If voice cloning violates right of publicity when sound recordings are fed into a model directly, does hiring a voice actor to imitate a voice and then feeding the imitated voice into a model violates right of publicity as well?
If it’s a distinctive voice and you’re doing it for commercial reasons, you will get sued and, depending on how distinct the voice is, lose. Look up Tom Waits v. Frito-Lay. He won $2.6 million from them in 1992. Granted, that was a radio commercial, but that would be the main precedent. http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/communications/waits.html
The Bitter Lesson talks about speech recognition instead of synthesis, but I would guess that it's a similar dynamic:
In speech recognition, there was an early competition, sponsored by DARPA, in the 1970s. Entrants included a host of special methods that took advantage of human knowledge—knowledge of words, of phonemes, of the human vocal tract, etc. On the other side were newer methods that were more statistical in nature and did much more computation, based on hidden Markov models (HMMs). Again, the statistical methods won out over the human-knowledge-based methods. This led to a major change in all of natural language processing, gradually over decades, where statistics and computation came to dominate the field. The recent rise of deep learning in speech recognition is the most recent step in this consistent direction. Deep learning methods rely even less on human knowledge, and use even more computation, together with learning on huge training sets, to produce dramatically better speech recognition systems. As in the games, researchers always tried to make systems that worked the way the researchers thought their own minds worked—they tried to put that knowledge in their systems—but it proved ultimately counterproductive, and a colossal waste of researcher’s time, when, through Moore’s law, massive computation became available and a means was found to put it to good use.
Copyright around the Pantone system is historically a pretty murky area. According to Pantone themselves,
"published materials of Pantone, are protected by copyright laws and include, for example, graphic presentations, color references, Pantone Colors, Pantone Names, numbers, formulas, and software". (Clause 4, Pantone EULA)
Aaron Perzanowski researches intellectual and personal property law at the University of Michigan Law School. He says that Pantone has no underlying intellectual property rights when it comes to either individual colors, or the color libraries of which they are a part. “There’s no copyright protection available for individual colors, and the limited trademark rights for specific colors don’t apply here either,” Perzanowski says.
Practically, a US District Court has ruled that, while Pantone cannot copyright a color, they can copyright the "Pantone Color System" that specifically exists to provide print-accurate colors.
There’s a documentary out there about this whole subject and it does indeed come down to exactly this.
Companies/design firms may not like the price that Pantone charges but they also say it’s absolutely worth it to know what color you will get in print.
How the upcoming AI legislations around the world, like voice cloning prevention and disclosure requeriment of techincal details of models, will affect open source or selfhosted models?
You mean my second point does? Would you agree with, do you see my first point being independent of the process and act of such a creation?
The same applies to the creation or training process. If they trained with voice samples or have a collection of voice samples for matching, then those could serve as evidence or indications.
Like I said initially, how do we legally define "cloning"? I don't think it's possible to write a law that prevents it without also creating vastly more unintended consequences (and problems).
Let's take a step back for a moment to think about a more fundamental question: Do people even have the right to NOT have their voice cloned? To me, that is impersonation; which is perfectly legal (in the US). As long as you don't make claims that it's the actual person. That is, if you impersonate someone, you can't claim it's actually that person. Because that would be fraud.
In the US—as far as I know—it's perfectly legal to clone someone's voice and use it however TF you want. What you can't do is claim that it's actually that person because that would be akin to a false endorsement.
Realistically—from what I know about human voices—this is probably fine. Voice clones aren't that good. The most effective method is to clone a voice and use it in a voice changer, using a voice actor that can mimick the original person's accent and inflection. But even that has flaws that a trained ear will pick up.
Ethically speaking, there's really nothing wrong with cloning a voice. Because—from an ethics standpoint—it is N/A: There's no impact. It's meaningless; just a different way of speaking or singing.
It feels like it might be bad to sing a song using something like Taylor Swift's voice but in reality it'll have no impact on her or her music-related business.
Why are most machine learning models (not frameworks) written in Python? Even through almost any programming language can be used for machine learning?
Strictly speaking, math gets proven from scratch by every math student. Software is slightly different, since most of it never gets a formal proof at all.
Sure, but it works, and that's what we build upon. And then people build upon that. If we really wanted, we could say simple loop is building upon the work that humans did when we simply invented/discovered counting.
If GPT (decoder-only transformer) models are text predictors, then why keyboard apps on PCs/phones don't have GPTs as text predictor options? They can be more accurate than the widely used N-gram models.
Are there any programs that implement iOS 26 icon styles (Light, Dark, Clear and Tinted) on other platforms (preferrably Windows and Linux, but can be a mobile platform too) already?
I would say: even if it's just a free video, C.Y.A. (wear some pants). At a minimum.
In other words, distance yourself from anything that ties to any sort of intellectual property. Don't use their names in a title/description, don't use their pixels (especially not in a thumbnail), use original designs and even add your own ideas or changes/improvements etc. Define, generalize, and abstract.
Keep any hint of it off of the internet until it's finished and released.
No. Not without paying a hefty license upgrade fee (Retail copy) or doing something incredibly shady. (Piracy tools which I won't specifically name but I'm sure you can find and likely know the dangers of obtaining for some users.)