525
Spotify is going to clone podcasters’ voices — and translate them to other languages
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
525 points (96.3% liked)
Technology
59232 readers
3198 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Assuming that nothing nefarious happens, I can still see this being a problem if the translations aren't top quality. Imagine that speakers of another language are offended or you're embarrassed in front of them because something you said was incorrectly translated; then it's rendered in your voice so it seems you said it.
Handle it just like horror podcasts usually do. Disclaimers before and after the podcast. Disclaimers in the podcast description. Notices in the ToS.
"This podcast has been translated into *your language* with the help of OpenAI. This is an automated service. As such, it may contain transcription and translation errors which may result in dialogue not intended by the original podcaster. Please report errors to *support link here*."
Be more concerned about this being like what Hollywood just pulled, where Spotify includes a usage clause that gives them the rights to the podcaster's voice in perpetuity.
And, it doesn't even need to be wrong. Sometimes very innocent things have a specific meaning or connotation in certain languages. Be it innuendos or euphemisms.
Using 3/5 in connection with Black people would mean basically nothing in Germany, but would perk up ears in the USA. On the other hand 18 and 88 is not that well known in the USA as anything particular, but in Germany you can't have it easily on your car plate, especially if you're from Hamburg (HH).
So you could quite correctly translate things, but they still get a different connotation depending on culture and language.
Perhaps that could be resolved by a disclaimer. Something like, "The following lyrics were generated by an AI and thus may be mistranslated." It wouldn't be perfect, but it might help.