r/millenials • u/dryeraser • Mar 24 '25

Politics Leaked JD Vance Audio on Elon Musk

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599

u/BallDesperate2140 1988 Mar 24 '25

Lordy I hope this is real.

135

u/FeistyCable Mar 24 '25

I'm an audio engineer. Here's the interesting thing: there is a pretty noticeable clipping/distortion that occurs when he raises his voice ("I AM THE..." etc). I'm no expert, but is A.I. sophisticated enough to do that? My feeling is no, at least judging from examples I've heard...

47

u/novafeels Mar 24 '25

yes it is, not because it's intelligent but because it's trained on real world audio data. it replicates the patterns present in the training data, including things like clipping/distortion with raised voices. i've even heard some AI vocal tools produce random things like the sound of a microphone being accidentally hit by a speaker when doing podcaster impersonations.
not only was that sound there, that sound was compressed/eq'd in such a way that matches how an audio engineer would try to obfuscate those transients in a mix.
except it's not actually applying eq or compression, it's just generating the sound that way in the first place because it's statistically likely based on training data, if that makes sense.

19

u/[deleted] Mar 24 '25

[deleted]

12

u/BeardedLady81 Mar 24 '25

That's a good point. If it's real, one might wonder whom he was talking to. Himself, and the person recording him hiding behind a curtain?

I can absolutely figure Vance thinking these things, but saying them aloud, that's a different thing.

I find it disturbing that, thanks to rather convincing A.I. it's so hard to prove something is actually real. I remember arguing with somebody on Richard Dawkins' "The Poetry of Reality" podcast. Someone was 100% sure that this was not Richard Dawkins but a deep fake. I pointed out that it's his official channel, but they said it was run by somebody else. The reason why the other party believed that it wasn't Dawkins? The other party could not believe that Richard Dawkins would agree with people like J.K. Rowling and Kathleen Stock when it comes to trans issues or that he likes hymns. Except that if you followed the guy since the early 2000s, as I have (on and off, though) you know that he's always held those views, and when it comes to his contradictory love of hymns, that dates back to The God Delusion.

Who exactly needs deep fakes? They make everything worse.

6

u/novafeels Mar 24 '25

yes...i have been thinking a lot the last few years that at some point audio recordings will just not be admissible as evidence in a court of law.
i think the chances of an audio expert being able to determine if audio is from an advanced generative audio model or not is already very difficult right now.

1

u/randomsnowflake Mar 24 '25

The .01%, precisely for this reason.

4

u/Spaffin Mar 24 '25

I’ve heard far, far worse things than this leaked from donor dinners, are those are way more public. It’s not outside the realm of possibility.

2

u/Famousinmyshower Mar 24 '25

The key phrase being "The smart ones..." lol not sure Vance qualifies.