from Hacker News

David Attenborough is now narrating my life

by andygcook on 11/15/23, 7:19 PM with 149 comments

  • by dang on 11/15/23, 10:03 PM

  • by iris2004 on 11/15/23, 7:38 PM

    It's a neat demo. I don't know how I feed about cloning the voice of a living person, even a 'public' figure like a presenter. I wouldn't be surprised if it eventually becomes illegal, although it'll likely be as difficult to enforce as normal casual copyright infringement.
  • by rcarmo on 11/15/23, 8:23 PM

    I want this, but with Werner Herzog. It would be the only way to do justice to the existential angst that pervades some of my meetings.
  • by OnlyMortal on 11/15/23, 10:32 PM

    “… and here we have the common Twitter poster. Their attempt to gain favour with their peers and, therefore, popularity with potential mates falls foul once again.”

    - Attenborough maybe.

  • by kadomony on 11/15/23, 8:19 PM

    Given the Attenborough Lore channel for Warhammer received a cease and desist, you can bet that his legal team will be busy suing the shit out of people like this.
  • by tptacek on 11/15/23, 7:48 PM

    This is simultaneously impressive and pretty gross.
  • by LightBug1 on 11/15/23, 9:48 PM

    Interesting ... and awful ... it sharpens how I feel about it knowing that the man is nearing the end of his life. This is absolutely not how I want to experience and remember the man.
  • by hyperific on 11/15/23, 8:33 PM

    This is nuts. I want a version of this where Emma Thompson narrates my life like Stranger than Fiction.
  • by smlacy on 11/15/23, 8:14 PM

  • by itissid on 11/15/23, 8:07 PM

    Oh man what a time to be alive. The creativity is amazing. Bravo.
  • by Dig1t on 11/15/23, 8:02 PM

    This is astounding. This is the kind of demo that we could only dream of just five years ago, now some hacker dude on Twitter can just throw this kind of thing together. Seriously cool.
  • by xwdv on 11/15/23, 8:02 PM

    It’s exciting to imagine that we can soon enter the age where people will be able to voice their opinions in their own voice and choice of words, long after they are dead and gone from this physical world. Perhaps the first version of some digital afterlife.
  • by floatrock on 11/15/23, 10:21 PM

    Isn't part of the actors' strike about maintaining rights on AI-reproductions of actor likeliness?

    This is a brilliant and effective demo of why that's important.

  • by BlueTemplar on 11/15/23, 8:57 PM

    Reminded me of the South Park guys (et al.) take on Deep Fakes from a few years ago, especialy the bit with Michael Caine :

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WfZuNceFDM

    (Of course they used a real fake voice for all of them.)

  • by consumer451 on 11/16/23, 4:01 AM

    I have really enjoyed the new show Scavengers Reign. It does an amazing job of showing an alien planet's biodiversity. I have fantasized about a cut of just the nature scenes with Attenborough narrating. It seems like this make an attempt at that.
  • by divbzero on 11/15/23, 9:45 PM

    YouTube is developing revenue sharing for AI-generated music [1]. I wonder if they will extend revenue sharing to non-musical content like the narration in OP.

    [1]: https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/21/23840026/youtube-ai-music...

  • by oldshatterhand on 11/15/23, 10:33 PM

    I need Werner Herzog to narrate my life!

    "Look in the eyez of this nerd. The intenzity of the ztupidity looking at back at you is juzt amazing."

  • by wsintra2022 on 11/16/23, 1:39 AM

    Pretty cool, a couple of months back a friend asked me if I could get him a Carl Rogers audiobook, I forget which one. I told him sure and jokingly asked if he wanted David Attenborough reading it. He said yes. I had myself a challenge. Long story short, I was able to create an audio book for a friend, the voice was meh!
  • by VikingCoder on 11/15/23, 9:09 PM

    I think you shouldn't be able to distribute code / model like this without permission...

    ...but...

    What if you distributed code that when I ran it, and plugged in each of the Blue Planet / Planet Earth DVDs, it would learn how to do this, with a local model?

  • by nextworddev on 11/15/23, 9:33 PM

    Wonder how he’s deciding which frame to feed to judge.py, given it would be tremendously wasteful to call gpt4vision on every frame. Maybe there’s some logic to detect meaningful drifts?
  • by fnordpiglet on 11/16/23, 4:14 AM

    This is the future I was promised.
  • by atleastoptimal on 11/15/23, 8:17 PM

    I tried making something like this but OpenAI restricts Vision API calls to 100 per day rn
  • by throwawaaarrgh on 11/15/23, 9:37 PM

    Take my money
  • by gumballindie on 11/15/23, 11:58 PM

    Without consent, of course.
  • by SpaceManNabs on 11/15/23, 8:27 PM

    I think this is nasty to provide as a service to others because the voice didn't consent. I don't agree with others when also critiquing personal use. Personal use should be fair use as long as you aren't stealing or mining a service to minimize some personal cost.

    So is this a text to speech model while mimicking somebody's voice? That is pretty cool.

    One thing I don't understand is how you get specific models for someone's voice. Do you fine tune to that voice?

    The issue of style transfer is not something I understand for audio. Anyone have example papers to read? I am familiar with MuLan, MusicLM, and MusicGen.