AI voice detection and recognition are becoming more crucial

This Twitter thread shows how far along artificial voices have come. For those who are familiar with Steve Jobs’ voice, the voice in these recordings is almost indistinguishable from the original. When you listen to them, you can be forgiven to think that it’s actually Steve Jobs saying these words, never mind that he’s been gone for more than a decade.

The only catch is that because the training set must have been taken from the many recordings of his Apple keynote speeches and product announcements, they all sound like he’s reading from a script or making announcements. None of the sentences sound natural the way someone would speak if they were having a regular conversation or answering questions but that’s not too difficult to overcome. The tools to make adjustments to AI generated voices to sound more natural already exists.

Here’s another example. The YouTube channel Star Wars Comics have started to experiment with using generated voices to narrate some storyline’s from the Star Wars comic books to keep their audience up to date with what’s happening in the comics. In one video, they used James Earl Jones’ Darth Vader voice to say the lines in the pages of the comic book. Their latest video voiced a conversation between Emperor Palpatine and Darth Vader from another issue in the recent Darth Vader comic book series, both using the generated voices of their real actors.

As many in the comments noted, while their voices sound indistinguishable from the original, the speech patterns make it obvious that these were generated. That’s because the voices weren’t adjusted to the way a person would speak in a proper conversation given in the situation. Again, these are relatively trivial changes that one could make using their AI voice generators.

While these may be little more than fun projects for the curious minds, the day when someone can create entirely fabricated recordings to manipulate the public is already here. You can already create fake videos of a person saying things that they never actually said, now the voices sound even closer to the original.

When deepfake videos started popping up in 2020, people knew that this was going to be a significant problem. People are already easily fooled by fabricated articles or stories and this is just going to make it far more challenging for people to fact check and verify the validity of recordings.

All I can say for that is, brace for impact.

zerohski:

Ngl this was way funnier in my head

(If you like my work consider reblogging ty <3)

Today I learned of the existence of the word bumbershoot

British People Do Not Actually Call Umbrellas Bumbershoots

Been saying for a while that ASEAN is a largely irrelevant organization of geographically adjacent nations that share very little common interest and barely a common goal. 

Anwar is probably the first regional leader to implicitly admit its irrelevance while Indonesia has always been a champion of ASEAN’s appearance of a united front made up of human rights violators and corrupt governments who are careful not to offend each other out of fear that their own dirty laundry become exposed and openly addressed.

As long as this sorry excuse of an organization can’t even resolve a conflict within its own member state decisively, it will never be the substantial economic and political union it has always wished or pretended to be.

It’s always upsetting seeing a StarTrek show ending whether by its own accord or by executive order but when it’s ordered, it doesn’t get to conclude on its own terms no matter how much time they give it. 

Discovery hasn’t been the best among all Treks and even breaks the mold of what a Trek show is especially given how frequently it’s centered and dependent on Michael Burnham saving the day. What it does have though, are some of the boldest story tellings in the franchise and really going to new places and opening up far more possibilities. 

Would have loved to see it go six or seven seasons with Burnham as captain in a rebuild of the Federation in the 32nd century and all the storylines and conflicts that would have gone along with it. Maybe we’ll still get to see it in season 5 but just one season of that, and only ten episodes, it’s going to come in very compact and rushed.

I have two posts on Netflix Indonesia’s price drop, one written by myself, the other by ChatGPT. It was a fun exercise in seeing how different the pieces would turn out. ChatGPT took a very general analysis view on the subject matter while I dug deeper on the reasons and give more business and competitive context to the readers. Let me know what you think of both.

Here’s why a 15-inch MacBook Air would be a good addition to the Mac lineup

With all this talk of a 15″ MacBook Air I have one small concern that the screen resolution might stay the same as for the 13.6″ version at 2560×1664 or thereabouts. It doesn’t make a lot of sense but it’s not like they haven’t done it before.

It’s a long time ago and an entirely different executive team, but when Apple introduced the 14″ iBook G4 they kept the screen resolution at 1024×768, the same as the 12″ iBook and the 12″ PowerBook G4. Those who bought the 14″ iBook didn’t get any more work space than those who bought the 12″ version.

The larger iBook had a bigger screen size, bigger hard drive, a SuperDrive that burns DVDs and CDs instead of a Combo Drive that can read DVDs but only burns CDs, and 450 grams heavier, and a higher price.

Apple didn’t want to cannibalize the slightly more expensive 12″ PowerBook G4 which had almost identical specs and they certainly didn’t want the iBook to encroach on the Pro Mac space, so they couldn’t give the 14″ iBook a higher screen resolution.

There’s little chance that someone would pick the 13″ M2 MacBook Pro if Apple makes a 15″ Air available, because frankly, why would you? Even the 13″ M2 MacBook Air is a slightly better machine overall and with a slightly lower price.

Will a 15″ Air pose a threat to the 14″ Pro? Not in the slightest. The 14″ and 16″ Pro machines carry the much more powerful M2 Pro or Max chips and they also have much higher resolution screens with the XDR display. They also have more connectivity or ports. The Air lineup will not have those.

Meta follows Twitter in charging for the coveted blue internet checkmark

Weeks after someone saw code inside the Instagram app referring to paid verification, Meta today formally announced their latest copycat feature, the paid blue checkmark.

Like pretty much every major product that Meta offers, the blue checkmark originally came from somewhere else, in this case, Twitter. Now that Twitter is charging for it, Meta can’t resist doing the same but they added their own twist.

Just like Twitter’s version, you’ll get the all important blue badge, increased visibility and reach, and exclusive features, but you’ll also get personal customer support, something that Twitter can’t offer because Elon fired everyone already.

Meta’s checkmarks are more expensive than Twitter’s. Even more expensive than paying for Netflix, Disney+, or HBO GO. One month of Meta Verification costs the same as Disney+ Hotstar for one entire year. Think about that.

Twitter charges US$11 per month from mobile apps and $8 from the web, while Meta charges $15 from mobile apps and $11 from the web.

Meta’s paid checkmarks are available only in Australia and New Zealand for now, though, so they make you crave for it with the oh so good FOMO and envy brewing up inside of you.

But my favorite one, though, is Tumblr. For a one time payment of $8 you get not one but two badges all at once and if that’s not enough, you can buy and display up to 12 pairs of badges! They now come in all rainbow colors too, not just blue, so it’s so much fancier and cooler because you can pick and choose which colors you want. You pay once and you keep it forever. Or until you delete your account. Love those guys.

Just spent half the day helping my kid format her school paper on Word. I haven’t touched that software probably in more than a decade. Always worked on alternative apps like Pages, Notes, TextEdit, Docs, Bear, iA Writer, etc.

Talk about being overwhelmed. Had to hunt and peck each button and feature and search online for tips on how to do certain things.

Never got my parents to help me with any of those as a kid because they didn’t grow up or worked with computers and to this day they still don’t know how to operate one beyond using browsers and WhatsApp. Had to figure things out myself and it was practically troubleshooting which got me into tech support before journalism kicked in.

As someone who lived through his entire life surrounded by tech products and devices and worked as tech support for a significant period, this was kind of embarrassing but also challenging and humbling. It took much longer to complete than it ought to but got it done eventually.

Getting the brain to reconnect neurons that didn’t need to connect for a long time was quite an exercise. Pretty exciting, actually, but also exhausting.

Blogs vs Microblogs

I’ve shared my thoughts about microblogs vs proper blogs a few times over the years but even after more than 20 years of blogging and more than 15 years of microblogging I still haven’t landed on a definitive position.

It’s evident that the era of Twitter has rendered blogs almost exclusively for more niche segments. The ability of microblogs to deliver almost instant readership and feedback to a piece of writing gives their authors relentless dopamine shots that keeps them around for much longer periods.

Blogs allow for more verbose and nuanced posts but when microblogs allow for that to happen as well, that makes you question the necessity of blogs other than the more obvious ones such as easier indexing, categorization, search, and discovery.

I guess it’s a matter of choosing between delivering more complete thoughts on a faster conversational platform and putting them down on your own space that you can have better control over.

Sometimes I wonder what would happen had something like Pownce had prevailed instead but that would require an alternate world in which the public chose Gowalla over Foursquare. Simplicity seems more likely to win over more complete or elaborate executions in our world after all.