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40,000 AI-narrated audiobooks flood Audible, dividing authors and listeners
(www.techspot.com)
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this post was submitted on 06 May 2024
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I very much understand the misgivings about this, and certain parts make me uncomfortable with it, too. But this could be revolutionary for media accessibility, and in my mind could easily be worth it for the ability to make new media immediately accessible to folks with vision challenges, deaf and hard of hearing individuals, and a lot of other folks for whom most media is not easily interactive/accessible. For many people in this situation, you wait months after a traditional version of something is published before an accessible version is released, if it ever is. Often, it's just not seen as worth a publisher's time to make their content accessible to an audience they don't see as significantly profitable.
Like the printing press took jobs from scribes, but had far more significant impacts democratizing information and education, so might AI in the long run.
As an accessibility add-on / upgrade to standard TTS, sure. Sounds great, even. But I will not accept soulless, robotic, AI-generated voices for something being sold as an audiobook. I just won't.
What about if we sweeten the deal and allow you to choose the voice actor on the fly? Want Star wars novels read by James Earl Jones, or Tolkien read by Arnold Schwarzenegger? You can have that with AI voices.
Lol, there is no sweetening the deal. Every one of those is a lost job opportunity for an actual voice actor.
Except many books get read by the author or never get read at all so it opens new opportunities for people who wouldn't ever use audio books or books who never will get audio version now vision impaired people have the option to hear them.
TTS already exists for the visually impaired. Amazon can use AI voices for that all they want (they're better than the default TTS now). Just don't sell me an "audiobook" that's not read by a person.
How about opening up new opportunities for real (if unknown) voice actors to read these books for people?
There'd be a market for that, just like there's a market for handmade furniture.
"I will not accept soulless robotic machine-generated typescript being sold as a book. I just won't." -Some hipster arguing against the printing press
Not denying audiobook performers don't have real valuable talent (and should be fairly paid for it), but when was the last time you paid a premium for a handwritten novel?
What if Amazon sold TTS voice packages that can read any novel in your catalogue? "Hello yes I would like the James Earl Jones voice package and every Star Wars book ever written please." But the existing audiobook storefront still had only audiobooks read by real people in it, protecting their jobs.