence to the County? Maybe, after having dispatched the incumbent to the Ontario Liberal party, the Russians might put up their own puppet candidate for mayor, who gets elected after stealing e-mails from his competitors and disseminating fake news about them, and then uses his vast influence over council to put a nuclear reactor (of Russian design) on Wellington beach, thereby ruining our tourist industry. If you start seeing trucks with “Vladivostok Ford” dealership stickers on the back, you’d better contact the OPP.)
While my mischief possibility is a bit exaggerated, I have to wonder if, piece by piece, we aren’t being denuded of our humanity as machines slowly overcome their limitations in capturing and reimagining our images, our voices and our innermost thoughts. We may end up forced to define our uniqueness by our propensity for random bouts of imperfection—at least until the machines figure out the algorithm for that too.
If I could do so, I would say “I hereby resign— from the technological rat race.”
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