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.
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.