Making then the illegal would accomplish nothing since it's already out in the wild. You can generate audio with high quality on fine-tuned versions of Tortoise TTS, which was originally trained on a cluster of NVIDIA 3090's, so it's within reach for any smart person to train a from-scratch model on consumer hardware. Realistically? We have to accept that this tech exists and there will be both positive and negative outcomes from it.
> Making then the illegal would accomplish nothing since it's already out in the wild.
Not true. Making it illegal wouldn't make it nonexistent -- that's true. But making it illegal would provide at least some method of mitigating some of the harm.
That's more than what we have right now.
> We have to accept that this tech exists and there will be both positive and negative outcomes from it.
Of course. But that doesn't mean it's futile to try to reduce the negative outcomes.
> Not true. Making it illegal wouldn't make it nonexistent -- that's true. But making it illegal would provide at least some method of mitigating some of the harm.
It's already illegal to impersonate someone to steal money or scam them, and those laws were on the books before computers existed.
> Of course. But that doesn't mean it's futile to try to reduce the negative outcomes.
You can run something on a consumer GPU and it's every bit as good if you know how to dial it in. By the end of the year you'll be able to download a nicely packaged "voice cloner" from a torrent that runs on a cheap laptop. IMHO any effort on regulation is far better spent informing people rather than trying to put the cat back in the bag.
I don't think so at all. There are all sorts of things you can technically do with ease that are illegal for good reason. Laws against them aren't futile.
But I admit that perhaps I'm being overly optimistic here. I'm just trying very hard to see any way that this stuff can end up not being a complete societal disaster.
> It's already illegal to impersonate someone to steal money or scam them, and those laws were on the books before computers existed.
There are two hurdles a criminal has to get past:
1. decide to break the law
2. figure out how to pull off their scam
It sounds like you're saying that since hurdle #1 already exists, hurdle #2 is irrelevant? No, of course it isn't. That's like saying that gun control can't possible help because it's already illegal to shoot someone.
Adding difficulty to a crime reduces (but does not eliminate) the prevalence of the crime.
