this post was submitted on 06 May 2024
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This does not inspire confidence. The technology is there to do this very well, but it takes skill and effort. The technology to automate it end to end with high quality does not yet exist.
52 minutes. That's maybe 1/10th the time it would take to listen to it. I wonder how much of these 40,000 books were even proof-listened once.
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.
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.