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Comment by contravariant | Hacker News Reader

This article is disparaging Project Gutenberg so badly that to me it almost seems to be trying to hurt the cause of the actors currently on strike.

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.

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You'll see this happen whenever the tech becomes slightly widespread. When DALL-E was the only kid on the block, and stable diffusion and midjourney and such barely existed, the media was breathless with excitement over how cool these tools were. Then as soon as sd came out, and made image generation available to a ton more people, without corporate censorship and control, you started to hear about how bad it was, how it was undermining artists, and so forth

>it almost seems to be trying to hurt the cause of the actors currently on strike.

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 gets compounded because there is a blind spot to bad behavior of ingroup people. You know plenty of people on your side who aren’t crazy, so you dismiss the extremists as crazy people on the periphery, while those outside the group see them as examples of the norm of your group.

Yes. Unfortunately none of this is easy. Even if you are sure you are not in a deteriorating cult (pleasant one or not) there is still a ton of blind spots not stemming from social environment but your ego for the lack of a better term. Cognitive biases are a real danger and both advertisement and cognitive warfare target those.

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.

> (especially so for media in the public domain)

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.

Well, I have seen some translators blame translation models for stealing their jobs, especially nowadays that these services like Google Translate, Deepl are based on AI, people are creating parallelism with the ongoing controversy around AI art etc... And attract a lot of attention on Twitter.

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.

"Making stuff that takes a lot of effort virtually effortless is a massive gain to humanity"

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.

That problem is as old as automation itself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-loom_riots

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.

Well they don't have to be happy about it, heck I think it's more than fair they protest when technology impacts their livelihoods. There's even some valid concerns about the way some of these models are trained or exploited.

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.

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