They frame it as though it’s for user content, more likely it’s to train AI, but in fact it gives them the right to do almost anything they want - up to (but not including) stealing the content outright.
They frame it as though it’s for user content, more likely it’s to train AI, but in fact it gives them the right to do almost anything they want - up to (but not including) stealing the content outright.
So, they want to create AI written and narrated audiobooks that use the voices of well known voice actors without paying them for the privilege? How is that supposed to stand in court?
Voices can’t be protected by copyright but there may be a legal avenue for someone like Morgan Freeman to sue if a voice is clearly a knock off of his voice AND he can make a case for it damaging his “brand”.
I’d be impressed though if AI can write a novel without directly referencing a fictional person, place or thing that someone else made up. Stable Diffusion, for example, can make a picture of dog wearing a tracksuit running on the side of a skyscraper made of pudding in the middle of a noodle hurricane. But it didn’t invent any of those individual components, it just combined them.
Now I want that image of the dog framed and hanging in my house.
It wouldn’t be to save the cheap coat of a voice actor.
It’s so they can play the audio to their AI for free without having to say it was fed a copywritten text. It would also get better at telling stories, depending on the quality it was fed.
But the main advantage is training it to follow a long verbal narrative. And decide if it’s better to transcribe it for full reference, or just make a summary as the story goes and risk missing an important bit.
Then to repeat it in the AI’s “own words”. This would make a huge loophole for exploiting famous authors. If you feed AI the text, the author can argue it was trained on it. If the AI just listened to it and makes a summary and remembers the structure. Derivative works of famous authors can be claimed to be no different than a human emulating popular authors that they had read.
They’re just trying to find a way around using the full text, and reading it aloud might be enough.