Project Gutenberg has implemented one of the worst AI fears of striking actors
qz.com
qz.com
Spreading FUD about text-to-speech technology that is not completely lifeless is a bit like blaming google translate or OCR programs from taking away jobs. Making stuff that takes a lot of effort virtually effortless is a massive gain to humanity, especially for people who depend on technology like this to access media (especially so for media in the public domain).
It's such a weird argument that honestly it feels like a trap designed to hurt the striking actors. I hope none them are stupid enough to latch onto this article to support their argument because as an actor saying you're afraid a robot might be better at understanding and conveying the emotion in a book is not a good look. Even more so when you're aiming at accessibility software.
Thats a lot less strange then it sounds. Sabotage is a real strategy and it has become incredibly easy with increasing tribalism and the inability to call peoples stupidity out. The rational goes the more i can make your side look and act stupid, the better chances for my side. It becomes increasingly easy if there arent any checks and balances in your ingroup. It of course leaves everyone in a worse situation but a lot of people dont seem to care.
This is very much an asymmetric struggle. While you might be a sensible person when you are paying attention to the right aspects, most of the time you arent. Or to quote the Provisional IRA of all people
>Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.
I dont see a way around regularly checking if you have gotten unlucky and carried away. Its really easy to just be opposed to a caricature, figuring out and accepting that you have become one as well as a reaction is quite a lot harder. Mitchell and Webb made a great bit about checking regularly if you and your friends are maybe the baddies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY
If people around you take offense to you doing that, thats a very valuable indicator. If this leaves you with a collapsed reality model, dont worry, thats normal. Stuff is just complicated. Fortunately less bad is often a very reachable bar.
And doubly so for older, long-tail content which would otherwise be unlikely to get an audiobook produced of it. There's more to public-domain English fiction than Shakespeare and Dickens, but no one's stepping up to voice-act audiobooks for obscure authors from the 1800s.
But since I'm not a native English speaker and these models were incredible for learning the language, also speech-to-text models, all these accessibility models are used in the vast majority of cases where there would be no human alternative, for example transcribing all Youtube videos, or correcting the grammar of this HN comment, so I really agree with you.
Sure, and having AI generated movies and stuff would reduce the physical and human resources needed to make movies. In either case, the people who lose those jobs won't be happy about it, despite the gain to humanity.
It should not be overlooked that this is less of a problem of automation but one of how we organize society. What do we do once large parts of society become redundant? With many of them already having had bullshit jobs doing busywork? The effect of substantial numbers of high paying jobs vanishing alone will be disastrous for the economy. Technological progress is just highly deflationary.
But this instance is a terrible fight to pick. You'll be pitting a fight against a non-profit, accessibility software, a public domain library, on the basis that a computer is doing too good a job reading a book out loud.
If you want to complain, complain about the Bezos-owned WaPo adding machine-generated audio versions of all their stories (linked prominently under the headline) and pushing them for a podcast-like experience (terrible quality generated audio, might I add, having clicked on it yesterday by accident while scrolling and couldn’t figure out how to stop it until I just killed the app).
Unlike Project Gutenberg, WaPo and NYT used to hire narrators for their popular stories or bleeding headlines. That is revenue and jobs that might actually be erased.
AI is one part of why actors are striking, and their fears are pretty directed at studios and employers. In particular they're worried about contract clauses that grant studios perpetual rights to use their likenesses and voices to train AIs that studios hope will replace them. It is a convenient narrative to phrase that as if they are opposed to AI entirely or that they are opposed to accessibility or voice-over technology. In reality even if actors were fully embracing AI-generated content, the terms being proposed by studios for ownership over training data and unlimited monopolization of actor voices and performances would still be egregious.
There have been conflicts about text-to-speech efforts in ebooks before, but it's not clear to me that the majority of actors have any problem with stilted, lifeless text-to-speech designed by a nonprofit to increase ebook accessibility.
And maybe actors will be furious at Gutenberg, I don't know. But that's the point, a good way of figuring out whether or not striking actors are mad at Gutenberg would be to talk to them directly, which this article doesn't do. What I'm saying is, in the middle of a highly public strike, be careful of uncritically accepting the word of writers who are not part of that strike when they tell you what the strike is about and what the people striking believe and want.
There is a huge effort going on to frame striking actors as if they're anti-technology and to turn what should be a conversation about clearly unacceptable studio terms around IP rights into a philosophical debate about the nature of progress. If the union organizers all come out and start condemning Project Gutenberg then fine, we can have a conversation about Gutenberg then. But as far as I can tell online, that hasn't happened yet.
And even if we do end up having that conversation, it's not at all clear that striking actors are going to feel the same way about nonprofit accessibility tools as they would feel about purely profit-motivated projects for Amazon books or (more relevant to the actual strike going on) movie studios. These conversations oversimplify what actor demands actually are.
Before you get into a giant argument, check to make sure that the argument is actually happening and isn't just the result of a single Internet article by a single writer. Made-up conflicts online started with "people on Twitter say" junk pieces that would quote single-digit follower Twitter accounts as if they represented a consensus, and have now moved past that into pieces just kind of confidently stating what demographics believe with literally no sources at all. If union organizers have a problem with Project Gutenberg, they will say something about it at some point.
And maybe they will! But I can't find a source on that yet; as far as I can tell from some quick searches we have one isolated article online framing this as a major conflict with unions even though there are zero actual union organizers in the article saying that it's a conflict.
Maybe this is another union ploy, similar to the Netflix hit pieces a month ago about the ML job.
It was probably even written by AI!
The book text starts out "I." as in, roman numeral for chapter 1. The audio book read this as "eye" (or "I", but not 1).
Then the third sentence in the text says "1793-05". The audio was "1793 to 2005". Actually it was 1793 to 1805.
I listened to a few more sentences and had an idea of the state of it currently. The tech has advanced in the past few years, still has a way to go. Insofar as striking actors, they probably should be worried about what the big companies are up to.
Bit of a tangent here but did you get 1805 from context or is YYYY-YY a common year range notation that I'm not aware of? Because I would never guess 1793-05 meant 1793-1805 either.
Read more books.
"I" is the correct text, but it's intended as a Roman numeral and should be read as "one". (And, a few chapters later, "IV" should be read as "four", not "intravenous".)
We'll get there.
A lot of people do not read books (for various reasons: they are blind, they are driving, they are jogging, they are doing chores, they just don't enjoy reading), leaving millions of pieces of art inaccessible to them.
Getting TTS quality up to near human narration level means absolutely everything will become available to them overnight.
It seems like a big win to me.
As for actual creative tasks, that is another matter altogether. I can only hope that real creativity doesn't die out and that TV series and other things don't get any more homogenous than they already have become. At least there are still enjoyable outliers in this plethora of entertainment output. And in some way, audio books can also be creative if they really add emotions that aren't written down exactly. Similar to how the same sheet music can be adapted by different musicians in slightly different ways or instruments and such. Even if all of that could be synthesized, what it means is that selection of the results would become the creative task. Just like stable diffusion and others output hundreds of images for a prompt but only a few are actually interesting. By definition of this automation, you will always end up with more than you can consume and finding the right result for the right people then becomes the next hurdle.
I still wonder though, whether new entertainment really is necessary until the end of times. There probably are already more books and music in the world to last you a lifetime. And after 100 to 200 years of continuous TV and movie output, you probably could just reshow the ones from a decade ago for the next generation, no need to rehash everything. This assumes that there are no new media though, such as maybe walkable VR movies. But even film from decades ago can be remastered in 4k and I begin to doubt that anything above 4k makes much sense. Even 2k is still perfectly fine to me.
It isn’t just the blind who benefit. As you age, eyesight degrades and the mind dulls. At some point, audiobooks are a real boon, especially with PD texts where you can read until you get tired, then listen. Also the growing demographic of live-alone elderly like the background sounds of people talking in their residence, explaining part of the popularity of talk radio. They feel a little less lonely. These audiotexts provide an intellectually varied and overall healthier option. It seems like an Absolute Good to me.
This will help fill the gap for books that would never have an audiobook, or for people that never would have paid anyway (so they aren’t lost customers).
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.03926.pdf
edit: I'm not sure what's particularly exciting about this paper otherwise, it just seems like they parsed the PG html format and then applied some previously developed speech model to them.
It suck for voice actors. If they’re lucky the top percent of them might retain a job due to the novelty or branding of their voice, but most will be unemployed.
edit: erroneously said dictation (which also will be solved :p)
This created jobs from Biblical times, nearly to the present.
https://ai.meta.com/blog/voicebox-generative-ai-model-speech...
https://news.play.ht/post/introducing-playht2-0-the-state-of...
Actors demanding a cut of revenue generated with their likeness I can understand, but trying to stop all AI-gen content, even that which does not imitate a real person and was trained on ethically sourced, non-SAG data, smells like business-model protectionism or even luddism.
You loved cheap tasteless hydroponic tomatoes? You'll love cheap bland voice-acting.
Making these works available to most people is the goal of Project Gutenberg and this is another step in that direction.
They do not have the money to hire voice actors to record audiobooks even for their most popular titles
In a competitive market, bad product drives out good.
> Speaking at the tech-based CogX festival in London, he played a clip of a history documentary that faked his voice, without his knowledge. It appears as though the actor is narrating the show but the AI-generated voice was actually created by technology learning from Fry reading all seven of the Harry Potter audiobooks.
https://www.standard.co.uk/tech/stephen-fry-voice-ai-cloned-...
However, the notion that it's somehow nefarious to create a new voice to read audiobooks (with the permission of the person supplying the training data) is ridiculous.
Do the author and the imaginary picketline behind them take issue with Librivox recordings of public domain works?
AI will enable the creation of voices and people who never were and even the corpus of people used to train the AI wont need to include actors.
If you read books out loud or are an extra you don't and honestly shouldn't expect an income from it and this problem stands to get worse not better.
These is little political will to implement UBI so best get to learning a new profession whilst audio books transition to tools produce dozens of professional virtual voice actors for 19.99 or free if you dont mind user unfriendly open source you have to set up yourself.
It's the other way around. If people cannot expect an income from doing work, the work will be left undone. Or it will be done poorly by cut rate profiteers.
https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/home/cleaning/a20705805/how...
We should also go back to making our own thread, weaving our own cloth, and sewing our own clothes.
Naaah.
Computers haven't replaced chess players because chess is recreation it is an end unto itself not a means to an end.
With voice acting it is the means toward an end which is the finished audio file which can be licenced to consumers for money.
The means costs about 300 usd per hour of finished audio whereas there is every reason to believe software can drive the per unit cost so low its impossible for a human to make a living whilst still being profitable.
Eg most of the work could end up open source leaving someone to provide 2 people to burn 6 months to produce millions of hours of audio. Lets value their time ar 150k per year and suppose they produce 3 million hours the labor cost is roughly 5c per hour.
They can probably afford to offer 4.99 per hour while being wildly profitable even after other costs are considered.
A human being doing a dozen hours a week wouldn't be able to afford a good enough tent to impress the other hobos.
There are now more _professional_ chess players than in the 90s. Because people like to play chess? That's circular reasoning isn't it? People can train and learn from software, with the end goal of being better players and the economics of the game have because of this absorbed more people.
When you take a snapshot of a field of human activity and imagine the next one, you guess there will be less people and more machines. This is naive and unfounded in history. There are now more fashion designers and tailors and a more complex sartorial economy than before robotic looms. Even accounting for population growth. There won't be less voice actors in a generation because of robotic voice acting. There will be a more diverse and more complex economy around producing voice content.
Predicting machines will replace people is predicated on a industrial view of the economy where people are either capitalists or workers and capitalists vie to use capital to reduce labor costs. In practice, many trade-offs apply, and often the introduction of technology changes dynamics in unpredictable ways. Not everything in the economy is some form of inefficient manual labor that can be profitably replaced by a box.
This whole "entitled workers shouldn't expect to deserve an income" smacks of elitist propaganda. Technology changes culture and economy in complex and nuanced ways, and the caricature of workers mad at clever engineers robbing them of cushy jobs is usually just a front for selling some mass produced lower grade substitute. And the people working on the high quality stuff don't get replaced by robots. They learn how to use the technology to innovate and add more value, out-competing these sorts.
Take the auto industry for example. They went heavily into robotics for decades, automated welding heavily and raced to the bottom culminating in a heavy series of recalls in early 00s. Meanwhile, skilled welders have become some of the highest payed industrial workers and what did the auto industry do to climb up the value ladder again? Crammed their cars full of non-robot made software.
I personally am not a big fan of AI but playing devil’s advocate to a degree it seems AI narrated books may be useful for translating works into less common languages.
I hope we can widely implement “generated by AI” labeling for works/items to notify consumers.
Edit: fwiw I have a difficult time listening to audio books read by humans in the first place. But that’s largely irrelevant
This isn't a zero sum game.
If humans want human narrated books, they'll get access to both. Human narration will only disappear if people aren't willing to pay for it. I'm pretty sure that ultimately AI narration will be so much better that human reading will be a niche thing, but I view that as a positive overall. More books get read with high quality narration, and consumers don't have to cover the cost of a human narrator.
Obviously unfortunate for the human narrators, but that's why we should be pushing for UBI - AI and robots are going to eliminate a lot of professions, and I think it's wrong to keep jobs around for no other reason than to keep people employed, especially when doing so ultimately leads consumer costs to be higher. You see this in lots of places now - a big one is the teamsters using their union power to keep automation out of our ports. Literally everyone in the US could benefit from goods moving more quickly, efficiently and cheaply through our transportation infrastructure, but instead everyone has to pay a bit more so humans can keep unnecessary jobs.
Respect your opinion but hope that's not the case.
Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus
https://twitter.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538?...
AI read audiobooks are unlistenable.
I’d argue that no one should be getting AI to read audiobooks it’s a terrible experience.
I find 2 faults with them:
1% of the time I can tell it's a robovoice narrating the MS/PG audiobooks, and
When the book switches back and forth between multiple speakers in a conversation, the MS/PG audio book fail to change voices enough.
I have spent a week downloading most of them, and will continue to leech until I have to whole 1.25 TB collection with a back-up copy.
https://www.audible.com/adblbestsellers
All copyrighted books, fairly recently published ones, not the mostly older public-domain ones Gutenberg does.