NEW YORK (AP) — Seventy years ago Friday, no one outside the U.S. Supreme Court building heard that moment. Chief Justice Earl Warren Announced the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision regarding school desegregation.
Now, through the use of innovative voice cloning technology, people can “hear” oral arguments by future Supreme Court justices and other lawyers just as Warren read the decision on May 17, 1954. It is becoming. Thurgood Marshall.
The “Brown Revisited” recreation is scheduled to go live by Friday at brown.oyez.org, the dream website of former Northwestern University professor Jerry Goldman. Goldman painstakingly built the site to allow people to listen to oral arguments and track written transcripts of decades worth of Supreme Court cases. However, Goldman was always frustrated that the court did not begin recording oral arguments until 1955, a year after Brown was handed down. Printed transcripts are not the same.
“I could give you the script for “Madame Butterfly,'' he said, “but would you rather read it, or sit and listen to it?''
The Brown decision was a landmark in the civil rights movement. The court overturned an 1896 decision that institutionalized racial segregation by providing “separate but equal” schools for black and white students, ruling that such accommodations were never equal.
The court began recording arguments in 1955, but virtually no one heard them until 1969, when they were made available through the National Archives for academic and legal research. Full public access was not granted until 1993. The court began posting arguments on its website in his 2000s, but usually with a delay of several days.
It wasn't until 2020 that the court began regularly publishing live streams of arguments. Cameras are never allowed.
Goldman said a year ago he saw a play that used artificial intelligence to recreate familiar voices and wondered if the technology could be used for historical court arguments. I reached out to Northwestern alumnus James Boggs, CEO of interactive audio company Spooler, and he was interested.
“It's good to draw attention to this case, because this case is fundamental to our understanding of the Constitution, and this case changed America,” Goldman said.
The first step was to find recordings of key figures who had died long before the incident. The recording was preferably made around 1954 to bring it closer to what it was like at the time. For former California governors Warren and Marshall, that wasn't difficult. It was more difficult for John W. Davis, an opponent of integration. His long career included being the Democratic presidential candidate in 1924. He died in his 1955 year.
Davis' recordings were tracked through the Library of Congress. Recordings of some other participants could not be found.
Through artificial intelligence, these voice samples are fused with voice samples of actors reading historical records to make them sound like they are speaking anew.
The actual discussion spanned 18 hours over three days, with 38 participants, and spanned a wide range of topics. Mr. Goldman shortened his presentation to 1 hour and 45 minutes, including reading Mr. Warren's judgment. Mr. Goldman was able to use the memo left by Mr. Warren as a guide and include in this recreation the presiding judge's emphasis that the decision was unanimous.
The increase in technology's ability to reproduce speech is amazing, but deeply worrying for many who worry that it will put false words into familiar mouths. Such deepfakes are of particular concern in the lead-up to the presidential election.
Rabbit Dotan, CEO of TechBetter and lecturer on technology ethics, said that although consent is impossible for people who are no longer alive, he is concerned about the practice of cloning people's voices without their consent. Told. She believes “Brown Revisited” set a bad precedent.
“I can imagine that in the future there will be laws governing how long a person's right to a person's image lasts after death, just as copyright expires 70 years after the author's death,” Dotan said. “However, there is currently no legal guidance and I am concerned that people will use it to misuse people's likenesses or spread disinformation.”
Brown's project is not a deepfake, but a “deep truth,” Boggs said.
“We’re not creating new content,” he said. “These are things that were actually said, and we have the historical documents to prove it.”
Similar recreations have natural limitations. It wasn't until the late 1800s that recordings of his voice became available. If you go further back, they are essentially guesses. Who knows what George Washington actually sounded like?
But for the curious, the “Brown Revisited” project offers a new window into history.
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David Bauder writes about media for The Associated Press.please follow him http://twitter.com/dbauder.
