Over the past couple days, you might have seen this link making the rounds, a 3D virtual tour of this unusual house for sale in Louisville, Kentucky.

Uh. Found this in a Facebook group; the person who posted said “tour in 3D, try to find the bathtub” …enjoy(?) https://t.co/20wOBjSUZa

— Jenny Jaffe (@jennyjaffe) October 26, 2020

What starts as an ordinary cluttered living room quickly descends into a labyrinth of merchandise, with towers of DVDs, CDs, books, and miscellaneous goods filling every space.

It’s easy to get lost as you find randomness around every corner: a bathroom with two toilets side-by-side, a carpeted urinal, a GameCube, a portrait of two brothers, a chonky cat, a human arm, and much more.

And then there’s the bathtub.

(If you haven’t, now’s a good time to take the tour. If you have an Oculus headset, try it in VR.)

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Some called it the best game of 2020, praising its environmental storytelling. Some starting doing speedruns to find the bathtub, in three different categories.

People starting sharing their findings in forums and multiple viral Twitter threads, some doing extended walkthroughs on YouTube and Twitch. Some fans made scavenger hunt checklists. One game developer ported it to VRChat.

But a larger question remained: what’s the deal with this place? Whoever owned it, they were too organized to be hoarders. The home appeared to double as the office and warehouse for an internet reseller business, but who sells a house crammed floor-to-ceiling with retail goods?

Internet sleuths unearthed several news articles from 2014, outlining how police discovered thousands of stolen items being sold online during a raid at the address, the result of a four-year investigation resulting in criminal charges for four family members living and working at the house.

But it didn’t add up. If they were convicted for organized crime, why was there still so much inventory in the house, with products released as recently as last year? Why is it still packed full while they’re trying to sell it? And what’s with the bathtub!?

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I had questions, so I picked up the phone. The realtor put me in contact with Troy Curtis, the home’s owner, and we chatted about the history of the unusual house, the nature of his business, and why he’s moving on.

He addressed the criminal charges immediately. The terms of his settlement limited what he could say about the raid, but he told me he’s nearing the end of a seven-year probation period for his organized crime charges under the RICO Act, as well as tax evasion.

As Curtis describes it, he never knew that he was selling stolen merchandise at all. He was running a legitimate family business buying discount goods from peddlers marts and flea markets and reselling them for profit on Amazon and eBay.

But one supplier he found through Craigslist repeatedly sold him bulk goods at clearance rates, claiming they were purchased legitimately, but were actually stolen from local Target and Kroger stores. He never knew they were stolen, but he also never dug deep, even though he was at times suspicious — something he clearly regrets now.

The authorities allowed him to continue his reseller business, as long as he kept receipts for everything he bought for resale. Amazon dropped him as a reseller in the process, but he continues his business legitimately on eBay, where he maintains an outstanding seller rating.

The House

The house was originally a church and a Christian school, with the small house first built in the 1950s, and two larger structures added in the 1970s.

Its origins as a church explain the unusual bathtub. Curtis confirmed that it was once a baptistry, a large pool that originally opened out into the congregation for baptism viewings, before they walled it off and his nephew plumbed it as a shower.

Curtis knows how strange his house is, but the sprawling layout and size for his business made it well worth the purchase price, which cost him more than twice what a normal house would cost.

Selling the House

Troy Curtis is selling his unusual home for a good reason: he needs more space. He’s looking for a larger building that can handle his growing business and overflowing inventory.

Emptying out the house before selling simply wasn’t an option, since he needs the funds from the sale to buy the larger property.

So, he let the realtor come in to shoot the virtual tour in its current packed state. The 3D photographer told Curtis that it typically takes him 30-40 minutes to shoot a house of that size, but going up and down every aisle, it took over three hours to capture it all.

The Response

Curtis was aware that people were talking about his house, but he wasn’t clear how viral it was going online. He doesn’t have a Twitter account, and his phone wasn’t able to view the virtual tour, though some friends mentioned it to him on Facebook.

He seemed excited that people were finding it, and that it would bring more viewers to his listing, but then two strange things happened unrelated to our conversation:

1. The link to the 3D walkthrough was removed from the listing.
2. When loading the walkthrough directly, you can’t get to the bathtub anymore.

I quickly called him back, and he was puzzled that it was gone. He never asked for them to remove it, and certainly never told them to change the walkthrough.

He called his broker on the other line, and we quickly learned why they blocked it off: Girls Gone Wild.

The room right before the bathtub is filled with shelves of Girls Gone Wild DVDs, and the DVD covers are clearly visible. The brokerage agent felt it was inappropriate, so removed the links and blocked off that room, making it impossible to get to the bathtub.

Troy Curtis is hoping the brokerage company changes it back.

He was really hoping to unload some of those Girls Gone Wild DVDs as souvenirs to people who won the game.

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Updates

October 28 — This post got linked to by the AV Club, Kotaku, Motherboard, Digg, Input, Kottke.org, BoingBoing, and the New York Times. So that’s nice!

Grace Hayba, a reporter for the local Fox affiliate in Louisville, visited the house to interview Troy Curtis and get a real-world tour of the house, plus the first known footage of Loco, the chonky cat. If you want to buy the house with everything in it, Curtis will sell it for an additional $250,000. (Loco not included.)

If you've ever wanted to take a shower in a blue baptism tub a few feet from hundreds of Girls Gone Wild videos, now you can. One homeowner walked me through his home that's become known for its unusual features, including urinals and a fat cat named "Loco." @WDRBNews pic.twitter.com/w6C4ip1PO6

— Grace Hayba (@GraceHayba) October 28, 2020

The VRChat port is complete, and a bunch of furries conducted a virtual open house. Hilarity ensued.

November 12 — I’m not sure when this happened, but the original uncensored tour is back online, complete with bathtub and adult DVDs.

This morning, my friend Tamás dropped this tweet into the #internet channel of the XOXO Slack, a place where we talk about weird and good internet.

Never one to turn down an inconsequential quest, I did a deep-dive through Google’s fragmented late-1990s Usenet archives to see if I could piece it together. What caused such a specific group to be created?

It ended up being an interesting microcosm exploring three approaches to community moderation: hands-off moderation, majority rule, and strong moderation.

The original charter for the alt.binaries.images.underwater newsgroup was extremely wholesome:

The theme or Topic of this newsgroup shall be images portraying “an underwater scene.” Only photographs, paintings, and graphics whose primary subject is shown in an underwater setting are “on topic” in alt.binaries.images.underwater. Its title’s broadness is deliberate, and indicates inclusion of a varied range of UW themes and imagery. Some examples: shipwrecks, non-human sea life (i.e. fish & coral), swimmers & divers (scuba, snorkelers, free-divers, mermaids, pearl-divers, “hard-hat” divers). The setting may be an ocean, river, lake, or swimming pool… as long as the picture’s primary subject is seen underwater, the image is on-topic.

The setting may be an ocean, river, lake, or swimming pool… as long as the picture’s primary subject is seen underwater, the image is on-topic.

Certain “surface scenes” shall be considered acceptable *if* the image’s subject is seen *semi-submerged* (meaning more in-the-water than out of it. Some examples: a surface view of a semi-submerged shipwreck, or divers/snorkelers floating beside their boat or a buoy.

It was designed to be G-rated and family-friendly, placed outside the alt.binaries.pictures.erotica.* hierarchy, and with no mentions of sex, nudity, or fetishes. Its creator chose to use “images” in the name instead of “pictures,” to distance from alt.binaries.pictures.* and because he felt it “conveys a classier feel.”

Pornography was never explicitly forbidden, and artistic nudity was explicitly allowed, which created a slippery slope. The creator’s hopes for tacitly allowing it were almost hilariously naive. In a FAQ from 1998, he wrote, “Underwater pornography is actually rather scarce, and I do not think it will be as much of a problem here as James suspects… I think that most of the nudity which will (inevitably) show up in a.b.i.u. will be tasteful, and beautiful.”

Quickly, it’s clear from old threads that NSFW photos came to dominate the group, even though it was never intended for that purpose.

And there were other types of images that were technically underwater, but veered far from the group charter: images of shark attacks, drownings, bondage, and children and underage models.

After being taken to task for deciding a moderation guideline against bondage imagery unilaterally, the group’s creator/admin decided to allow policies to be determined entirely by majority rule.

As a result, four new rules were added, passed by a 70% margin:

The banned-in-ABIU subjects are:
(1) shark attacks and victims, etc.
(2) portrayals of drownings & drowning victims
(3) portrayals of UW bondage (tied-up/chained, or otherwise “bound” people)
(4) pictures of naked (or clothed) children or legally underage models (US Law)

Beyond here, the history gets muddy. It’s clear that these rules weren’t taken kindly to some of the active members of the group.

A splinter group, free.underwater, was created with absolutely no rules. (I’m only able to piece this history together because of cross-postings to that group and others like rec.scuba, since Google doesn’t host archives of the alt.binaries.* groups.)

From other postings in scuba enthusiast groups, it’s clear that the reputation of alt.binaries.images.underwater was irreparably damaged: through lax moderation, it was dominated by NSFW photos, and the accompanying porn spam ads that come with it, with little else of value.

By August 1999, the group’s original creator decided he’d had enough of his wholesome underwater photography newsgroup being flooded with porn and spam, and banned it entirely from alt.binaries.images.underwater.

He created a second newsgroup solely for NSFW (but non-violent!) underwater photos, the unwieldy alt.binaries.images.underwater.non-violent.moderated, named to indicate content disallowed by moderators, but neglecting to mention that NSFW images were allowed. The newsgroup’s one-line description only reads, “No death/drownings/bondage (Moderated).”

In a post to rec.scuba from October 1999, he proudly advertised that alt.binaries.images.underwater had changed.

Its binding original G-rated scuba-oriented Charter rules are being enforced. It is ready for you scuba fans to come and fill it with your G-rated UW photos. As its creator/admin, I’ll actively help you keep the spam and sex stuff out.

Back on Aug. 30th, a new Moderated newsgroup was created for the fans of underwater erotica (nudes & sex), and they have left. ABIU is now the place for family-safe UW pics.

How well did this approach work? Hard to say definitively, since neither group was archived by Google Groups.

But judging from a search of mentions on rec.scuba, it seems like alt.binaries.images.underwater once again became a place recommended by enthusiasts to find and post underwater photography, like its creator originally hoped.

There’s virtually no mention of alt.binaries.images.underwater.non-violent.moderated again, leading me to believe that it quietly died as people shifted to other unmoderated Usenet groups, as well as web-based forums, P2P file sharing, and later, communities like Reddit.

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Have an internet mystery or inconsequential quest you want solved? My inbox and DMs are always open.

On Friday, I linked to several videos by Vocal Synthesis, a new YouTube channel dedicated to audio deepfakes — AI-generated speech that mimics human voices, synthesized from text by training a state-of-the-art neural network on a large corpus of audio.

The videos are remarkable, pairing famous voices with unlikely dialogue: Bob Dylan singing Britney Spears, Ayn Rand and Slavoj Žižek dueting Sonny and Cher, Tucker Carlson reading the Unabomber Manifesto, Bill Clinton reciting “Baby Got Back,” or JFK touting the intellectual merits of Rick and Morty.

Many of the videos have been remixed by fans, adding music to create hilarious and surreal musical mashups. Six U.S. presidents from FDR to Obama rap N.W.A.’s, Fuck Tha Police, George W. Bush covers 50 Cent’s In Da Club, Obama covers Notorious B.I.G.’s Juicy, and my personal favorite, Sinatra slurring his way through the Navy Seal copypasta, a decade-old 4chan meme.

Videos Taken Offline

Over the weekend, for the first time, the anonymous creator of Vocal Synthesis received a copyright claim on YouTube, taking two of his videos offline with deepfaked audio of Jay-Z reciting the “To Be or Not To Be” soliloquy from Hamlet and Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire.”

According to the creator, the copyright claims were filed by Roc Nation LLC with an unusual reason for removal: “This content unlawfully uses an AI to impersonate our client’s voice.”

Both videos were immediately removed by YouTube, but can still be viewed on LBRY, a decentralized and open-source publishing platform. Two synthetic Jay-Z videos remained online, in which he raps the Book of Genesis and the Navy Seal copypasta. (Update: The videos were temporarily reinstated by Google. See updates below.)

The video’s creator announced the takedown in a creative way: using the voices of Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Ronald Reagan, JFK, and FDR.

Here’s an excerpt transcript from the video:

“Over the past few months, the creator of the channel has trained dozens of speech synthesis models based on the speech patterns of various celebrities or other prominent figures, and has used these models to generate more than one hundred videos for this channel. These videos typically feature a synthetic celebrity voice narrating some short text or a speech. Often, the particular text was selected in order to provide a funny or entertaining contrast with the celebrity’s real-life persona.

“For example, some of my favorites are George W. Bush performing a spoken-word version of “In Da Club” by 50 Cent, or Franklin Roosevelt’s powerful rendition of the Navy Seals Copypasta.

“The channel was created by an individual hobbyist with a huge amount of free time on his hands, as well as an interest in machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies. He would like to emphasize that all of the videos on this channel were intended as entertainment, and there was no malicious purpose for any of them.

“Every video, including this one, is clearly labeled as speech synthesis in both the title and description. Which brings us to the reason why we’re delivering this message.

“Over the past two days, several videos were posted to the channel featuring a synthetic Jay-Z rapping various texts, including the Navy Seals Copypasta, the Book of Genesis, the song “We Didn’t Start the Fire” by Billy Joel, and the “To Be Or Not To Be” soliloquy from Hamlet.

“Unfortunately, for the first time since the channel began, YouTube took down two of these videos yesterday as a result of a copyright strike. The strike was requested by Roc Nation LLC, with the stated reason being that it, quote, “unlawfully uses an AI to impersonate our client’s voice.”

“Obviously, Donald and I are both disappointed that Jay-Z and Roc Nation have decided to bully a small YouTuber in this way. It’s also disappointing that YouTube would choose once again to stifle creativity by reflexively siding with powerful companies over small content creators. Specifically, it’s a little ironic that YouTube would accept “AI impersonation” as a reason for a copyright strike, when Google itself has successfully argued in the case of “Authors Guild v. Google” that machine learning models trained on copyrighted material should be protected under fair use.”

No Intent to Deceive

At its core, the controversy over deepfakes is about deception and disinformation. Earlier this year, Facebook and Twitter banned deepfakes that could mislead or cause harm, largely motivated by their potential impact on the 2020 elections.

Though it’s worth nothing that the use of deepfakes for fake news is largely theoretical so far, as Samantha Cole covered for VICE, with most created for porn. (And, no, Joe Biden sticking his tongue is not a deepfake.)

In this case, there’s no deception involved. As he wrote in his statement, every Vocal Synthesis video is clearly labeled as speech synthesis in the title and description, and falls outside of YouTube’s guidelines for manipulated media.

Copyright and Fair Use

With these takedowns, Roc Nation is making two claims:

1. These videos are an infringing use of Jay-Z’s copyright.
2. The videos “unlawfully uses an AI to impersonate our client’s voice.”

But are either of these true? With a technology this new, we’re in untested legal waters.

The Vocal Synthesis audio clips were created by training a model with a large corpus of audio samples and text transcriptions. In this case, he fed Jay-Z songs and lyrics into Tacotron 2, a neural network architecture developed by Google.

It seems reasonable to assume that a model and audio generated from copyrighted audio recordings would be considered derivative works.

But is it copyright infringement? Like virtually everything in the world of copyright, it depends—on how it was used, and for what purpose.

It’s easy to imagine a court finding that many uses of this technology would infringe copyright or, in many states, publicity rights. For example, if a record producer made Jay-Z guest on a new single without his knowledge or permission, or if a startup made him endorse their new product in a commercial, they would have a clear legal recourse.

But, as the Vocal Synthesis creator pointed out, there’s a strong case to be made this derivative work should be protected as a “fair use.” Fair use can get very complicated, with different courts reaching different outcomes for very similar cases. But there are four factors judges use when weighing a fair use defense in federal court:

1. The purpose and character of the use.
2. The nature of the copyrighted work.
3. The amount and substantiality of the portion taken.
4. The effect of the use upon the potential market.

There’s a strong case for transformation with the Vocal Synthesis videos. None of the original work is used in any recognizable form—it’s not sampled in a traditional way, using an undisclosed set of vocal samples, stripped from their instrumentals and context, to generate an amalgam of the speaker.

And in most cases, it’s clearly designed as parody with an intent to entertain, not deceive. Making politicians rap, philosophers sing pop songs, or rappers recite Shakespeare pokes fun at those public personas in specific ways.

Vocal Synthesis is an anonymous and non-commercial project, not monetizing the channel with advertising and no clear financial benefit to the creator, and the impact on the market value of Jay-Z’s discography is non-existent.

There are questions about the amount and substantiality of the borrowed work. But even if the model was trained on everything Jay-Z ever produced, it wouldn’t necessarily rule out a fair use defense for parody.

Ultimately, there are two clear truths I’ve learned about fair use from my own experiences: only a court can determine fair use, and while it might be a successful defense, fair use won’t protect you from getting sued and the costs of litigating are high.

Interviewing the Creator

As far as I know, this is the most prominent example of a celebrity claiming copyright over their own deepfakes, the first example of a musician issuing a takedown of synthesized vocals, and according to the creator, the first time YouTube’s removed a video for impersonating a voice with AI. (Previously, Conde Nast took down a Kim Kardashian deepfake by claiming copyright over the source video, and Jordan Peterson ordered a voice simulator offline.)

I reached out to the anonymous creator of Vocal Synthesis to learn more about how he makes these videos, his reaction to the takedown order, and his concern over the future of speech synthesis. (Unfortunately, Roc Nation didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

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How do you feel about the takedown order? Were you surprised to receive it?
I was pretty surprised to receive the takedown order. As far as I’m aware, this was the first time YouTube has removed a video for impersonating a voice using AI. I’ve been posting these kind of videos for months and have not had any other videos removed for this reason. There are also several other channels making speech synthesis videos similar to mine, and I’m not aware of any of them having videos removed for this reason.

I’m not a lawyer and have not studied intellectual property law, but logically I don’t really understand why mimicking a celebrity’s voice using an AI model should be treated differently than someone naturally doing an (extremely accurate) impression of that celebrity’s voice. Especially since all of my videos are clearly labeled as speech synthesis in both the title and description, so there was no attempt to deceive anyone into thinking that these were real recordings of Jay-Z.

Can you talk a little about the effort that goes into generating a new model? For example, how long does it typically take to gather and train a new model until it sounds good enough to publish?
Constructing the training set for a new voice is the most time-consuming (and by far the most tedious) part of the process. I’ve written some code to help streamline it, though, so it now usually takes me just a few hours of work (it depends on the quality of the audio and the transcript), and then there’s an additional 12 hours (approximately) needed to actually train the model.

Are you using Tacotron 2 for synthesis?
Yeah, I’m using fine-tuned versions of Tacotron 2.

I saw you’ve struggled getting enough dialogue to fully develop some models, like with Mr. Rogers. Have there been other voices you’ve wanted to synthesize, but it’s just too challenging to find a corpus to work from?
Yeah, several. Recently I tried to make one for Theodore Roosevelt, but there’s only about 30 minutes of audio that exists for him (and it’s pretty poor quality), so the model didn’t really come out well.

The Crocodile Hunter (Steve Irwin) is another one I really want to do, and I can find enough audio, but I haven’t been able to find any accurate transcripts or subtitles yet (it’s very tedious for me to transcribe the audio myself).

How do you decide the voices and dialogue to pair together?
I try to consistently have all my voices read the Navy Seals Copypasta and the first few lines of the Book of Genesis, since it’s easier to hear the nuances of each voice when I can compare them to other voices reading the same text. Other than that, there’s no real method to it. If I have an idea for voice/text combination that I think would be funny or interesting enough to be worth the effort of making the video, then I’ll do it.

What do these videos mean to you? Is it more of a technical demonstration or a form of creative expression?
I wouldn’t really consider my videos to be a technical demonstration, since I’m definitely not the first to make realistic speech synthesis impersonations of well-known voices, and also the models I’m using aren’t state-of-the-art anymore.

Mainly, I’m just making these videos for entertainment. Sometimes I just have an idea for a video that I really want to exist, and I know that if I don’t make it myself, no one else will.

On the more serious side, the other reason I made the channel was because I wanted to show that synthetic media doesn’t have to be exclusively made for malicious/evil purposes, and I think there’s currently massive amounts of untapped potential in terms of fun/entertaining uses of the technology. I think the scariness of deepfakes and synthetic media is being overblown by the media, and I’m not at all convinced that the net impact will be negative, so I hoped that my channel could be a counterexample to that narrative.

Are you worried about the legal future for creative uses of this technology?
Sure. I expect that this technology will improve even more over the next few years, both in terms of accuracy and ease of use/accessibility. Right now it seems to be legally uncharted waters in some ways, but I think these issues will need to be settled fairly soon. Hopefully the technology won’t be stifled by overly restrictive legal interpretations.

It seems inevitable that, at some point, an artist’s voice is going to be used for other uses against their will: guesting on a track without permission, promoting products they aren’t paid for, or maybe just saying things they don’t believe. What would you say to artists or other public figures who are worried that this technology will damage their rights and image?
There are always trade-offs whenever a new technology is developed. There are no technologies that can be used exclusively for good; in the hands of bad people, anything can be used maliciously. I believe that there are a lot of potential positive uses of this technology, especially as it gets more advanced. It’s possible I’m wrong, but for now at least I’m not convinced that the potential negative uses will outweigh that.

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Thanks to the anonymous creator of Vocal Synthesis for their time. You can subscribe to the YouTube channel (for now) for new videos, follow updates and remixes in the /r/VocalSynthesis subreddit, and the video mirror on LBRY.

Update: I just heard from Vocal Synthesis’s creator that the copyright strike was removed, and both videos are back on his channel. I initially suspected that Roc Nation dropped the copyright claim, but Nick Statt at The Verge reported that Google reviewed the DMCA takedowns.

“After reviewing the DMCA takedown requests for the videos in question, we determined that they were incomplete,” a Google spokesperson tells The Verge. “Pending additional information from the claimant, we have temporarily reinstated the videos.”

If Roc Nation provides the missing information to complete the DMCA requests, the videos will go offline again. Or, given the press coverage, they may choose to let it go. We’ll see!