- A Reddit user created an AI-generated voice of David Attenborough, the famed English broadcaster and naturalist.
- A software developer then used the model to create a YouTube channel that auto-uploads subreddit posts into clips read by the fake voice.
- You can listen to Attenborough reading various posts on misguided relationship advice, as well as other topics, on the YouTube Channel ReddiTube.
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A Reddit user created a fake voice of iconic English broadcaster David Attenborough that is now being used to read posts published on the site’s r/Relationships and r/AskReddit subreddits.
Per a report from Motherboard, a Reddit user named “youmebangbang” created the machine learning voice model likely by taking hours of voice recordings from Attenborough’s myriad wildlife program narrations and then using the data to teach the model how to sound like him.
A software developer and Reddit user named Garett MacGowan then made changes to the model and deployed another algorithm to scrape Reddit for posts to put through the model and upload the clips onto a YouTube channel, ReddiTube.
You can listen to Attenborough’s iconic voice read Reddit posts on misguided relationship advice as well as other topics. One of the clips starts off with “I (30F) caught my husband (31M) in an affair and I don’t know how to move on,” read in Attenborough’s distinctive baritone.
The project may be amusing for those familiar with Attenborough's various beloved narrations, but automatically-generated, text-to-speech content has long created a problem on YouTube, as Motherboard notes. Political groups have used the process to amplify their ideologies on the platform, contributing to a proliferation of fake news on YouTube.
MacGowan told the outlet that he's aware this kind of technology "can be used in both positive and negative ways," but thinks it best to make the public aware of its existence.
"It will not be very long until these fakes are indistinguishable to an unaided person," MacGowan told Motherboard.