this post was submitted on 06 May 2024
113 points (99.1% liked)
Audiobooks
306 readers
1 users here now
For talk of all things audiobook related!
Please follow this instances rules.
To find more communities on this instance, go to: !411@literature.cafe
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Honestly, I don't really care if the LLM can spit out a perfect replica of Stephen Fry with every inflection and intonation possible and in the correct spots.
Tools like these can and will be used to take jobs from actual voice actors. I want no part of it.
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.
And most importantly it will never be creative, only recreate. Just that if you mix many many people it sounds new.
Yep, it's already happening. I did freelance voice work for a client for awhile but was replaced by a voice model because it's vastly cheaper, even if the output is also proportionally worse.
That sucks. Just know I'm doing my very tiny, infinitesimally small part to not support that practice.
It's appreciated! Luckily it wasn't my whole income, but seeing myself replaced with a really bad voice model was just gross. But hey, think of all the value it creates for shareholders!
That's how automation works. It's just a fact of technological advancement.
If people will happily listen to it and it's way cheaper it's going to happen I'm afraid.
I agree on the technological advancement, but automating human creativity and emotion (yes, there's definitely a degree of creativity in voice acting) is a bridge too far for me. An AI-narrated audiobook automatically loses 3 stars on the review lol.
I totally get where you're coming from.
They'll likely get banned if the quality isn't good hopefully.
"banned"?
I agree with the job loss part, but it seems like a really weak argument. What about the increase deals for the author? Many steps in progress lead to job losses, because the world changes. What's important is to do it in a responsible manner, and I think that's where Amazon is failing.
This is the same thing that happened to scribes when the printing press was invented. It's not going away.