Technical University of Denmark: Korean artist speaks Danish with AI help from students

The Korean artist Haegue Yang speaks Danish in a new video at SMK – Statens Museum for Kunst – with help from students in the bachelor’s programme Artificial Intelligence and Data at DTU Compute.

The students have been working on deep fakes and voice conversion in their second year of their studies. Now they are in the third and final year and have spent all their free time over seven weeks in January and February developing an AI model that has converted Yang’s voice to speak Danish.

First, they received voice material with the artist in English so that the artificial intelligence could learn her way of speaking. Next, they got an employee at SMK to record the text of the video in Danish. Finally, their AI model worked with the material to recreate the sound using Haegue Yang’s voice.

The technology can be used illegally, and therefore students work with a lot with the ethical dilemmas during their studies, so they are aware of how the technology can both help society and also do harm, explains Professor and Head of Studies Morten Mørup.

Why AI and Art? Well, working with artificial intelligence and these technologies is very creative. Being an artist is also a very creative job. And one can say that artificial intelligence and art can meet in a creative space as in this collaboration, says Morten Mørup.