> I think "good enough at 1/10 the price" is quite empowering for consumers.

That's the thing though - it's not as empowering as it seems longer-term, because the "good enough" quickly drops to "barely fit for purpose"/"if it were any worse, it would be illegal to market or sell". This has been the case with most established classes of products I can think of, including pretty much anything that's been fully commoditized.

And so

> nothing stops you from paying what we pay now for human voice actors if there continues to be a quality differential that customers care about. (Though perhaps Baumol's Cost Disease would push the price up for today's human-generated quality.)

Nothing stops me today. But even if the quality differential exists, the dropping price on the low-quality version will reduce demand on the moderate-quality version, pushing its prices up and reducing number of suppliers (here, voice actors). The end result seems to always be a bifurcation: there is not enough demand to sustain a business doing decent quality work for a reasonable price, so all companies move to providing either low quality work cheaply, or high quality work at a hefty premium. The middle disappears.

In the specific context of this thread, the middle in question is the current quality of audiobooks with voice acting. The quality level available to most consumers will be below that, and the next step up will be niche recordings at high cost.

I'm not romanticizing quality of human work. I'm not claiming people give more shit than it seems. I'm claiming that with humans doing the work, quality can only get so low[0] - and automation lets you punch through that floor, achieving much lower quality standards.

Or, put another way:

> Removing humans from the loop often directly leads to improved quality.

Yes, but improved quality for the same price means leaving money on the table, so approximately every business immediately drops quality to the baseline and pockets the difference - and from that point on, competition will optimize the quality further down.

> Of course, those are same humans that make decisions about how to use automation, so it’s not a panacea.

It's not the humans being replaced that make that decision - it's their bosses, who rent or own the automation, that make this call.

> There’s tons of things where quality improved immensely due to automation. Engines, drugs, batteries, just to name few.

Sorta, kinda. In areas with strict regulatory standards? Yes. In areas where automation improves both cost and quality, and the competitive pressure isn't very strong? Sure. With products not yet commoditized? Often enough. When it enables market segmentation? Of course.

But then you have commodities, or automation replacing people directly on the "critical path" of value chain. That's where products and services go to shit. Bonus points if automation allows to engage customers in "self-service" - i.e. outsource work to the customers.

Case in point: automated checkout machines in stores. They reduce jobs, but in theory, they could reduce queues, increase throughput, and make shopping more pleasant - win-win deal for everyone - even the cashiers could be shifted to oversight/support jobs, ensuring increased throughput and more profit for the store, for the same number of employees.

In practice, it turns out the optimal setup for the store is deploying way too few machines, and instead of having dedicated employees for oversight/support of the machines, those responsibilities are just tacked on to the workload of the existing (reduced) work force. As a result, queues are longer, customers are frustrated, overall shopping experience is shit - but the store knows perfectly well the customers will endure it anyway[1].

The market optimizes for profits, not quality or happiness. It's not just greed - money is the lifeblood of companies, and without it they die. As a result, however, competitive pressure ensures that any value or virtue that can be sacrificed to improve profits, will be sacrificed. Those who refuse get outcompeted by those who make that sacrifice. The ratchet turns, and the sacrificed value is lost forever.

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[0] - There are many limiting factors. If the business is pushing down quality of human work too hard, they'll eventually have to deal with employee frustration, or hit limits imposed by OSHA or labor law, or just a soft limit where producing a fixed amount of goods/services costs X in labor, and there's no point in trying to save 0.1X on quality if it requires workers to put effort, which will make them produce less per unit of time, or increase variability of output, or both.

[1] - There are many reasons for it, including customers being price sensitive to the point of irrationality, usually valuing their free time at 0, and being easy to confuse with constant churn of deals. Stores also know that frustration is a fleeting feeling, while well-crafted product selection makes a store/chain sticky. Notice how automated checkout machines tend to proliferate in grocery stores and drogeries, and are seldom seen anywhere else: that's because they work best in places where customers are susceptible to factors I described earlier - and thus will endure bad experience and still come back for more. It's not like there are alternatives - competitive pressure ensures all competitors offer equally shitty experience. The ratchet made a turn, there is no going back.

"Midjourney's level" is precisely the quality I'm talking about. It's impressive for what the computer can do, yes. It's not impressive when you find it coming out of a black box labeled "commercial commissioned art", not when compared to what used to come out of that box for about the same price. The images are... almost OK. But there's always something. A missing finger here, a tiny extra eye there, some psychedelic pattern faintly visible in the negative space, etc.

But what can you do? Every black box labeled "commercial commissioned art" is now returning similarly off images, almost but not quite there. They all dropped their prices a little, so there's that - while the few black boxes offering the quality that used to be normal now cost 2-3x of what used to be normal. Hard pass.

(Meanwhile, people operating the black boxes - i.e. companies or in-house departments churning out commercial graphics cheaply - are swimming in money made on firing all their minimum-wage artists, replacing them with Midjourney or SD, and pocketing the difference. Sure, they had to drop the prices a little to clear out remaining human-powered competitors, and they will have to drop them way further once the competition restarts in the earnest - but for a short moment, they all get to make small fortunes on selling shit output, that's 100+x cheaper to produce, at roughly the same price as mediocre one before.)

Can AI be used to generate much higher quality at the same cost as human art? Sure - you'll need to spend what you used to pay an artist, whom you just fired, on generating variants and a (cheaper, at least per unit of output) human select best ones - but yes, AI can give you much better quality for the same price. But AI can also give you same quality as before for cheaper, or somewhat worse quality for much cheaper. Which is the best option to choose?

The answer, I claim, is that there is no choice - competitive pressure will force everyone to go for shittiest quality the market can bear, sold almost at cost. This will satisfy enough demand that "standard quality" offering becomes something very expensive or outright unavailable, as economics of using minimum-wage factory artists suddenly stops working.

Niche stuff has always been economically viable. Niche stuff also tends to get publisher support. Realistically these days the only reason why books don't have an audiobook format is due to not wanting to support Amazon/Apple, or because they just don't want it. Voice actors literally are not expensive for audiobooks. You can absolutely afford one if your tiny $9 book hits more than 200 copies.

Unless you're talking about illegal niche, in which fair but I highly doubt stores are going to accept those. All generation helps with is content that will be free.