Voice cloning technologies for famous (sometimes deceased) individuals using AI

Check out my latest article on the use of AI to clone the voices of individuals (dead or alive) and it’s both exciting and terrifying implications. I’d love to hear what you think both about the opportunities this enables and the ramifications (legal, et al).

One positive thing I can think of is the opportunity to artificially re-create an experience with a loved one who passed away + therapy or grieving assistance of that person. A more advanced form of this situation could be creating a 3D hologram making it seem like they are really there with you in real time and able to respond to you using their voice. Re-animating using video + audio/voices of a certain individual could cause problems if that sort of technology got into the wrongs hands with potential to wreak havoc especially in regards to broadcasting global news. would be an interesting thing to brainstorm about and I am sure this technology will only be more realistic and improved over time.

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thanks Sean - interesting use case relative to communicating with loved ones who have moved on. On a related note, museums and archives are using advanced technologies to preserve their testimonies and introduce them to new generations. For example, some remaining holocaust survivors (fewer each year) were interviewed last year and their stories captured utilizing hologram and VR technology to bring them and their experiences to life. Check this out to learn more about some examples of this in action. Both fascinating and eerie.

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Ah… this brings back many memories of the Everlive Corporation! This was a project I worked on for kicks 12 years ago. The idea was to create a seemingly real organization that purported to be “Facebook for the Dead” where you could warehouse your loved one forever in a state of suspended animation (kind of like they were in a cryogenic center) except that you could continue to communicate with them through the “Hive Mind Platform”. The sinister part was that all the minds of the so-called ‘deceased’ were meshed together into a giant HiveMind OS that had unintended consequences. The reason for doing this the first place was that throwing brains away into cemeteries was a “senseless waste of human life” because those brains contained enormous computing power plus experienced that could be utilized in a flesh computer.

I had a website up for a number of years to see if it would attract any attention. The website was taken down but this is where it used to be. I’ll create another post with some of the original content for fun and see if anyone wants to resurrect this.

Since then, I thought it would be fun to create an AI chat site that does something similar and call it, “Shrine”, in which the living can train AI on their posts, tweets, conversations, etc, so that when they DO die, there will be a chatbot trained on them to pick up (their conversation) where they left off.

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I love this concept - and would absolutely enjoy discussing it and playing with it further (!).

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