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 😠.
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.
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.