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Holly Herndon: The 100 Most Influential People in AI 2023 | TIME

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T he singer-songwriter Holly Herndon cannot sing in Spanish. She cannot nail melismatic Arabic vocal runs across multiple octaves. She certainly cannot sing any song you want, on demand, to wherever you are in the world. But her digital twin, Holly+, can do all of that. Working with technologists, Herndon created a vocal deepfake of herself in 2021 by extensively training a neural network on her voice. Now, any amateur musician can use Holly+ to transform their pedestrian voice into hers, perfectly tuned and ethereal. The idea of handing over your voice for public manipulation might sound dystopian, a gesture of human surrender to our new machine overlords. But Herndon’s intent is the opposite. She created Holly+ to spur her fellow artists to reclaim agency over their careers and creative autonomy in the midst of a technological revolution she feels will dramatically shift how we make and process art. The world is barreling toward an era of “infinite media,” Herndon says, where anyone

The singer-songwriter Holly Herndon cannot sing in Spanish. She cannot nail melismatic Arabic vocal runs across multiple octaves. She certainly cannot sing any song you want, on demand, to wherever you are in the world. But her digital twin, Holly+, can do all of that. Working with technologists, Herndon created a vocal deepfake of herself in 2021 by extensively training a neural network on her voice. Now, any amateur musician can use Holly+ to transform their pedestrian voice into hers, perfectly tuned and ethereal. The idea of handing over your voice for public manipulation might sound dysto

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