> Seems from right out of the gate, they are breaking their own ethical guidelines as a cheap promotional tactic. If they care that little about themselves and a former president of the United States, what do they care about your likeness.
We state in our blogpost that we make an exception for Obama/Trump in order to raise public awareness. Both of them are regularly used in Machine Learning benchmarks (for example [0] [1]). Note that we don't allow users to generate from Trump/Obama's voice.
Once again, we care a lot about these issues and that's why we only allow users to copy their own voice.
Unfortunately this is something that we can not enforce automatically.
We ensure that people copy their own voice by asking them to read predefined sentences (we use speech recognition to check that the sentence is indeed corresponding to the text).
Thank you for raising those concerns. We take those very seriously. You can read more about our ethical stance in this article: https://lyrebird.ai/ethics/
To recap:
- we want to start by raising public awareness about the technology and we did demos with the voices of Trump/Obama for that,
- your digital voice is yours, people can not use it without your authorization.
Yes, it's actually quite interesting! It's a recurrent observation that we have inside the team with our own voices. Friends of the person usually better appreciate the quality of his/her digital voice. You can also observe these reactions to some extent on twitter: https://twitter.com/LyrebirdAi
Other interesting observation are the sentences that people generate for the first time with their digital voice...
- you want to use the voice of someone that has a Lyrebird account: he or she has to give you their authorization.
- you want to use the voice of someone who does not have an account. We have specific contracts for that. Say you want to copy the voice of Morgan Freeman, the contract will be between him/her, you and Lyrebird. We will also probably explore alternative ways for that.
Thank you for sharing that! We had not thought about this specific use case yet. It's quite difficult to figure out which use cases are going to become the most popular.