Since announcing a beta tool last year allowing self-published authors to generate AI "virtual voice" narrations for their ebooks, over 40,000 AI-narrated titles have flooded onto Audible,...
I definitely do not want to support this practice, but there’s no way to filter these out 😠.
I get where you’re coming from, but it doesn’t sit quite right with me. The whole point of technology is to save human time and effort. That should be a good thing. The problem is the capitalist hellscape that is the status quo. I don’t think we should put the onus of propping up that capitalist hellscape onto book authors. I mean, maybe that’s the easiest way to maintain the status quo, but the status quo was never sustainable in the first place.
I don’t know. This is not a fully fleshed out philosophy. At some level I’m sure it’s the same old idealism-vs-pragmatism debate.
I mean, when that time and effort is someone’s chosen profession, then there’s only so many ways it can go.
The authors are free to not release an audiobook with some soulless, robotic voice behind it and stick to print/ebook. Amazon is also free to use the AI voices as enhanced TTS for regular books, and I would be fine with that (no one expects those to sound human, and they’re not sold as audiobooks).
For me, the narrator makes the audiobook experience. As an example, pretty much all of the Revelation Space series was narrated by John Lee. One of the later books was narrated by someone else (forget their name, but they were definitely forgettable), and it just didn’t do it for me. It was an actual person, but they read it so robotically I lost interest halfway through the prologue and just read it on e-reader.
A person’s job was replaced with a capitalist’s robot, and now the capitalist earns all the money.
Not necessarily. A lot of Text-to-Speech (TTS) tech comes out of academia and free, open source software (FOSS). That includes AI models and voice changing tools like RVC (Retrieval-based Voice Conversion). It is fully open source and there’s thousands upon thousands of voices to choose from that are also free and not a one is an exact replica of a real person’s voice (because it doesn’t do that good a job; just gets close). Many of the most popular voices are mashups of many different voices anyway.
You can use any number of FOSS TTS tools (some of the newer open source AI models are great) to have it read your text and then have it processed through RVC into whatever voices you want.
Alternatively, you could just read the text yourself and change the voices using RVC. That works far better than you’d think it would but it requires reading your whole book out loud which requires overcoming laziness haha.
TL;DR: A person’s job could be replaced with a FOSS robot, and now the author earns all the money.
I get where you’re coming from, but it doesn’t sit quite right with me. The whole point of technology is to save human time and effort. That should be a good thing. The problem is the capitalist hellscape that is the status quo. I don’t think we should put the onus of propping up that capitalist hellscape onto book authors. I mean, maybe that’s the easiest way to maintain the status quo, but the status quo was never sustainable in the first place.
I don’t know. This is not a fully fleshed out philosophy. At some level I’m sure it’s the same old idealism-vs-pragmatism debate.
I mean, when that time and effort is someone’s chosen profession, then there’s only so many ways it can go.
The authors are free to not release an audiobook with some soulless, robotic voice behind it and stick to print/ebook. Amazon is also free to use the AI voices as enhanced TTS for regular books, and I would be fine with that (no one expects those to sound human, and they’re not sold as audiobooks).
For me, the narrator makes the audiobook experience. As an example, pretty much all of the Revelation Space series was narrated by John Lee. One of the later books was narrated by someone else (forget their name, but they were definitely forgettable), and it just didn’t do it for me. It was an actual person, but they read it so robotically I lost interest halfway through the prologue and just read it on e-reader.
Let me rephrase the issue for you and see if you have a different emotional reaction.
A person’s job was replaced with a capitalist’s robot, and now the capitalist earns all the money.
I know I’m way late to the party but…
Not necessarily. A lot of Text-to-Speech (TTS) tech comes out of academia and free, open source software (FOSS). That includes AI models and voice changing tools like RVC (Retrieval-based Voice Conversion). It is fully open source and there’s thousands upon thousands of voices to choose from that are also free and not a one is an exact replica of a real person’s voice (because it doesn’t do that good a job; just gets close). Many of the most popular voices are mashups of many different voices anyway.
You can use any number of FOSS TTS tools (some of the newer open source AI models are great) to have it read your text and then have it processed through RVC into whatever voices you want.
Alternatively, you could just read the text yourself and change the voices using RVC. That works far better than you’d think it would but it requires reading your whole book out loud which requires overcoming laziness haha.
TL;DR: A person’s job could be replaced with a FOSS robot, and now the author earns all the money.