Amazon shows off Alexa feature that mimics the voices of your dead relatives
theverge.com
theverge.com
> “As you saw in this experience, instead of Alexa’s voice reading the book, it’s the kid’s grandma’s voice,” said Rohit Prasad, Amazon’s head scientist for Alexa AI. Prasad introduced the clip by saying that adding “human attributes” to AI systems was increasingly important “in these times of the ongoing pandemic, when so many of us have lost someone we love.”
> “While AI can’t eliminate that pain of loss, it can definitely make their memories last,” said Prasad. You can watch the demo itself below:
Sometimes I wonder who is approving these presentations. Like who saw the brief for this and said "yep, that sounds like a good idea!". I fully expected this article to be clickbait and/or be misrepresenting the facts but no, instead it's coming awfully close to Black Mirror's "Be Right Back" episode.
My grandma actually recorded herself reading books to me as a child and I cherried those cassette tapes and listened to them over and over again. To the point that in early elementary school I "read" a book for "show and tell" that surprised my teachers (reading at that level, for my age). Turns out I had just memorized it (a story I've seen repeated online more than once). Those recordings are special, this feels gross. Alexa is not making their memories last, it's a lie, it's fake, it's not real, and it borders on delusional.
But they choose to present it in the context of perhaps the most ghoulish use case possible? And not only a use case that's entangled with taboos surrounding death and respect for the dead, but one that's been openly lampooned in popular media franchises like Black Mirror? I'm failing to comprehend why this was the chosen approach. Perhaps because it's controversial enough to distract from the implications for more actively malevolent uses of deepfakery?
Read off this script in my neighbor's voice so we can convince this bank clerk on the phone to move their funds to another account.
I remember reading a story on reddit where children for their mother's Mother's day created deep fake of their passed grandparents, hoping it would make their mother happy...yet their mothers reaction was more creeped out over happiness.
Wow. Words fail me.
Its happenstance that they chose to market it this way, it's just a voice filter that can be used for anything. But they are going for "empathy" and for people that don't already have an Alexa yet.
I'm sure it's technologically very impressive, but why do they choose to market it as a form of necromancy? There are so many less-inappropriate takes they could have chosen, like defeating voice print security or something.
I used to not focus on the AI ethics concerns, mainly because I think the ethics of subsequent AIs will have to match the ethics of whatever true AGI is created first in order to survive (that first AI will have so much of an evolutionary advantage), and I thought the first one would be created by OpenAI or some such with decent ethics. Now I think I was naïve, and wonder if the worry over AI ethics being more important than I thought, if something like the Cylons or Skynet is more probable than I thought.
If not, in a few years advertisements will be narrated by someone who's voice eerily sounds like that of your mother or father. I too love Empathy®. It produces great value for the shareholders.