A good weekend to you. I noticed a story this week that’s both an interesting idea to vivify history and a warning for the future.
Charles-Henry Groult and Benoît Hopquin of Le Monde asked the French Acoustics Institute (Ircam) to reconstruct a famed speech Charles de Gaulle gave from exile on June 18, 1940, to rally his country under Nazi occupation.
Recording technology was cumbersome, and De Gaulle was relatively unknown. His speech wasn’t recorded.
Many French people, including my wife’s aunts and uncles in Normandy, remember hearing the 49-year-old general tell them, “Whatever happens, the flame of French resistance must not be extinguished.”
The reporters uncovered a transcript of the speech made by Swiss military intelligence. Then technical wizards at Ircam took subsequent recordings of de Gaulle’s voice and got actor François Morel to deliver the speech in the general’s cadences.
Voila! Artificial intelligence then recreated the speech as it may have been heard.
It’s an exciting way to bring history alive. But it’s also hard not to think of troubling implications.
With AI audio technology, you could also create recordings that sound like the voice of Charles de Gaulle – or Indira Gandhi, John F. Kennedy, or Malcolm X – to say things they never did. Like a recipe for avocado toast or a Super Bowl beer ad.
You could also make familiar voices of today’s public figures say outrageous things they haven’t. But put them on social media sites, and some people would choose to believe they’re true.
There are ways in which voice recreation can dazzle and inform us, I’m sure. But experience tells us new technologies are often first used in nefarious ways. Stay tuned.
This week, we were honored to speak with Ukrainian photojournalist Evgeny Maloleta about the important and utterly real portraits he has captured.
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