As a *huge* Christie fan who does ethical risk assessments for technologies, this project is basically catnip for me, so I have views! I'm assuming the Christie estate signed off on this because someone was thinking that it would represent an interesting revenue stream - ThreadSky

rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social • 11 days ago

As a *huge* Christie fan who does ethical risk assessments for technologies, this project is basically catnip for me, so I have views!

I'm assuming the Christie estate signed off on this because someone was thinking that it would represent an interesting revenue stream

Reposted from Nick Harkaway

Critically, what you have here seems to be an actor performing Christie giving advice which is taken directly from her books and appearances, as researched and assembled by humans. It’s not a zombot.

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damonyoung.com.au•11 days ago

I am a *fiend* for this sort of post: when expertise meets enthusiasm.

rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social•11 days ago

Ha ha ha! I could have gone on at *quite some length* had my actual job not intervened. 😂

kathylove.bsky.social•11 days ago

Really interesting, Rachel, thanks!

cjr1968.bsky.social•11 days ago

Her great-grandson, representing the estate, was interviewed on World at One on Radio 4, worth checking that out.

rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social•11 days ago

Could, for instance, Christie "come back" and read her own audiobooks? Which is also interesting for the commercial part of the BBC because they have access to an amazing voice archive which presumably includes a few classic authors whose voice recordings might be out of copyright

eddwilson.bsky.social•11 days ago

If Michael Parkinson can "come back". . .

tanngrisnir.bsky.social•11 days ago

And they shouldn't do that either.

rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social•11 days ago

Presumably this got commissioned during that period when all the old male actors were being revived by AI and it made lots of headlines. But, also, we all know there'll be a hundred decks going round proposing doing eg gross things with Marilyn Monroe's recorded legacy

rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social•11 days ago

However, unfortunately, no one quite expected the copyright backlash (which is salient here because who knows how Respeecher built their underlying model), but also synthetic voice reproduction is maybe one of *the* most problematic uses of AI to be shipped so far

rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social•11 days ago

Because making it possible for a computer to pretend to be other people is Very Dangerous Indeed from an epistemically security and disinfo perspective, and normalising reproducing the voices of heritage celebrities we all love starts to make an unacceptably dangerous thing socially acceptable

rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social•11 days ago

Voice deep fakes are a quiet killer of democracy and a tool of organised crime. Rolling them out for a project Christie fans will love isn't the worst possible thing that could happen, but it's a bad idea because it makes a tech we should all be terrified of into a cute novelty

mariabustillos.com•11 days ago

These things creep me out a LOT when the real person they are imitating has been in the ground for many years, it's very weird and sad

georgevrt.bsky.social•11 days ago

I had this same issue with the Netflix documentary about Gabby Petito, which used AI to have ‘her’ voice her journal entries. It was really discomfiting, though I presume the family must’ve signed off on it.

moewenfels.bsky.social•11 days ago

Instead peoples minds are already racing how they can make a cute joke using this, to seem more interesting than they really are by using a tool they will continue to normalize that will ultimately bring an unimanigable host of issues with it.

rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social•11 days ago

*epistemic not epistemically obvs

anyway, lots of legal questions here and future regulatory challenges. I think that synthetic voice tech should ideally not exist but, seeing as it does, creators should need a tightly controlled license to use it and all uses should be approved by a regulator

adrianbowyer.bsky.social•11 days ago

But this is something where machines are only doing things that lots of people can do just as well, do all the time, and have done for ages. I mean, I can't tell if I'm listening to Jon Culshaw or Tom Baker...

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