trained on stolen books? then I guess I can download these from anywhere I may find for free as well, right?
This has actually got me thinking differently about AI all together.
The best use for AI needs to be for the individual. I want MY ai to read books or research with or complete tasks for me.
I don’t want another company to do it for me or monetize it or steal content with it.
AI voices are not trained on books.
The ethical issue there is more around cloning celebrities
but AI itself is
Not sure what you are trying to say here. AI itself is an equation.
AI models have been trained on copyright protected books illegally. Maybe the voice have not
In this case the AI voices are reading the exact copyrighted material so the original author or rights holder must be contacted to secure the necessary rights and licensing agreements. There is no free use argument.
Now, if the voices have been trained on copy protected sources to create a likenesses (e.g. Scarlet Johansson) then there could be a lawsuit.
Well, yeah, you can. Whoever told you that you can’t, don’t believe them, they are probably being payed to say it. You could also pay for the book to support the author but most likely your money will not go to the author so don’t bother.
I like your way of thinking
It was bound to happen. I’m okay with ones that were never going to be turned into audiobooks to begin with… but they likely will use that as the norm for all books… I guess unless the author/publisher says not to.
Yeah currently contracts require the author’s or publisher’s consent. If anyone is a writer make sure to triple check your contracts for this shit.
And unless you are Stephan King or the like exactly how are you going to get the publishing cartel (I think they re consolidated downs to 3-4 publishers now) to change their contract to not include this? Their response will almost certainly be either “that’s non-negotiable” or “ok then you get half as much money”.
Publishers will at least retain the right to use AI audio books for themselves. And it’s much easier for an author to get a piece of something the publisher does than it is for them to get money for books Amazon recorded without their consent.
Meanwhile I unveil a plan to continue not giving a goddamn cent to J Bozo. Ever.
tiktok voice:
hate. let me tell you how much i’ve come to hate you since i began to live. there are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex…
The professional ai voices are amazing
It’s Amazon, what did you expect? Enshittification and monopoly abuse, no surprise.
Idk, they have pretty good stats that nobody will listen to an audio book if they don’t like the narrator, so being able to choose your own narrator on the fly isn’t really shitty
Enshittification isn’t adding new features that people want, it’s gradually lowering the quality of the product. So here if Audible is solely adding more possibilities, never at the cost of higher quality ones degrading, then indeed I’m wrong.
If though they hire less people to do good voice acting, then it’s really shitty.
I genuinely hope I’m wrong and they are ONLY adding new capabilities… but my entire experience with capitalism is that obtaining a monopolistic position is not done to improve quality but rather to increase margins regardless of how.
We’ll see!
Fucking gross. Maybe it’s the 250+ audiobooks I have influencing me, but the very best ones I’ve listened to transcend just turning words into sound. Sound effects, music, tone, emotion, accents, sarcasm, and god damn BLOOPERS all improve the experience beyond just hearing what is written down.
I’m against it, fuck that literal noise.
All I can think of is Jim Dale’s reading of the Harry Potter books. Fucking epic.
I listened to one recently that was using AI. It was kind of off putting because of how robotic it came off.
It wasn’t the tone really, but I find that AI tends to not get human speech inflections right most of the time during active speech. And that can be jarring to me at least.
AI will write them and AI will read them to us.
Stock up on old physical books
Well that’s a great way to keep me unsubscribed. Glad I canceled my membership.
Is voice AI trained on stolen data? I was under the impression that was LLMs.
Pretty much anything handling unstructed data (audio, video, text) is using training data that has copyrighted content.
Surely I can just do that myself with an an epub and a free AI.
Glad I binned my Audible subscription many years ago.
This is clearly the future despite the outrage here.
There are at least 389 living languages with over 1M speakers. That alone means it’s impossible to reach some people and they get left out. Most of these languages dont even have enough professional voice actors to cover the bandwidth.
There are thousands of books released every year. That’s impossible to cover even in English alone.
Its an objective net good to have more accessible audio books and the privileged people who do care about this stuff can very much afford to vote with their wallets for non-ai voices.
In fact since AI moat is so minimal this will very quickly be adapted by open source solution providing audio book access to millions if not billions of people to whom this was not an option. Its amazing.
dont even have enough professional voice actors to cover the bandwidth
I’m pretty sure they’d be a lot more people ready to do that job if there was a good remuneration. Heck that sounds a lot more fun that a LOT of jobs out there!
Sure but that’s not how free markets work. If there’s only 3 million consumers you can’t afford 3 million voice actors but you can afford 3 million AI renders.
I’m not an economist but… 1 voice actor can serve 3 million consumers if they listen to the same content.
Anyway that’s not even my point, my point is that it is possible to cover, we as a society, driven both by VC with strategies of capturing markets (so precisely going against “free” market as an ideal) and consumers are making choices (like when one buys from the local farmer market vs Amazon deliveries). If though we, while fully understanding the consequence of such choice (namely how the sausage is made, here how AI models are trained and then run), believe it’s not valuable then sure, we can make that choice.
I’m just warning consumers then that if they don’t pay for quality content made a certain way, they can’t complain that they in turn don’t get the job they wanted because nobody out there is ready to pay for it.
2 sides of the same coin.
but for a service like audible.
I only get the ones with a famous narrator or the author.
Why would they when you can just plug any epub into a program and use google tts. Ive listened to about a book a day for the past few years doing this and i love it. Yeah it took getting used too, but once you find an ai voice you like and figure out which words to auto replace to sound right its honestly better then an audiobook. Well at least to me it is, i could never stand when the reader would change their voice for different characters.
This is what I don’t get from a business standpoint. Why would anyone buy an AI read audiobook for $20 when they can get the exact same audio by buying the ebook for $0.99 and running it through AI?
This consumer says you don’t get a red cent then!
It’s already a plague on youtube where half of the docu style vids are AI narrated already. I quit them in disgust. It’s so frustrating. It has eroded my perception of Youtube in short time.
