Father, Hacker (Information Security Professional), Open Source Software Developer, Inventor, and 3D printing enthusiast
There’s going to be some hilarious memes/videos when these get deployed:
Like I said initially, how do we legally define “cloning”? I don’t think it’s possible to write a law that prevents it without also creating vastly more unintended consequences (and problems).
Let’s take a step back for a moment to think about a more fundamental question: Do people even have the right to NOT have their voice cloned? To me, that is impersonation; which is perfectly legal (in the US). As long as you don’t make claims that it’s the actual person. That is, if you impersonate someone, you can’t claim it’s actually that person. Because that would be fraud.
In the US—as far as I know—it’s perfectly legal to clone someone’s voice and use it however TF you want. What you can’t do is claim that it’s actually that person because that would be akin to a false endorsement.
Realistically—from what I know about human voices—this is probably fine. Voice clones aren’t that good. The most effective method is to clone a voice and use it in a voice changer, using a voice actor that can mimick the original person’s accent and inflection. But even that has flaws that a trained ear will pick up.
Ethically speaking, there’s really nothing wrong with cloning a voice. Because—from an ethics standpoint—it is N/A: There’s no impact. It’s meaningless; just a different way of speaking or singing.
It feels like it might be bad to sing a song using something like Taylor Swift’s voice but in reality it’ll have no impact on her or her music-related business.
wouldn’t we expect countries with strong social programs like Norway to have much higher birth rates? I suppose those social programs would tend to correlate with birth control
I was unfamiliar with Norway’s program so I looked it up…
49 weeks of maternity leave? FUCK YEAH!
$160/month (USD equivalent) for kids under 6? Not nearly enough! That is of negligibe impact and doesn’t come close to offsetting the costs of raising a child.
My two takeaways from this, learning about Norway’s programs:
Also, “when everyone gets a subsidy, no one gets a subsidy” (my own saying). It seems inevitable that daycare costs would increase by the subsidy amount in order to capture it as profit. Basically, long-term subsidies like that ultimately fail because of basic economics. They can work fine in the short term, though.
I still stand by what I said: Having kids makes you less economically stable and until we fix that, fertility rates will continue to decline.
Seems like the biggest thing that needs to be fixed though is housing costs.
Pollution would make sense if people were trying to have kids but couldn’t. But they’re not trying to have kids at all!
The more likely explanation—related to tech—is that we don’t need kids anymore. For 99% of human history, children were necessary and not having kids was basically impossible (horny kids and no birth control). Kids were how humans kept alive/stable as well as expanded their power and influence! It’s also how they got cared for in old age (though that’s a much lesser concern because I seriously doubt humans of the past thought that hard about such things when living to 40 was considered amazing).
Now we have birth control and—in Western societies—stability/safety is much more likely if you don’t have kids. We’ve basically flipped the script on our evolution.
You want people to have kids? Flip the script back! Make anyone under 30 without kids pay a massive tax that pays for the kids of people who have them! Basically, make everyone who didn’t have kids pay child support.
Make having kids the best damned economic decision anyone can make with diminishing returns after two (kids).
You make AI voice generation sound like it’s a one-step process, “clone voice X.” While you can do that, here’s where it’s heading in reality:
“Generate a voice that’s sounds like a male version of Scarlett Johansson”.
“That sounds good, but I want it to sound smoother.”
“Ooh that’s close! Make it slightly higher pitch.”
In a process like that, do you think Scarlett Johansson would have legal standing to sue?
What if you started with cloning your own voice but after many tweaks the end result ends up sounding similar to Taylor Swift? Does she have standing?
In court, you’d have expert witnesses saying they don’t sound the same. “They don’t even have the same inflection or accent!” You’d have voice analysis experts saying their voice patterns don’t match. Not even a little bit.
But about half the jury would be like, “yeah, that does sound similar.” And you could convict a completely innocent person.
The population of North Korea is approximately 26.5 million while South Korea is around 51.7 million. North Korea has already overtaken the South in total number of births per year (~340,000 VS ~250,000 in the South).
If the current trend continues (which I doubt it will), that means North Korea’s population will overtake South Korea some time around 2090-2100.
Instead, what’s going to happen is South Korea will have a regime collapse and then they’re going to have a “come to Korea” moment (like a “come to Jesus” moment, but Korean-themed and much more literal). There’s all sorts of things they can do to improve their situation practically overnight (from a geopolitical perspective) but they’ve so far refused to do so (for racist reasons).
Either they’re going to fortify their population with foreign stock or they’re going to demonstrate “the superiority of the Korean race” by going extinct.
SK is not going to be a good example because, in addition to the usual reasons for a declining birth rate, they also have some pretty extreme racism, sexism, and a work culture that even worse than Japan in many ways. Why would you want to have kids in South Korea‽
Let’s say you do have a wife and kids… Good luck getting home to see them on time on the regular!
What’s incredible is that the government’s stance on this situation is that it is preserving their culture. What they really mean is that they’re keeping out foreigners and not cross-breeding with the riffraff (which is… The rest of the world).
They will “preserve” themselves right into extinction.
I work for a huge bank and we tested voice recognition technology: Even under the best circumstances (high quality microphone with no ambient noise in a sound booth), it was far, far too easy to copy someone else’s voice by simply playing back a sliced up recording a la Sneakers (the movie). We ruled it out as an option over a decade ago.
The problem was fundamental and had nothing to do with the quality of the technology. If your bank is using your voice as a unique identifier they had better be using something else in addition to it! Because it’s super insecure.
From the perspective of human perception, people’s voices are only unique enough to about one in a few thousand. There’s a few outliers with much more unique voices but believe it or not, there’s a lot of people walking around on this earth that sound just like Morgan Freeman, James Earl Jones, and other voices people think are super unique.
I view an anti-cloning law as too risky: It sounds exactly like the type of thing that would prevent Grandma from cloning her own voice before going down for surgery because it just so happens to sound a lot like a famous person.
How do you implement voice cloning prevention? Human voices aren’t that unique. Also, AI voice cloning isn’t perfect. So… At what threshold is a voice considered, “cloned” from a legal perspective?
I mean, people couldn’t tell the difference between Scarlet Johansson and OpenAI’s “Sky” voice which was not cloned.
Before any of that can happen we need some non-ambiguous definitions of what “AI” is.
Mrs Brisbee is pleased.
I doubt that. New services that host the open models are cropping up all the time. They’re like VPS hosting providers (in fact, existing VPS hosts will soon break out into that space too).
It’s not like Big AI has some huge advantage over the open source models. In fact, for images they’re a little bit behind!
The FOSS coding models are getting pretty fantastic and they get better all the time. It seems like once a month a new, free model comes out that eclipses the previous generation once a month.
The mistakes it makes depends on the model and the language. GPT5 models can make horrific mistakes though where it randomly removes huge swaths of code for no reason. Every time it happens I’m like, “what the actual fuck?” Undoing the last change and trying usually fixes it though 🤷
They all make horrific security mistakes quite often. Though, that’s probably because they’re trained on human code that is *also" chock full of security mistakes (former security consultant, so I’m super biased on that front haha).
Schrodinger’s AI: It is both useless shit that can only generate “slop” while at the same time being so effective, it is the reason behind 50,000 layoffs/going to take everyone’s jobs.
You want to see someone using say, VS Code to write something using say, Claude Code?
There’s probably a thousand videos of that.
More interesting: I watched someone who was super cheap trying to use multiple AIs to code a project because he kept running out of free credits. Every now and again he’d switch accounts and use up those free credits.
That was an amazing dance, let me tell ya! Glorious!
I asked him which one he’d pay for if he had unlimited money and he said Claude Code. He has the $20/month plan but only uses it in special situations because he’ll run out of credits too fast. $20 really doesn’t get you much with Anthropic 🤷
That inspired me to try out all the code assist AIs and their respective plugins/CLI tools. He’s right: Claude Code was the best by a HUGE margin.
Gemini 3.0 is supposed to be nearly as good but I haven’t tried it yet so I dunno.
Now that I’ve said all that: I am severely disappointed in this article because it doesn’t say which AI models were used. In fact, the study authors don’t even know what AI models were used. So it’s 430 pull requests of random origin, made at some point in 2025.
For all we know, half of those could’ve been made with the Copilot gpt5-mini that everyone gets for free when they install the Copilot extension in VS Code.
Good games are orthogonal to AI usage. It’s possible to have a great game that was written with AI using AI-generated assets. Just as much as it’s possible to have a shitty one.
If AI makes creating games easier, we’re likely to see 1000 shitty games for every good one. But at the same time we’re also likely to see successful games made by people who had great ideas but never had the capital or skills to bring them to life before.
I can’t predict the future of AI but it’s easy to imagine a state where everyone has the power to make a game for basically no cost. Good or bad, that’s where we’re heading.
If making great games doesn’t require a shitton of capital, the ones who are most likely to suffer are the rich AAA game studios. Basically, the capitalists. Because when capital isn’t necessary to get something done anymore, capital becomes less useful.
Effort builds skill but it does not build quality. You could put in a ton of effort and still fail or just make something terrible. What breeds success is iteration (and luck). Because AI makes iteration faster and easier, it’s likely we’re going to see a lot of great things created using it.
FYI: Stuff like this is for automated testing, not “playing games for you” 🤣
Also, I won’t consider it realistic until it can type out, “lol git gud scrub” after ganking someone who just spawned.
Yet for some reason it still left me kinda hyped 🤷
Maybe take pictures of them instead?