I just listened to this AI generated audiobook and if it didn’t say it was AI, I’d have thought it was human-made. It has different voices, dramatization, sound effects… The last I’d heard about this tech was a post saying Stephen Fry’s voice was stolen and replicated by AI. But since then, nothing, even though it’s clearly advanced incredibly fast. You’d expect more buzz for something that went from detectable as AI to indistinguishable from humans so quickly. How is it that no one is talking about AI generated audiobooks and their rapid improvement? This seems like a huge deal to me.
Because it has the potential to become actively harmful to the audiobook industry
And great for accesibility for people who can not read well.
Yeah, this is where shit gets weird imo. Which one is more important, accessibility or the ability to make a livelihood at something?
AI has the ability to make things a lot easier for people who are visually and/or auditory impaired, but in order for that to happen, the solutions have to be media-agnostic. This means that someone like Stephan Fry only gets to sell their AI voice once per person as opposed to being able to make royalties from every work their voice is used in. For some people, that could be devastating from a financial standpoint.
On the other hand, you could restrict AI to the publishers. That’d mean they’d still be able to convert previously un-voiced books into audiobooks without needing people to come into the studio, making the conversion a lot cheaper and faster. This would lead to books which previously were viewed as “unprofitable” receiving audiobook versions. Additionally, this would allow voice actors to receive royalties per-release like (I assume) they currently are, and would probably lead to some voice actors receiving more in royalties than they were previously. However, the problem now is that not all books would receive audiobooks, especially those that sit in “copyright hell”. Additionally, it’d mean that someone can’t use AI to read their computer or phone screen.
A lot of audiobook voices are harmful to the industry. Plenty of times I’ve listened to a book for ten minutes and said nevermind because the voice actor was terrible, making wet mouth sounds or their voice was just annoying or the audio quality was terrible.
I love the multi book series where they hire a different narrator for certain books and they end up pronouncing names and places differently than the first narrator.
why should i care about the audio book industry? The biggest player is Amazon, it doesn’t add value to the art form, its just another way to become informed, and the more people who have that ability the better.
Because they are people. There are other options, you don’t have to support Amazon.
I think it is true because if they get the tech right the market could be saturated and voice actors will be in lower demand.
And the situation is already terrible for these workers. >90% of people buy and consume books via Audible which is owned by Amazon. As I’m sure you can guess there is lots of shady stuff going on. Such as (but not limited to) the “Audiblegate” campaign where workers discovered Amazon was engaging massive systemic wagetheft. As situation which is still ongoing to the best of my knowledge.
Some further context about Audible: