This Week (or So) in Vocal Deepfakes:

Lightly annotated

  1. The director of a documentary film uses an AI engine so that his celebrated, deceased subject can speak from beyond the grave: theverge.com.

  2. A musician creates a business built around deepfake technology, letting other musicians engage with her voice: rollingstone.com.

  3. Bedroom producers make “fan fiction” songs featuring the AI-engineered voices of actual stars: billboard.com.

  4. Synthetic voices belatedly catch up with CGI, and all-digital animation may be in our near future: technologyreview.com.

Initial vaguely related thoughts:

  • All bands start as cover bands.

  • There’s a whole culture of nightclub performers, cover bands, and actors having careers (or partial careers) being other people.

  • There’s an uncanny valley between John Fogerty being sued for sounding like himself and the verdict against Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams in the “Blurred Lines” case.

  • A lot of the voices of fictional robots and androids in film and television are the voices of humans (see: 2001: A Space Odyssey, WarGames, Max Headroom, Colossus: The Forbin Project, and so on).

  • The future is especially meaningful when viewed through the lens of the past.

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