AI is coming for us all, Taking notes

Yesterday I got an email regarding AI generated deep fakes on the internet and how easy it is to create one. To make the point the email included basic instructions how to make one. The first one I did was of my buddy Marty. I first uploaded a video off his YouTube channel to a site that is able to clone a persons voice. After listening to the audio I was now able to get Marty to say anything in his own voice, sounding remarkably accurate. I had him speak a funny paragraph and then saved that audio file.

Next I went to another site, Hedra.com where I uploaded a picture of Marty and then fed it the audio file. AI was then able to animate the still picture and have Marty speaking the lines I created. The end product was surprisingly good considering it took all of 5 minutes to create.

I then decided to use myself as a test dummy. I fed AI about a one minute clip out of one of my live streams to clone my voice. I paired it with an AI generated image of myself that I made early in the year. Again the results were pretty nuts. The voice totally sounds likes me and even though it was applied to a cartoonish version of myself it looked pretty good.

Is the technology cool? Absolutely. Do we have a very near term future where being able to discern from real and fake is going to be next to impossible? Yes. It is going to get to the point that unless a person is sitting in front of you, there is no guarantee what you are seeing and/or hearing is legit.

Last night was the annual community HOA meeting. I thought because on the agenda was a vote about increasing our HOA fees there would be a decent amount of people in attendance. Instead we only had 14 people and that only represented maybe a third of the homes in our very small neighborhood. The meeting took about an hour and the fee increase was passed without much fuss. As the HOA secretary I was taking a few notes along the way so I could send out a recap to everyone after the fact. Did I EVER think I would be an HOA board member in my life, absolutely not. This is a consistent theme in recent years, finding myself in situations that I never would have anticipated or predicted ahead of time.