This (and everything else with AI) isn't saying "you don't need good actors any more". It's saying "if you don't have an audiobook, you can make a mediocre one automatically".
AI (text, images, videos, whatever) doesn't replace the top end, it replaces the entire bottom-to-middle end.
An embalming tech for our dying civilization.
Printing presses produce superior products.
A mediocre audiobook is certainly better than no audiobook at all, but it is an inferior product to a well produced audiobook.
That seems like a highly dubitable statement. Many hand illuminated manuscripts are masterpieces of art. The advantage of the printing press was chiefly economical making the cost of a copy dramatically less, not an increase in quality (especially so by the aesthetical standards of the time).
I love audiobooks but at this point, most of what I want to listen to is stuff that would not sell enough to bother having someone read.
There are also many voice actors who I simply don't like the way they read.
A future that I can pick a voice that I like for any PDF is a huge upgrade.
I think a problem people have is if on the young side, maybe didn't expect the future to change like this.
No one I knew went on the internet when I graduated high school. Change like this is all par for the course. The only advice I got in high school from a guidance counselor was that I had a nice voice for radio. Books on tape was not exactly a career option at the time. The culture will survive the death of a career path that didn't even really exist when I was a senior in high school.
Even current SOTA models would almost certainly be able to handle multiple speakers and pick-up on the intended tone and intonation.
Don't make the mistake of thinking what we have today is what we will still be working with in 5 or 10 years.
There will be curation and specialization. Previously ignored niches now will be economically profitable. It will be a Renaissance of creativity, and millions of jobs will be created.
There's a lot more to be said for the value of audio books, but the accessibility gains of proliferated auto-generated audiobooks outweigh the downside of losing a small number of expertly produced audio books.
For context, I listen to audio books a lot, and for years I have listened to traditional TTS readings of books too. Better voice generation for books without audiobooks is a great win for society.
Death of a civilization doesn't mean disappearance of mankind or even overall regression on the long term.
https://ehne.fr/en/encyclopedia/themes/european-humanism/eur...
(To be clear, nothing is solely and exclusively caused by any one thing. Causality is a very fuzzy concept. But sans printing press, those wars certainly wouldn’t have happened when/where/how they did, if they ever happened at all).
Without trains, the logistics of canned food isn't much better than the logistics of any bread-based food you give to your soldiers. It doesn't solve the weight problem which is the key problem with preindustrial army logistical issue.
AI is big and significant, but we'll be ok. There is also no such "one" thing as "our civilisation". We're deeply interconnected extremely vast and complex interconnected networks of ever-changing relationships.
AI does indeed represent the commoditisation of things we used to really value like "craftsmanship in book narration" and "intelligence". But we've had commoditisations of similar media in the past.
Paper used to be extremely expensive, but as time went on, it became more and more commoditised.
Memory used to be extremely expensive (2000-3000 years ago, we needed to encode memory in _dance_, _stories_ and _plays_. Holy shit). Now you can purchase enough memory to store a billion books for maybe two hours of labor.
Most of these things don't really matter. What is happening is that the media landscape is significantly shifting, and that is a tale as old as history.
I do think the intellectual class will be affected the most. People who understand this shift stand to benefit enormously, while those who don't _might_ end up in a super awful super low class.
And yet, all of that doesn't really matter if you just move to, I dunno, Paramaribo or whatever. The people there are pragmatic and friendly. They don't care about AI too much. Or maybe New Zealand, or Iceland, or Peru, or Nepal or I don't know.
The world isn't ending. Civilisation isn't being destroyed at our core.
The media landscape is changing, classes are shifting, power-relationships are changing. I suggest you think deeply about where you want to live, what you stand for and what is most important to you in life.
I don't need money or tech to be happy. I am fine with just my cats, my closest friends and family and healthy food.
If it happens to be the case that I need to leave tech or that extremely high-end narrated audiobooks cease to exist? Then all I have to say is "oh no, anyway".
We'll be fine. One way or another.
Just different.
This stance always reminds me of the Profession, a 1957 novella by Isaac Asimov that depicts pretty much the future where there are only top performers and the ignorant crowd.
The "top-enders" are the privileged who need to have some of their gains for their intelligence redistributed to others. The alternative is "survival of the smartest", which is de-facto what we have today and what Young was trying to warn us about.
IMGO(gut opinion), generative AI is a consumption aid, like a strong antacid. It lets us be done with $content quicker, for content = {book, art, noisy_email, coding_task}. There's obvious preconceptions forming among us all from "generative" nomenclature, but lots of surviving usages are rather reductive in relevant useful manners.
Even on the non-fiction side, the narration for Gleick's The Information adds something.
While I want this tool for all the stuff with no narration, NYT/New Yorker/etc replacing human narrators with AI ones has been so shitty. The human narrators sound good, not just average. They add something. The AI narrators are simply bad.
Can someone with low vision tell me if this would be useful to them? It may be that specialist tools already do this better.
The real question is "what tools are they already using and how can I make sure those tools are providing higher quality output?". There are standards in browsers for these kinds of things (ways to hint navigation via accessibility tools for example).
Yes, that was my second thought. But I'd rather ask someone than rely on my assumptions.
oh, and it's also a boon for those who can't afford to buy audiobooks.
They are also different activities, with audio it's easier to listen to more but retention is usually lower. Not casting any elitist "you need to read" bullshit by the way, but find it odd to define it in terms of lack of time, and I really like both mediums.
there are other factors as well. i love reading so much that i tend to forget time around me. as a result reading would cause me to neglect other duties. i can't allow that, and therefore i am forced to avoid reading. i also don't like long form reading on electronic devices, and as a frequent traveler, printed books are simply not practical and often not even accessible.
i agree with the retention issue, but i found that a much larger factor for retention is how well i can follow the story. a good story that is easy to get into is also easier to retain. and finally, reading fiction is for entertainment. i don't have to retain it.
There's a few categories where it makes sense to roll your eyes, like if they say they have no time to shower or have never been to one of their kid's baseball games.
But for things that aren't basic human expectations, I think you'd have to a real jerk to roll your eyes at someone not having time. No time to cook multi-pot dishes? No time to exercise? No time to read? No time to go to museums? No time to meet at the bar for a drink? Any of them sensible.
No one can do everything, we all make our priorities and its well within their choice not to have any one optional life thing at the top of their personal stack.
Why are you trying to argue about their preference? They didn't cast any judgement on others with different preferences.
This is nothing like “no time for exercise”.
It's more like "I have no time (preference) to fire up the wood stove so I use microwave" and then you come in with "wow so you roll your eyes at us fire stove users?"
I wonder if a standardized markup exists to do so.
With LLMs proving to be very good at generating code, it may be reasonable to assume they can get good at generating SSML as well.
Not sure if there is a more direct way to channel the interpretation of the tone/context/emotion etc from prose into generated voice qualities.
If we train some models on ebooks along with their professionally produced human-narrated audiobooks, with enough variety and volume of training data, the models might capture the essence of that human-interpretation of written text? Just maybe?
Amazon with its huge collection of Audible + Kindle library -- if it can do this without violating any rights -- has a huge corpus for this. They already have "whispersync" which is a feature that syncs text in a kindle ebook with words in corresponding audible audiobook.
Probably the results with a model trained for this plus human audit could lead to very good results.
TortoiseTTS has a few examples under prompt engineering on their demo site: https://nonint.com/static/tortoise_v2_examples.html
But the difference to good audio books is that you have * different voices for the narrator and each character * different emotions and/or speed in certain situations.
I guess you could use a LLM to "understand" and annotate an existing book if there's a markup and then use TTS to create an audio book from it and so automate most of the the process.
"Annotate the following text with speakers and emotions so that it can be turned into an audiobook via TTS", followed by a short text from "The Hobbit" (The "Good morning scene"). The result is very good.
Just imagine what this would do for writers. They can get instant feedback and adjust their book for the audiobook.
New authors, self-publishers, can't afford tens of thousands of dollars to get an audiobook recorded professionally... This can limit their distribution.
Authors might even choose not to make such version (or lack confidence to record themselves), so AI capable of making a decently passable version would be nice -- something more than reading text blandly. AI in theory could attempt to track the scene and adjust.
Anyway, even if in theory it might, in practice things may end even worse than doing it with a monotone voice.
My example, I was never a Wheel of Time fan, but the new audio editions done by Rosamund Pike are quite the performance, and make me like the story. She brings all the characters to life in a way thats different than just reading. It's a true performance.
Computer chess took a long time to get better than the best players in the world, but it was better than most chess players for many years before that. We're seeing that a lot with these generative models.
On the other, some of my favorite audio books all stood out because the narrator was interpreting the text really well, for example by changing the pacing during chaotic moments. Or those audiobooks with multiple narrators and different voices for each character. Not to mention that sometimes the only cue you get for who's speaking during dialogue is how the voice actor changes their tone. I have mixed feelings about using this and losing some of that quality.
I would totally use this over amateur ebooks or public domain audiobooks like the ones on project guttenberg. As cool as it is/was for someone to contribute to free books... as a listener it was always jarring to switch to a new chapter and hear a completely different voice and microphone quality for no reason.