More information: https://medium.com/descript/introducing-descript-podcast-stu...

> Seems from right out of the gate, they are breaking their own ethical guidelines as a cheap promotional tactic. If they care that little about themselves and a former president of the United States, what do they care about your likeness.

We state in our blogpost that we make an exception for Obama/Trump in order to raise public awareness. Both of them are regularly used in Machine Learning benchmarks (for example [0] [1]). Note that we don't allow users to generate from Trump/Obama's voice.

Once again, we care a lot about these issues and that's why we only allow users to copy their own voice.

[0] http://www.washington.edu/news/2017/07/11/lip-syncing-obama-... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohmajJTcpNk

These issues are challenging and suggestions about how you think the technology should be introduced/regulated are very welcome.

It's still hypocritical and insulting to the reader's intelligence.

You could make Obama say anything. He could say something humourous, something that he's never said before. You would have just as impressive of a demo if you had Obama say "I'm a little teapot short and stout..." and then used overlay text to promote yourself. You chose instead to make a video where he promotes your startup.

That is both hypocritical and immoral and not only using his personal likeness but, also the seat of the Presidency of the United States.

This fast and loose way that Lyrebird treats their technology only makes me think that they don't really think about the massive negative potential of the technology and just want to get scale / profitability as fast as possible.

This is a good point, it's true that we don't mention it explicitly in our ethics statement. But it is in our evaluation agreement:

> (v) create a false identity or otherwise impersonate a third party on or through the Services;

section 3.A: https://lyrebird.ai/terms/evaluation

Unfortunately this is something that we can not enforce automatically.

We ensure that people copy their own voice by asking them to read predefined sentences (we use speech recognition to check that the sentence is indeed corresponding to the text).

Thank you for raising those concerns. We take those very seriously. You can read more about our ethical stance in this article: https://lyrebird.ai/ethics/

To recap:

- we want to start by raising public awareness about the technology and we did demos with the voices of Trump/Obama for that,

- your digital voice is yours, people can not use it without your authorization.

This is going to be very tricky! No clear answer to that, we are putting a lot of effort on research but our progress is quite difficult to predict.

You will be able to create a digital voice that sounds like you and generate any sentence from it.

And thanks, we are going to update the instructions to make them more clear.

Thanks. Such an explanation on the website would be helpful. BTW, the Trump/Obama tweets do not add value. Using political objects to define a technical service, is a mismatch under the context. It also doesn't help in explaining what this service provides (people wouldn't expect that Trump and Obama have given you consent to use their voice). Just an opinion.

Yes, it's actually quite interesting! It's a recurrent observation that we have inside the team with our own voices. Friends of the person usually better appreciate the quality of his/her digital voice. You can also observe these reactions to some extent on twitter: https://twitter.com/LyrebirdAi

Other interesting observation are the sentences that people generate for the first time with their digital voice...

Sure, good question!

There will be two scenarii:

- you want to use the voice of someone that has a Lyrebird account: he or she has to give you their authorization.

- you want to use the voice of someone who does not have an account. We have specific contracts for that. Say you want to copy the voice of Morgan Freeman, the contract will be between him/her, you and Lyrebird. We will also probably explore alternative ways for that.

Did you get authorization to use the voices of public figures in your promotional materials? If not, how can users be sure that you will not arbitrary use their voice profile for promotional materials or otherwise?

Unfortunately for certain voices our model has difficulties to generate the very beginning of the sentence. We hope to fix this problem soon.

Some other people shared their voices on twitter if you want to compare: https://twitter.com/LyrebirdAi

The first version will only be an online API. I agree with you that we should eventually think about licensing it for offline/embedded redistribution.