People can hear important events in history as if they were there thanks to voice-cloning technology. Seventy years ago, Chief Justice Earl Warren made the important ruling in Brown v. Board of Education.
Voice-cloning technology has made it possible to hear Warren talk about this choice. People can now “hear” Warren and the lawyers’ arguments from 1954 because technology has such great voice-cloning skills.
The “hearing,” which is being called “Brown Revisited,” will be on brown.oyez.org, which is part of a website that came together thanks to a professor at Northwestern University named Jerry Goldman. People will be able to read along with spoken opinions from the Supreme Court in cases from over the years.
He said that recordings of formal arguments didn’t begin until 1955, which was after the Brown v. Board of Education decision. He asked, “I could give you the libretto to ‘Madame Butterfly,’ but would you rather read it or sit and listen to the performance?”
It wasn’t until the 2000s that most people could access the arguments that were taped after this point. This is what made Goldman think of voice-cloning as a way to give people audio to listen to in cases where nothing was taped.
Warren had left behind some written notes that Goldman was able to use to cut the talk down to an hour and forty-five minutes.
It can be helpful to be able to clone sounds sometimes, but there are also a lot of worries about this, like deep fakes, especially now that it’s election season.
Ramit Dotan, CEO of TechBetter, said that this made her worry about copying people’s sounds without their permission.
She said, “In the future, I can see laws that say how long a person’s likeness rights last after they die, similar to copyright, which ends 70 years after the creator’s death.”
