BBC chooses AI over human voiceover artist
Comments
saaaaaam
LeroyRaz
I think the mission of the BBC is mainly to serve the audience rather than artists. Hence they presumably felt using AI would enable better content, e.g. through cost saving, or faster development cycles.
Artist's rights, livelihoods, and incentives should all be protected. This protection should probably come from good regulation of AI, and not us merely asking or expecting corporations or entities like the BBC to conflict with their primary goals (without government or industry regulation forcing them to comply to a clearly articulated standard).
pipes
Given I'm forced to pay for the BBC a fee for a service I don't use. I'd prefer they did it as cheaply as possible, maybe it will stop it getting even more expensive. The BBC's job isn't to create nice jobs.
nxobject
What do you mean by "nice jobs"?
aaron695
[dead]
haltIncomplete
[flagged]
morkalork
Can't help but think their brains have been poisoned by Rupert Murdoch and Conrad Black. See the same in Canada with people crying foul over the CBC being taxpayer funded. As if the state ceding 100% of news media to private, corporate interests would be for the betterment of society.
johnisgood
Well, the answer lies in the answers to these questions: what happens if you do not pay the fee for BBC, a service you do not use? What happens if it is private?
Do not, in the former, you risk getting caged? Whereas if it is a private company, you do not risk your freedom?
I do not like the idea of being thrown into jail for not paying for a service I do not use. I do not use Netflix, and that is fine, it has no dire consequences. What are the consequences of not paying for BBC? Genuinely curious, because I am not sure.
dingnuts
Free countries don't need their own Pravda. For every Murdoch there's a dozen other channels, and anyway, Facebook is worse for radicalization than any Murdoch property.
The State has press releases, and the ability to command attention for speeches simply due to their monopoly on force. That's sufficient; there doesn't need to be a full time propaganda wing for the people to hear the perspective of the state
DrScientist
You are confused about the role of the BBC. It's not there for state propaganda ( though that happens - as with any broadcaster ), it's mission is more parentalistic - ( Yep I've invented a word to cover maternalistic/paternalistic. )
Ask yourself - if the BBC was such a state machine - why do members of the government complain about it's output so much?
It's there to lift the nation culturally, to create a British identity and social cohesion - to inform, educate, and entertain. To be a positive inspirational force.
It's not a single entity, with a single voice - but a sum of it's employees.
> For every Murdoch there's a dozen other channels,
I'm not sure quantity is the best metric here....
Havoc
It’s not that hard to opt out. Don’t even recall what I had to do that’s how fast it was
4rt
I'll bite, who's forcing you to "pay for the BBC a fee for a service" you don't use?
rmellow
GP likely lives in the UK where households are subject to a mandatory TV Licence, which fees are used to fund the BBC.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_...
morbia
There are many things wrong with the TV license system, but I think saying it is 'mandatory' is a little misleading. As the Wikipedia article states, you need a TV license if you want to watch or record live broadcasted material (and iplayer). You can own a TV and not pay for a TV license and use it for Netflix, YouTube, gaming etc legally.
For my entire adult life I've never paid for a TV license, and I have never broken the law and watched live content. Many in my generation have no interest in TV anymore.
detritus
It's worth appreciating that 'live broadcast' also includes media off the main networks, so if you watch a SpaceX livestream on YouTube (etc), technically you should have a TV License to do so.
I do find that infuriating.
0xFF0123
That's not my understanding, unless that spacex livestream is by one of the TV networks.
"A licence is not required to view user generated content, clips and videos on YouTube. This includes live streamed content that is not part of a television broadcast. Or being broadcast at the same time by other means."
belter
At least they most get high quality programs. Pitty the Germans with their expensive obligatory license, all to get a talking Brot 8 hours a night... - https://youtu.be/Rl_Rt0PNxn4
defrost
The hassle of "opting out" might be the force referred to:
The cat detector van can pinpoint a purr at 500 yards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licensing_in_the_Un...
unobatbayar
This is very real. They also give you notice before their surveillance scan.
exodust
Surely this can't be real any more!
Like the wikipedia article says, modern digital signals and flat screens means correlating a set's emissions with a particular licensed broadcast is "difficult"!
I'd say impossible. For a van parked outside to determine you're watching BBC and not something else? Laughably impossible! Unless they peep through your windows?
rjmunro
> watching BBC and not something else
You're not allowed to watch "something else" either - it's a national tax on televisions, not a BBC subscription charge.
Historically the detector vans tuned in to the local oscillator frequency generated by the television's "Heterodyne" tuning circuits. In order to tune to different channels, the TV generated different frequencies and used them to shift the broadcast an intermediate frequency to where they would decode it. If you know the intermediate frequency used by the TV (I believe they all use the same one), and can measure the local oscillator frequency, you know the channel being tuned to. You may well still know the frequency being tuned to with a digital TV, but each frequency now carries a multiplex of several TV or radio channels.
4rt
Your RF knowledge is no-doubt sound, the people saying TV detector vans are impossible have no idea what they're talking about.
But, ultimately the tax isn't on TVs. The tax is applied to people watching broadcast live television and it's used to fund the BBC, ITV, Channel4 and also used to pay OFCOM which regulates all other media.
defrost
> Unless they peep through your windows?
If you search|scroll down the TV Licence article for "In 2013 it was revealed..." these days they can literally match flickering light seen through the window bouncing off the ceiling against currently broadcasting BBC | Channel 5, ITV, etc broadcasts.
See: Optical detectors
exodust
Interesting privacy issue. Personally I'd want to protect my own home's "light emissions" from peeping toms. My home, my light!
It's remarkable anyone thinks it's okay for a licensing authority to adopt this Orwellian creepiness. The slippery slope is technology increasingly reveals more detail from incidental light and audio coming from private households. We should act now in policy-making to protect this information as we do or should do for biometric data.
NikkiA
Freeview receives data on the same 4 core broadcasts* that were used for analog, and in fact, freeview channels remain mux'ed in a way that BBC produced content is isolated to the 2 muxes that correspond to the old BBC1/BBC2 split.
So yes, it's still perfectly easy to find the Intermediate Frequency oscillator for a freeview receiver.
* During the analog/digital crossover period, the DTV signals were, obviously, at an offset from the associated analog UHF channel, since analog and DTV could not physically occupy the same frequency, but the fact remains that the DTV muxes were associated with one of the 4 existing channels (Ch 5 didn't have an associated DTV mux afaik)
edit:
here's a list of the mux allocations, you'll notice that all BBC programming is allocated to the BBCA and BBCB muxes, even though there's more than 4 overall muxes available these days.
NikkiA
Hmm, for some reason HN stripped out the url on that edit
https://www.freeview.co.uk/corporate/platform-management/cha...
thebruce87m
It’s about as real as a lie detector.
SuperNinKenDo
What is the point of a State owned broadcaster if it operates like a private equity firm? How is this in the public interest? I'm surprised this happened so quickly.
nxobject
Because it's been consistently underfunded for years – tentpole current affairs/factual programmes like Newsnight have had shrinking resources for years, and commercially successful franchises like Dr. Who are often majority-funded by other broadcasters (Disney+ in this case.) [1]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2024/mar/27/russell...
M2Ys4U
>I'm surprised this happened so quickly.
That's because of the conservative government, imposing ideological cuts on the BBC. The BBC's budget was cut by 30% between 2010 and 2020 because of freezes to the license fee, withdrawing funding for the World Service and the liability for free licences for over 75s being shifted from the government on to the corporation.
constantcrying
>What is the point of a State owned broadcaster if it operates like a private equity firm?
Who knows? In my country most of the money given to public broadcasters is spent making absurd low quality entertainment and documentaries which YouTubers do easily better while having a millionth of the budget.
For some reason they feel the need to compete with the rest of the industry, when the sole reason they exist is such that they don't have to do that.
fakedang
At least a private equity firm keeps to begging and courting HNW folks. The BBC on the other hand sends threatening letters forcing you to cough up for a TV license, even if you don't use your TV for anything except videogames (in spite of what the gummint says in its rulebook).
rjmunro
It's in the public interest because it saves money which can be used on other things.
SuperNinKenDo
That can be said of anything. At some point you have to actually spend money to make things better, else nothing you do is in the public interest.
ximeng
Sara is an actress with years of experience in musicals including in Lindon’s West End. She recently posted on Twitter that she’d lost an opportunity with the BBC because they have decided to use an AI-generated voice instead.
slimebot80
With AI producers will be able to remove all checkpoints and make mistakes at lightning speed.
unobatbayar
Blinkist has also started using AI narration to scale their content, I couldn't tell the difference...
https://support.blinkist.com/hc/en-us/articles/218022708-Why...
vunderba
Color me unsurprised. The VA business has only gotten more competitive as time has progressed - the majority of VA work is surprisingly just close to the natural sounding voice of the VA themselves. (Rarely is a cartoonish or outlandish voice required).
TTS systems like ElevenLabs, etc. are going to heavily disrupt the industry in the next few years particularly with voice-to-voice mapping, e.g. regular John Doe quickly records the line in an angry voice, "THESE PRETZELS ARE MAKING ME THIRSTY!", then maps the emotion/inflection onto the desired TTS voice model.
VA licensing will also become a thing but plenty of major studios that would require hundreds of voices for video games and other things don't have to license known voices at all, they can just create generate brand new ones and pay zero licensing fees.
pimlottc
Is there any background/context besides one tweeted image?
saaaaaam
Well exactly. In the absence of any context or supporting detail it’s impossible to say what has actually happened here.
bunbun69
spend $5K/month on some voiceover artist or a few cents on AI that barely makes mistakes and can be programmed (with hints) to correct their speech?
vouaobrasil
How I wish people had this attitude towards programmers: spend $15K per month on an AI programmer or have a better society without AI...
hombre_fatal
Look around, though. We do have this attitude towards programmers.
The biggest (e.g. Copilot) and most hyped (e.g. Devin) tools in the AI space are tools for developing software such that Stack Overflow is dead and the skill floor is rising on being an employable software developer.
Intralexical
Y'all misread the comment. It seems like the last six words in it describe an incomprehensible concept or something…
raincole
If AI could actually do what they are doing, programmers would be laid off at a rate never seen before.
I mean never seen before in human history.
bleepblop
Man, do I have some bad news for you.
These guys have been at it for a few years now: https://www.replicastudios.com/
And the list is growing quickly.
acchow
How can we have a society without AI? How could this be implemented?
constantcrying
It is very clear that being a voice artist as a career is soon dead. Current AI is almost good enough, all you need is a single company doing good tooling around it (e.g. telling the model what parts to emphasize and what tone to use) and you replaced an expensive human with an extremely cheap AI.
ratg13
Didn’t BBC just learn this lesson with their Dr. Who advertising?
matt3210
Hard to beat free
I’ve seen this tweet doing the rounds but it seems strange. The way the text in the email is presented is odd. Why is there a cursor midway through a sentence. Why is it forwarded text? Why is there no sender information? Why is the subject line the voice actor’s name?
It looks to me like an agent has forwarded something from a third party production company working for the BBC.
There are at least five different possibilities here:
1. The production company is working on spec or to develop a proof of concept piece of content that is not going to be broadcast so they are using AI voice to flesh out that proof of concept.
2. A production assistant sending this weirdly formatted email has got the wrong end of the stick and sent an email referencing AI voice having misunderstood something.
3. The BBC is actually using AI voice. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it is for broadcast or public facing use.
4. The BBC is using AI voice for broadcast/public facing use and Equity (the performers’ union) will call out its members to strike.
5. The email is fake.
With no further context it’s impossible to say which of these is most likely. But in the absence of any further detail - particularly context from the author of the tweet or sender info - even partially obfuscated - there’s enough doubt to need that further context before people start screaming and wailing about AI destroying jobs.
If this isn’t happening now, it will happen in six months. And if it doesn’t happen in six months it will happen at some point in the near future.
Voice actors, session musicians, anyone providing a “commodity performance” need to prepare themselves for a world where the majority of work evaporates or changes and only remarkable performances stand out and have value beyond what can be delivered by AI.