My fellow Americans, this is former president
Barack Obama,
and this is your favorite president, Donald
Trump.
I know this is highly unusual, but the creator
of the Vocal Synthesis YouTube channel has
asked us to put aside our political differences
for a moment, so that we can relay to you
a very important message.
Over the past few months, the creator of the
channel has trained dozens of speech synthesis
models based on the speech patterns of various
celebrities or other prominent figures, and
has used these models to generate more than
one hundred videos for this channel.
These videos typically feature a synthetic
celebrity voice narrating some short text
or a speech.
Often, the particular text was selected in
order to provide a funny or entertaining contrast
with the celebrity's real-life persona.
For example, some of my favorites are George
W. Bush performing a spoken-word version of
"In Da Club" by 50 Cent, or Franklin Roosevelt's
powerful rendition of the Navy Seals Copypasta.
The channel was created by an individual hobbyist
with a huge amount of free time on his hands,
as well as an interest in machine learning
and artificial intelligence technologies.
He would like to emphasize that all of the
videos on this channel were intended as entertainment,
and there was no malicious purpose for any
of them.
Every video, including this one, is clearly
labeled as speech synthesis in both the title
and description.
Which brings us to the reason why we're delivering
this message.
Over the past two days, several videos were
posted to the channel featuring a synthetic
Jay-Z rapping various texts, including the
Navy Seals Copypasta, the Book of Genesis,
the song "We Didn't Start the Fire" by Billy
Joel, and the "To Be Or Not To Be" soliloquy
from Hamlet.
Unfortunately, for the first time since the
channel began, YouTube took down two of these
videos yesterday as a result of a copyright
strike.
The strike was requested by Roc Nation LLC,
with the stated reason being that it, quote,
"unlawfully uses an AI to impersonate our
client's voice."
Obviously, Donald and I are both disappointed
that Jay-Z and Roc Nation have decided to
bully a small YouTuber in this way.
It's also disappointing that YouTube would
choose once again to stifle creativity by
reflexively siding with powerful companies
over small content creators.
Specifically, it's a little ironic that YouTube
would accept "AI impersonation" as a reason
for a copyright strike, when Google itself
has successfully argued in the case of "Authors
Guild v. Google" that machine learning models
trained on copyrighted material should be
protected under fair use.
We've consulted several other former presidents,
and they all agree with us as well:
This is Ronald Reagan speaking.
I think YouTube and Roc Nation should be ashamed
of themselves.
The United States should be a country where
people have the freedom to innovate and experiment
with new technologies, rather than being immediately
shut down by the established powers.
Hello YouTube, I'm former president John F.
Kennedy.
I believe that YouTube's policies are now
rigged in favor of large corporations with
powerful legal teams, and that smaller creators
are gradually being forced to leave the platform.
Since YouTube is essentially a monopoly, this
is a very dangerous development.
And last but not least, this is Franklin Delano
Roosevelt speaking.
In my opinion, Fuck YouTube and Fuck Roc Nation.
Anyway, although we all hope that YouTube
reverses its decision, it seems unlikely,
so there is now a real possibility that this
channel will soon be taken down or heavily
restricted in the near future.
As a backup plan, the creator of the channel
has just made the subreddit /r/VocalSynthesis.
If you've been enjoying the channel so far,
we'd strongly encourage you to join.
If the channel is shut down in the future,
that subreddit will be the best place to find
further updates, as well as archived versions
of any videos that are removed from YouTube.
In the meantime, the creator intends to continue
training new voices and posting new videos
to this channel, for as long as he can.
We hope you enjoy them.
Thank you for listening, and God Bless America.
