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> * Voice cloning someone else’s voice to use it for voiceover

This is interesting because I was considering cloning my own voice as a way to record things without the inevitable hesitations, ums, errs, and stumbling over my words. By this standard I am allowed to do so.

But then I thought what does it even mean "someone else's" when multiple people can make a video, if my wife and I make a video together can we not then use my recorded voice because to her my voice is someone else.

I suspect all of these rules will have similar edge cases and a wide penumbra where arbitrary rulings will be autocratically applied.

> ...to her my voice is someone else.

To her, your voice is your voice not someone else's voice.

If you share a Youtube account with your wife, "someone else" means someone other than you or your wife.

The more interesting and troubling point is your use of "synthetic you" to make the real you sound better!

Is this really any different to say using makeup, cosmetic plastic surgery, or even choosing to wear specific clothes?

A lot different? The equivalent would be applying makeup to your mannequin replacement. All the things you mention are decoration. Replacing your voice is more than a surface alteration. I guess if some clever AI decides to take issue with what I say, and uses some enforcement tactic to arm-twist my opinion, I could change my mind.

We already have people editing videos anyway, you never see the first cut. AI-matically removing umms is really just speeding up that process.

I think the suggestion being discussed was AI-cloning your voice, and then using that for text-to-speech. Audio generation, rather than automating the cuts and tweaks to the recorded audio.

Yes exactly. Thanks. Voice cloning was indeed the suggestion made above.

The ethical challenge in my opinion, is that your status as living human narrator on a video is now irrelevant, when you're replaced by voice cloning. Perhaps we'll see a new book by "George Orwell" soon. We don't need the real man, his clone will do.

> The more interesting and troubling point is your use of "synthetic you" to make the real you sound better!

Why?

Did you replace the real you with "AI you" to ask me "why"?

I presume you wouldn't do that? How about replacing your own voice on a video that you make, allowing your viewers to believe it's your natural voice? Are you comfortable with that deception?

Everyone has evolving opinions about this subject. For me, I don't want to converse with stand-in replacements for living people.

How’s that different from photoshopping images?

> * Showing a realistic depiction of a tornado or other weather events moving toward a real city that didn’t actually happen

> * Making it appear as if hospital workers turned away sick or wounded patients

> * Depicting a public figure stealing something they did not steal, or admitting to stealing something when they did not make that admission

Considering they own the platform, why not just ban this type of content? It was possible to create this content before "AI".

There are many cases where such content is perfectly fine. After all, YouTube doesn't claim to be a place devoted to non-fiction only. The first one is an especially common thing in fiction.

Does that mean movies clips will need to be labeled?

Or video game footage? I explicitly remember people confusing Arma footage with real war footage.

The third one could easily be satire. Imagine that a politician is accused of stealing from the public purse, and issues a meme-worthy press statement denying it, and someone generates AI content of that politician claiming not to have stolen a car or something using a similar script.

Valid satire, fair use of the original content: parody is considered transformative. But it should be labeled as AI generated, or it's going to escape onto social media and cause havoc.

It might anyway, obviously. But that isn't a good reason to ban free expression here imho.

For what it's worth, this is already a genre of YouTube video, and I happen to find it absolutely hilarious:

https://youtu.be/3oWFFAVYMec

https://youtu.be/aL1f6w-ziOM

Respectfully disagree. Satire should not be labelled as satire. Onus is on the reader to be awake and thinking critically—not for the entire planet to be made into a safe space for the unthinking.

It was never historically the case that satire was expected to be labelled, or instantly recognized by anyone who stumbled across it. Satire is rude. It's meant to mock people—it is intended to muddle and provoke confused reactions. That's free expression nonetheless!

So when we have perfect deep fakes that are indistinguishable from real videos and people are using it for satire, people shouldn’t be required to inform people of that?

How is one to figure out what is real and what is a satire? Times and technologies change. What was once reasonable won’t always be.

- "How is one to figure out what is real and what is a satire?"

Context, source, tone of speech, and reasonability.

- "Times and technologies change."

And so do people! We adapt to times and technology; we don't need to be insulated from them. The only response needed to a new type of artificial medium, is, that people learn to be marginally more skeptical about that medium.

Nah. Satire was always safe when it's not pretending to have documented evidence of the thing actually happening.

Two recent headlines:

* Biden Urges Americans Not To Let Dangerous Online Rhetoric Humanize Palestinians [1]

* Trump says he would encourage Russia to attack Nato allies who pay too little [2]

Do you really think, if you jumped back a few years, you could have known which was satire and which wasn't?

The fact that we have video evidence of the second is (part) of how we know it's true. Sure, we could also trust the reporters who were there, but that doesn't lend itself to immediate verification by someone who sees the headline on their Facebook feed.

If the first had an accompanying AI video, do you think it would be believed by some people who are willing to believe the worst of Biden? Sure, especially in a timeline where the second headline is true.

1. https://www.theonion.com/biden-urges-americans-not-to-let-da...

2. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/feb/11/donald-trump...

> Synthetically generating music (including music generated using Creator Music)

What about music made with a synthesizer?

In one of the examples, they refer to something called "Dream Track"

> Dream Track in Shorts is an experimental song creation tool that allows creators to create a unique 30-second soundtrack with the voices of opted-in artists. It brings together the expertise of Google DeepMind and YouTube’s most innovative researchers with the expertise of our music industry partners, to open up new ways for creators on Shorts to create and engage with artists.

> Once a soundtrack is published, anyone can use the AI-generated soundtrack as-is to remix it into their own Shorts. These AI-generated soundtracks will have a text label indicating that they were created with Dream Track. We’re starting with a limited set of creators in the United States and opted-in artists. Based on the feedback from these experiments, we hope to expand this.

So my impression is they're talking about labeling music which is derived from a real source (like a singer or a band) and might conceivably be mistaken for coming from that source.

Even if it is fully AI-generated, this requirement seems off compared to the other ones.

In all of the other cases, it can be deceiving, but what is deceiving in synthetic music? There may be some cases where it is relevant, like when imitating the voice of a famous singer, but other than that, music is not "real", it is work coming from the imagination of its creator. That kind of thing is already dealt with with copyright, and attribution is a common requirement, and one that YouTube already enforces (how it does that is different matter).

From a Google/Alphabet perspective it could also be valuable to distinguish between „original“ and „ai generated“ music for the purpose of a cleaner database to train their own music generation models?

Alternatively they want to know who to ban when the RIAA inevitably starts suing the shit out of music generators.

If you manually did enough work have the copyright it is fine.

But since AI can't legally have copyright to their music Google probably wants to know for that reason.

> If you manually did enough work have the copyright it is fine.

Amount of work is not a basis for copyright. (Kind of work is, though the basis for the “kind” distinction used isn't actually a real objective category, so its ultimately almost entirely arbitary.)

That could get tricky. A lot of hardware and software MIDI sequencers these days have probabilistic triggering built in, to introduce variation in drum loops, basslines, and so forth. An argument could be made that even if you programmed the sequence and all the sounds yourself, having any randomization or algorithmic elements would make the resulting work ineligible for copyright.

It goes without saying that a piece of software can't be a copyright holder.

But the person who uses that software certainly can own the copyright to the resulting work.

If someone else uses the same AI generator software and makes the same piece of music should Google go after them for it? I don't think that would hold in court.

Hopefully this means that AI generated music gets skipped by Googles DRM checks.

I hope there is some kind of middle ground, legally, here? Like say you use a piano that uses AI to generate artificial piano sounds, but you create and play the melody yourself: can you get copyright or not?

IANAL. I think you'd get copyright on the melody and the recording, but not the sound font that the AI created.

> Synthetically generating music

Yagoddabekidding. That could cover any piece of music created with MIDI sequencing and synthesizers and such.

I think there's a clear difference between synthesizing music and synthetically generating music. One term has been around for decades and the other one is being confused with that.

To someone who is doing one or the there is a clear difference. I don't trust the EU or YouTube to be able to tell the difference from the other end, by the end product alone.

If AI writes MIDI input for a synthesizer, rather than producing the actual waveform, where does that land?

>Showing a realistic depiction of a tornado or other weather events moving toward a real city that didn’t actually happen

A bit funny considering a realistic warning and "live" radar map of an impending, major, natural disaster occurring in your city apparently doesn't violate their ad policy on YouTube. Probably the only time an ad gave me a genuine fright.

There’s a whole genre of videos on YouTube simulating the PSAs of large scale disasters. Nuclear war, meteors, etc. My 12 year old is really into them.

  * Digitally altering audio to make it sound as if a popular singer missed a note in their live performance

Does all the autotuning that singers use in live performance counts?

/j

Interestingly they only say you have to disclose it if it's a singer missing a note. Seems like it's fair game to fix a note that was off key in real life and not disclose that.

That was only an example, not a rule. Presumably you need to label it if you fix the note too

IMHO, not even a /j.

Under the current guidelines, doesn't all music performances that make use of some sort of pitch correction assist are technically "digitally altered"?

What about autotune is AI?

Those voice overs on tiktok that are computer generated but sound quite real and often are reading some script. Do they have to disclose that those voices are artificially produced?

So all those trash generated AI voice product videos and or just reading reddit text can stay?

To me, the guidelines are fairly clear: if it’s assisting production of a work of fiction, it’s ok.