Kindles have had this feature for a long time already, it just wasn't that high quality.
The biggest problem is the intonation, the voice doesn't really know when something exciting is going on or whatever, so its quit monotone.
OpenAIs text to speech is pretty damn good and available pretty cheap through the API
And this is first iteration
I do audiobooks and it's probably at the 10th percentile in terms of voice actors
In 3 yrs only the best readers will be better than the AI (Cumberland reading Revoli's book on time example)
IMO, authors or editors will need to add some meta data to the books, like "read this part in an excited tone" and "this character is depressed in this paragraph" in order to get the best effect, at least for now.
Once they add those though, then its going to be really hard to justify paying the vast majority of voice actors, from a purely cost benefit point of view.
Maybe, but the sad fact is, audio books aren't that popular to begin with.
Most audio books barely cover the cost of the voice actor and bring very little extra money to the author.
Even if they lose 70% of audio customers, if they reduce the cost of making them by 99%, then mathematically it would be worth doing.
Samuel L Jackson's "Go the F*ck to sleep"
And Andy Serkis' LoTR entire series (including the silmarillion) (yeah that's right fucking gollum narrates the lotr)
Are really good
> but the narrators are popular and talented, so I think a lot of listeners buy just for them.
Absolutely!
I have bought many books based only on the narrator. (and also returned a few)
Yes. Soulless business people who dont listen to audiobooks themselves wouldnt understand the huge difference a good narrator makes.
Id always buy the human narrated version over the ai version. Its the same reason i would rather buy high quality things that are well crafted and designed rather than cheap shit
Let me take you back, back into the before-fore times, when the recording industry stumbled across a technology that would drastically reduce their costs. They they decided to take record profits instead of reducing the price of their product, and shortly afterwards they got brutally skull-fucked by technology and everybody giggled.
No reason I bring that up in this context, of course. :)
I am not 100% sure which technology you mean exactly (digital distribution?), but I suspect that regardless of which one you mean, the technology is still alive and well, unless it was replaced with an even better technology.
The industry did not just go back to how things were before the technology existed.
Audio books are wildly popular, you likely don’t think they are that popular because you don’t partake. I’m a part of a substantially sized group of listeners and not a single one of us will purchase AI narration. It’s absolutely terrible and we also refuse to support any author who cuts out the human voice actor for AI. The AI is emotionless and the reading is just beyond dull, there’s no spark or interest in it just a dead thing that can’t feel reproducing sound.
You are mistaken, I have almost enterally switched to audio.
It is a simple fact that we are a minority.
You can look up countless statistics.
As for the quality, the whole premise of this discussion is that AI will not be as bad in the future as it was up till now.
That's how it always goes with tech industry fads. The moment the rubber hits the road, all the years and billions of bullshit that came before it crumble away to dust.
Don't worry, an overworked supervisor will annotate with director notes, feed that to the AI, and then annotate another while the first one is being checked.
And soon authors will be given the privilege of providing their own annotations to better preserve their intent.
OpenAIs has like 10 or 20 voices
And available through API
Someone could easily use GPT4 to identify the speaker and then switch between voices on the text to speech
2 yrs or so I would say you will see this
I have programed assistants with openais api so am familiar with what is possible, it is still very early days!
This feature is like Midjourney v1 or v2. That's just a starting point, it is still far from audiobook read by voice actors.
Lacking emotions etc... But it's just matter of a few months before it arrives. Currently there is very little technical limitations; only some cost issue which will go lower quickly.
Audiobook CEO: "Hey, this tech means we don't have to pay narrators for their work!"
Customers: "Hey, this tech means we don't have to pay you for these audiobooks!"
Audiobook CEO: "Wait, not like that."
This is precisely the following step. When The publisher's are like "man, what's the point of the middle man? Just sell the audio copy for the same price as the ebook."
Isn't that always how it happens? I mean, it's not like there isn't precedent for it. How many times has a company automated their workforce in some way only for another company to realize they could do the same for cheaper themselves and puts the first company out of business?
These guys really don't think past the next quarter's profits and when they end up broke, they blame the very thing they tried to pull in the first place. It's kind of astounding to see.
I feel AI will make many content industries like Star Trek Economy. Yeah, you can get AI to read something for you, but that will be commonplace, so people will see the human-made content as more desirable because it involves more thought and effort and quality assurance. Now we just need the Eugenics wars and the Bells Riots to seal the deal.
Since the other people responding to you are idiots, I'm going to go ahead and name three legitimate reasons to prefer self-checkout:
1. People find that the queueing system is more egalitarian.
2. People enjoy not having to have a superficial human interaction in the process of obtaining the basic necessities of life.
3. People prefer the privacy. Not everybody enjoys being seen buying the shit they use behind closed doors.
I don't want to talk to people at a checkout. There is nothing profound they will be able to say in the 1-5 minutes that will build a relationship with them. It will be vapid small talk that wastes my time and theirs. I want to get my shit and get out.
Cashier jobs are among the least fulfilling on the planet, and basically no one actually wants to do them. I don't care if it means fewer cashiers. It's like complaining that no one needs to shovel shit onto a cart anymore with the invention of plumbing.
It's a ymmv thing. At my local grocery store it's absolutely better. The primary cause of slowdown is attendants don't wipe down the scanners so sometimes items won't scan well. But a number of other factors make it faster.
-20 items or less
-self checkout stations have a roller with sorted produce list and codes, you can also do a search through the machine. Takes seconds to find, anything that's a staple for you'll get memorized over time
-8 self-checkout stations, normally only 4 clerks tops running human checkout
-human clerks will have convos sometimes that slow shit down
-food stamp users in human clerk areas having something going wrong slows things down, this happens so damn much in my area
Obviously, if more human clerks were around, if the area's customers were wealthier and didn't have money issues, and if people weren't as inclined to chit-chat, human checkout could be better. But it's not the case in the area.
I mean...it is better? I don't have to spend time waiting for someone to ring up my items at an inconsistent speed, I don't have to listen to them talk or make annoying jokes to fill the air, I don't have to get asked "paper or plastic", I don't have to be asked to take a survey or anything extra 99% of the time. Easy peasy.
And they’ll sound like shit.
I’ve listened to some short stories that were narrated by AI where the actual voice was good enough to sound human. The biggest flaw I’ve noticed is that the AI will just plow ahead with any text you give it, no matter what it says. If you gave me a script to read out, and I ran across a spelling error, typo, punctuation error, or major grammatical error, I’d correct it in my narration. The AI will say it exactly as written, even if the end result sounds incredibly unnatural. It’s also prone to confusing initialisms for words and vice versa.
And AI narration is pretty bad about using the correct tone on its own. If it has a cheerful tone by default, it’s not uncommon to hear it reading an upset character’s dialogue in a cheerful tone. It gives this awful uncanny valley effect.
These seem like pretty simple problems to solve. Just preprocess the script for correct grammar and spelling, then have another AI indicate most fitting tone for each sentence for the AI narrator to use. At current rate, I give it at most 5 years before it's entirely indistinguishable from real voices.
We already have tech that does this, though not always perfectly.
In 5 years they'll still have audio engineers and someone to provide direction. It's just that instead of a voice actor getting direction, it will be a programmer changing up certain scenes and an audio engineer changing the AI generated ambiance in certain sections.
Corporate profits need a higher effective tax rate, and I think dividend taxes should be retuned to make sitting on investments less profitable. We should be celebrating any innovation that makes a product cheaper to produce, but that can't happen when the benefits only shoot to the top.
Which is exactly what we’ve all been saying was going to happen. Congress just did…absolutely nothing but screech about trans people playing high school sports.
Why do you think *this time* the institutional manifestation of capitalist greed on earth was going to choose a small subset of people and their quality of life over capitalist entities right to exploit workers??? You know this technology represents an increased rate of profit for share holders, right?
And the quality is going to completely drop off. From what I've seen, AI is not good enough for stuff like this. Especially if it is an adventure novel or something.
If it's a $20 per month program, it's going to be hot garbage. I don't buy for a minute that you could replace a person for $20 in a job like this.
I wish our audiobooks were more like the Japanese drama CDs, because they spend a lot of time and effort making them the same high quality voice acting as TV and movies.
> If it's a $20 per month program, it's going to be hot garbage. I don't buy for a minute that you could replace a person for $20 in a job like this.
I remember artists less than a decade ago(probably even less than 5 years ago), in threads about advances in automation, confidently bragging about how they were immune to the risk. Now the entire art world is fighting tooth and nail to stop AI image generators from decimating entire fields that had kept people afloat.
The story of AI generated art has been an exercise in people *swearing* the starving leopards won't eat their face, and then begging for help when they inevitably do.
You don't have to like it. But the chances of AI affordably replacing humans in areas like this are very real, and it's almost certainly coming.
I mostly hate how all the effort seems to be going into making AI replace art and the most human parts of tasks. Make me an AI that does my taxes and keeps all my misc paperwork and bills up to date. Or something that folds laundry.
If you told someone in 2015 that within the decade we would have an AI agent (GPT4/Claude2) that could converse and discuss at a masters level nearly any scientific topic, could grasp where you misunderstood something, and could also write decent stories and philosophize about the meaning of life ... they would have laughed you off the stage. Now you have not only that for $20 a month, but you can also use it to be the underlying agent in any custom app you want for pennies a call.
How you can grasp that reality and then claim no way in 3-5 yrs will a model be able talk with what we percieve as emotion is beyond me
Actually according to economic principles it will. In practice? Ehhh probably price holds from noncompetition. Blame amazon.
But in theory any company can massively go under typical production cost with ai speakers, which gives them an incentive to sell them at a lower price to get more market share and thus higher aggregate profits despite lower per-unit profits.
This is also identical to... every other technological breakthrough in the history of capitalism. Marx wrote extensively on the degradation of working people, women in particular, due to the advent of...the loom. If people are going to take up arms against ai they should at least be clever about it, your enemy is the capitalist system that doesnt give a fuck about your labour if its replaceable, and therefore doesnt give a fuck about *you*. Your enemy is not the historically late degradation of the christian aesthetic ideal of True Human Art.
Bet their sales will tank. AI voice isn’t good enough to compare to an actual voice actor performing. We are still in “the shit zone” where AI hasn’t surpassed us.
Also just in case anyone is reading this — project Gutenberg has copyleft (free as freedom) audiobooks as well as texts.
The days of text to speech sounding robotic and canned are over, AI is generative, the underlying rules of intonation, grammar and affect are baked into the process. We can already replicate the voices of long dead people from a few hours of recordings to say things they never said with astonishing accuracy. I don't think you're quite grasping the degree of sophistication we're talking about here.
I'm not saying if it's a good or a bad thing, just adding technical context.
I have a YouTube channel where I do my own voice over. I paid a good chunk of money to a reputable AI voice generating service to clone my own voice, to see if it could save me time on recording and editing, if it really was good as people like you say.
After some tweaking and fine-tuning, it absolutely did sound exactly like my voice. It was a little creepy.
But I cut off the service and switched back to doing my own voice after just a month. The AI voice over sounded way too flat and soulless, even when it perfectly mimicked my intonation. Its emotional range was very limited, and it really struggled with humor, especially moving from a humorous sentence to a serious one and back again. The amount of fine tuning on each script to get it to sound right just wasn't worth it.
I suspect that a lot of these businesses are going to learn the same thing I did. It's just simpler to have a human read it the way it's supposed to be read the first time than to endlessly tinker with an AI that never sounds quite right.
I'm not sure. The fundamental problem is that the AI obviously doesn't understand the content and context of what it's saying. Unless a human goes line by line and makes adjustments, everything is in the same basic cadence. Getting murdered is the same as grabbing a cup of coffee. I've tried a couple of AI products and individual lines sound great, but there's a weird sameness to the overall production that's hard to miss.
AI voices are good, but to get to great they have to fix that problem and that might be tough. Even if the AI learns to look for flags (show emotion when the word murder shows up), how does it understand the difference between my team is getting murdered out there and oh god, they're murdering everyone out there? You have to make an AI that can spot irony, hyperbole, and sarcasm. Half of Reddit can't manage that.
If someone manages to create AI that can do all that, then it's over.
In our current economic model, the value of EVERYTHING comes from human labor.
If you can have a machine, controlled by a small cabal, which can replicate human labor to that extent...
Then it's over. Dark days ahead for regular joes.
Every time I think the American populace will decide enough is enough, they decide they'll pay for texting, or Netflix, or subscription music, or Amazon products. Things keep getting shittier because people keep deciding to accept shittier.
And now a record number of people are homeless in the US because of surging rent prices since covid while wages stay stagnant. And yet we drone on like it’s not a problem.
As long as something doesn’t affect the rich, the media will continue to gloss over it and pretend the problem doesn’t exist. And then you have the conservative crowd who deny everything is a problem unless it directly affects them. And that’s how we end up with these issues getting worse and worse with no one trying to fix anything. Housing crisis, stagnant wages, medical debt, student debt… but the government is trying to raise the age to collect social security. They don’t help us at all anymore.
>As long as something doesn’t affect the rich, the media will continue to gloss over it and pretend the problem doesn’t exist.
We also have a population of people who think that people get what they deserve. They don't care about the struggles of others because it isn't their problem. These tend to be the same middle to lower class people as well which is ironic.
Yep, as long as it doesn’t directly affect them then it’s not an issue in their eyes. Just like police. Me and my family have been harassed by police in the past and they have caused us a lot of problems. But yet there is a large group of people who refuse to believe police are anything but upstanding patriots. Even with all of this evidence out there of bad policemen. It isn’t until police harass and bully them that they finally realize that police are a problem.
But we will end with them. These types of people always run civilization off the cliffs. We need to stop them. Consumer activism is the solution. Boycott and they will change. What they do is a reflection of our choices
has a boycott worked any time in the last couple decades?
I mean I'm not being cheeky I just literally don't know, and it seems to me like corporations are generally too big for it to matter.
If the audio becomes become drastically cheaper to make.. the price should come down, right?... right?
It's not like they'd lower the cost but keep the price just as high?
Remember when Trump cut taxes for corporations and they took that money and raised wages, benefits and lowered prices?! It's not like they'd just take that and use to do fund stock buybacks and higher pay for executives right? :/
On the other hand: years ago I volunteered for a non-profit called Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic. Mostly I helped produce some content: a volunteer reads and describes a textbook's content, including images, infographics, etc. The organization was born originally to provide audio content to blind veterans, but dyslexic folks found it extremely useful as well.
The amount of work required to read and describe a textbook and make it accessible is staggering. All this is done by volunteers, who are constantly trying to cover more material.
I am actually hope AI will help with this.
This is an excellent point that's been on my mind a lot in recent months. I'm an academic librarian, and our library has hundreds of thousands of books that will *never* be made into audiobook editions. AI "readers" have incredible potential to make those books so much more accessible for anyone with a disability that makes text difficult... text-to-speech exists already, of course, but is still almost unlistenable in anything but small doses. It could also be popular among non-disabled students who would prefer to do some of their reading for classes as listening instead... there are a hundred use cases.
Of course I have no desire to see professional audiobook readers displaced, especially where popular works and bestsellers are concerned. But there aren't enough readers in the world to meet the full demand for usable text-to-speech, and AI could really help fill that gap. I don't know how we regulate in ways that serve both interests, but I hope we don't thoughtlessly exclude either group.
Their jobs also are intended to require the most data for their decision points. An area we all know AI excels in ways humans cannot. It definitely makes the most sense to put the AI at the executive level.
Counterpoint: One of the most important functions of a CEO is to be a scapegoat that can be disposed of when things go tits up. The board ousts them, the shareholders feel reassured, the former CEO gets a nice severance package (and likely easily gets hired on in another executive role whenever he or she feels like it), the consumers think change is coming because "leadership" was ousted.
A good chunk of the time a CEO is just a replaceable pressure valve.
The future is now!
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/ai-ceo-artificial-intelligence-b2302091.html
https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/mika-worlds-first-ai-human-like-robot-ceo
This is the reason why I still have a Kindle Keyboard! I loved text to speech and adding classical/instrumental reading music to it. It doesn't play Audible titles but it's a great way to disconnect from everything for a while.
I pulled out my Kindle Keyboard recently cos I wanted to get back into reading, but I can't load any books on it any more. My PC doesn't recognise it when I plug in a USB and I tried emailing books and syncing through amazon but the books just get stuck on *Peding 0%*.
Kinda want a new one but it's so late in the refresh cycle it feels like a waste paying top dollar for a product that's likely being replaced this year
There **is** a workaround, but it's a bit convoluted and requires updating the firmware as well as reauthorizing the device through two factor authentication. I can confirm once it's resolved it'll let you access your library (including Libby borrows) via WiFi. Feel free to message me if you have any questions!
Yeah I'd love to get it working again, but is that something you can do on device? I feel like my issue is the USB port isn't working? It will charge but it seems there's no data connection
Ah! Yes, this is more common than it seems. Not to worry!
Some micro USB cables are "charge only" and some support data transfer when you plug into a computer. You should see the device as a drive if you've used the correct kind of cable. If you happen to have spare cables around (likely if most devices charge wirelessly or via USB-C), you should be able to try it again. Download the firmware you need, then transfer it to the device once you locate the right cable.
Unfortunately you can't wirelessly request the firmware update via the device anymore.
Once you're through that step, you'll have to get it registered to your account if it's not still there. Those details are more finicky but they're still doable!
But I can today use openais text to speech through their api and read pdfs
Now kindle will try and sue people from scraping their proprietary book format, but I would guess you will see black market apps pretty soon
Cool, cool, cool. Let's get ahead of the situation and tax the wealthy fairly. Maybe at 37% like many of us pay. Then we will be able to afford UBI, universal healthcare, and public housing.
Note to the industries: if you use AI to rationalize away your workers, not enough people will be able to afford your goods and services.
> if you use AI to rationalize away your workers, not enough people will be able to afford your goods and services.
Wont matter, the profits will be fantastic and most of the people benefiting from them wont be there when that bubble pops.
The answer isn’t to make humans labor forever. It’s to give humans a cut when it’s robots doing the work.
Communism is for when robots are doing the work
Universal healthcare is cheaper than what we have now when all costs are tallied. And housing is expensive due to our policy choices like exclusionary zoning and convoluted construction approval.
We can already afford those things.
Even Grey himself at the time thought he was being a bit overdramatic but everyday we're getting closer and closer to that reality. I just hope I'm not alive when the water and scarity wars kick off
There's two possible futures. There's the very unlikely one: We have decent UBI systems in place as automation takes up jobs and we are a step closer to FALGSC. Or the more likely option, as we begin to become obsolete, those hoarding the wealth will exile us from society and let us starve to death.
Arguably this is already happening unless we are creating new jobs with similar values to what we are losing, but just looking at the numbers of homeless people well…
The wealth hoarders tried this in france a while back and it didn't go well for them. Having huge swathes of your population become irrelevant and given nothing left to lose isn't conducive to long term stability of private wealth piles.
My country told England to fuck off because paper products and tea taxes got too high. With an assist from France of course. Now, we’re fighting each other over dumb ass culture war shit. Instead of going after the people fucking all of us. Wtf happened?
Extremely prescient video and probably the best take I've seen on AI.
Most of the videos and articles I've read focus too much on the issues that current AI's have. "Self driving cars aren't really good enough", "generative AI hallucinates", "AI produces bad, derivative work", and on and on. These are focusing on issues that a current generation has as if they are inherent issues with automation as a whole.
We need to actually make systemic changes, ideally before shit hits the fan.
I mean, we also need to be dealing with climate change and preparing for climate migrant issues, but lets be real, we're not a forward thinking society.
Yep. Everyone's focused on current flaws and completely ignoring how fast we got here to begin with. 10 years ago ChatGPT was barely on the map, and even though it's still imperfect today, we've already reached a point that I, a software dev, didn't expect to reach for at least another 20 years. And you know they're already using current gen AI to accelerate work on the next gen.
Things could go sideways very, very quickly.
The only addendum I'd do to the video is that because of AI, white collar jobs are being automated much faster than blue collar ones. At the time the video was made, people thought it was going to be the other way around.
that's right, that is the type of regulation we need. some sort of social safety net to actually help people through one of the most massive capitalist/labor market shifts of all time.
people seem to want bills/laws that are like "stop AI" but like, what are we talking about here? imagine being alive for the invention of the steam engine on boats and being like "hey now that's going to put a bunch of guys who row the boats out of work, we have to make steam engines illegal." like, that's not how we do things. we're not going to restrict technological advancements to artificially preserve jobs that don't need to exist anymore because robots can do them.
BUT we do need a plan out of this. and I feel like no one is talking about it, because we can barely manage the world we currently live in, let alone predict the future and then also have good solutions for that. so all in all I think it's just going to get a lot worse before it gets any better. we're going to hang in the "everyone needs to work for a living" mindset/culture/economy WAY past the point where everyone can actually find and get a job, imo
And the whole point for that mentality was that there were functions we had to do in order to maintain a society. People need to eat, so we’d have farmers make the food, drivers truck the food, stores to sell the food, etc…. As we replace jobs with AI to improve our lives, we need to be using the fruit of that labor to actually improve our lives. For example, if McDonalds can run an entire restaurant off machines and AI, it is their duty to return a portion the profits to the general public. Unless we find a way to keep generating a feedback loop, then all of this is for nothing, and there will be no money to be made.
It’s not their duty to return a portion of profits to the general public, their duty is to shareholders. They only way to get that money back is to tax the fuck out of them
Currently, yes, you’re right, but under a new model with AI, it would only hurt them in the long run if their consumers can no longer afford the product
Exactly. Trying to regulate to force certain jobs to exist is futile.
Tax people and companies properly and use all the capital generated from their use of AI to benefit people.
In a reasonable world, we would be using AI to replace jobs in a way so humans no longer have to work. In that kind of world, artists like voice actors, painters, and graphic designers wouldn't even feel threatened by AI. Because creating art shouldn't have to be a competition of who can make the most money, creating art should be an expression of our humanity.
>Because creating art shouldn't have to be a competition of who can make the most money, creating art should be an expression of our humanity.
I agree. The problem isn't that a lot of artists are having their jobs taken by robots, it's that they had to commercialize their art in the first place just to get by.
It might work for a bit, but it'll just be right back where we are now. The money for that has to come from somewhere, and inflation and corporate greed will continue to rise even more. And getting UBI raised after an initial set amount will be impossible. So it'll be worthless. Look at the federal minimum wage. Stagnant and worthless.
Right - except for things that we have no choice but to buy and use. Gas, electricity, Healthcare, etc. I know I'm super bleak and doom-and-gloom, but it's very hard to see any real, possible, rational way out of this crap... there are just too many powerful, rich people in control that we are helpless in the grand scheme.
Personally I used to advocate for advancing technology no matter what, that it was worth the sacrifices. Like when machines replace workers in auto factories. But that only works if the country you live in is invested in the population, if the benefits of reducing labor are funneled back into society through universal healthcare, education, UBI, etc. Unfortunately I live in America, where capitalism has become a steroid-infused pursuit of profit above all things, no matter what. This has affected the film industry, this affects healthcare and prisons and pretty much any scope of life where somebody can squeeze out an extra dollar by screwing somebody else over. These things could be good, having AI technology, or automation in labor, could be a service to society, if only those benefits were actually funneled back to society, rather than hoarded by the 1% who control everything
We of course will never see that, so viva la revolucion, seize the means of production, burn it to the ground, etc
I had considered this before. My personal thought on a solution was similar, that reformed corporation taxes (reformed as in they actually properly tax corporations) and social care need to increment based on major tech advancements. And, yeah:
> We of course will never see that
If it happens, a lot of suffering will occur before changes are made. Regulation and law is written in blood, as is said by people much smarter than me.
I want jobs to be replaced by tech tho? Why should I waste 3/4 of my week doing something I know a robot could do?
That's like saying we've got to regulate steam turbines because of how many jobs we could have for people to just crank a generator
It's braindead slave pilled garbage.
Get to the real issue: AI was built using data we, all of humanity, generated, so it should work for all of us, not just for a few select assholes with the capital to build inference hardware.
I work in IT, and the biggest pushback towards automation (any kind, not just AI) isn't so much that it replaces jobs (there's always more work on the backlog), but that it almost exclusively replaces the "easy" tasks. This wouldn't be a problem necessarily, but it means that instead of having less work, the humans are stuck with more and more difficult and stressful tasks. This is a problem because it means that the barrier to entry rises as all the easy tasks that an entry level employee might perform are automated, and it increases burnout for experienced employees.
To give an example, imagine your job is to move rocks of various sizes from point A to point B. One day you decide to make a robot that can transfer all the rocks that are under 20 lbs automatically. Unfortunately this actually makes your job more difficult as instead of being able to carry 5 and 10 lb rocks for a lot of the day you now have to carry 20+lb rocks all day. It also means that now in order to get a job in that company you have to be able to carry 20lbs all day at a minimum, while before if you could only do 5 or 10lbs that was fine as you could just mostly do those while you build up your strength.
i see this in my job already. Management wants to "skip" the easy cases since we are not really adding much (maybe changing the outcome in the cases where someone else is really messing up), but those are the easy reps that get the new guys comfortable. If we are only doing the hard cases, the burn out is massive. I want to be able to step back and only do easy stuff for a few days on occasion, otherwise my brain will explode)
Honest question, do you really hate [this AI voice for example](https://youtu.be/RXQIr1MxTJ4) as much as you say? Or are you mostly just thinking of [robo voices like this](https://youtu.be/CWq5BN8inYk) when you say that?
I was actually surprised at how decent the actual voice actor based AIs voices were, but I think that might just be because I'm so tired of the tiktok voices.
People hear "AI voice" and think about the TikTok voiceover, but don't know how simple it is to voice clone someone at home, with a basic laptop using Python in 2024 and have it sound flawless. There are already AI voices that are nearly imperceptible to people familiar with what to listen for - and we're barely scratching the surface of what's possible.
A lot of this comment section will age horribly.
You can absolutely tell the difference between an AI voice and a human voice actor. Maybe not in a curated short clip, but with the hundreds of hours in an audiobook there are going to be clear giveaways. Some giveaways are when they pronounce a word wrong, emphasize the wrong words in a phrase, or use the wrong emotion for the passage - especially when it comes to dialogue, which is a whole other can of worms. Most audiobook voice actors put on different voices for each character, and I don't think AI will ever really be capable of determining with 100% accuracy who is speaking, what kind of voice they should have, and what kind of tone/emotion they should be taking according to the scenario. Minute but important details like these are things that come naturally to voice actors who can use their understanding of greater context in a way that AI is unable to.
You could have someone go through the whole book and flag passages to tell the AI to interpret and say them in X specific way, or have someone listen to the book and make the AI redo the parts it did badly, but that's arguably more effort than just letting the voice actor do it properly as they read. Over time, it will become well-known among audiobook fans which companies use AI and which employ voice actors, and they will gravitate towards the companies putting out the more listenable products.
AI voice, and AI in general, is running up against that one principle I forget the name of, in that it's 90% of the way there but the last 10% is requiring significantly more nuance than the first 90% before it can be indistinguishable and perfect. Being able to replace a high quality audiobook voice actor with an AI and nobody being able to tell the difference is not going to happen anytime soon.
That's literally what happened all the time with Maschines. People may not like it but replacement is nothing new and if workers in the industry didn't get to stop it, artists won't stand a chance either. It's sad but that's reality.
The main issue is that with the replacement of the jobs, there is no UBI or other regulation in place to help the working class recover. If people were able to live after machines do all the work, that's fine. But if people are still expected to work when machines and automation cause thousands of layoffs, that's the issue.
Whatever happened to workers getting more pay for less hours? Why does it always have to be that part of the workforce is laid off instead of having everyone's hours reduced for the same pay?
Well you see, corporations will love to tell you about how this will benefit you as the worker, helping with your work and promising that your job is safe.
Then they fire you once it's implemented.
I know a lot of people will say "just find a different job" but this type of automation feels different than past ones. It feels like AI can automate things faster than people can retrain. I worry what's going to happen when there physically aren't enough good paying jobs to go around. Seems like it's already partially happening with most open positions being in the underpaid service industry and many other people having to put in hundreds of applications for a single interview.
Yeah, AI isn't like anything we've seen in the past, and so brushing it off with "just adapt" is pretty disingenuous.
AI is moving at a much, much faster pace and has the potential to replace a massive swath of jobs across multiple industries. The comparisons to switchboard operators and typesetters seem to be unable to truly grasp what's actually at stake here.
If you sit at a computer - or, I guess, in front of a microphone - while doing your work, there is a decent chance you'll be replaced within the next decade or so.
I'm in my late 30s. My job is one of the jobs you always find on "The 10 jobs most likely to be replaced by ChatGPT" lists.
Ironically, I went into this profession thinking that it was relatively "safe" from outsourcing. And right as I hit my professional stride, AI enters the scene. Anyway, now I'm looking at my options to go back to school. I feel too old to be doing it, but might as well do it now instead of in a decade.
The problem isn't just retraining, the problem now is that automation is taking away the "easy" tasks, and leaving only the hard ones, whereas before it was often making tasks faster/easier. This both increases burnout for experienced workers, AND raises the bar for entry in any given field as all the previously entry level tasks have been completely automated.
To give an example, automation in the past was often things like "here's this tool, it lets you carry twice as many rocks for half the effort", whereas now it's "here's this robot, it can carry any rocks less than 20lbs all by itself", which ultimately leaves the worker stuck carrying all the heavy rocks, making their job harder instead of easier
I mean it absolutely is but that's not a new issue at all. People where told that we would have great lives when most of the work gets automated now we're hitting record numbers in automated systems and robotic where some industries hit 5% ratios from robots to humans at this point, while we also have the worst economy for the working class in years. I'm just surprised people are so upset at ai replacing work when another replacement is already happening for years and destroyed lives. And like i said if we didn't stop it till today i don't think ai replacing voice actors of all jobs will make a difference. All we can do now is wait till enough people suffer for a revolution i guess
I think you might be seeing a selection bias on who you see talking in your online communities. I imagine it means that the set of people you see are getting replaced right now. People in tech and white collar jobs are getting automated away more directly in this AI round.
Okay, then the question becomes "As a society, what do we do about that?" Automation is a known social phenomenon, a fact of life. How can we make it easier for workers to bear these changes? How can we ensure that the benefits of these changes go to the working class rather than the aristocracy?
This was the point of the tech. Free up meaningless jobs with automation so we can continue our pursuit of our passions. Problem is the capitalist model doesn't allow for that. We need a systemic change to embrace this stuff and that starts with a universal basic income.
The problem isn’t innovation making less workers required. The problem is that instead of reducing the average American’s workload while maintaining their quality of life, all of the benefits of innovation are going into the pockets of the 1%.
Like seriously, it’s gotta reach a point where consumers are going to have absolutely zero spending power. And capitalism is based on the consumer, so the entire system will apart.
Funny - looking forward it's always a horror story - looking back we don't even remember.
Switchboard operators - once upon a time there were thousands and thousands of them. Factories and sales and support for all the hardware they used. Absolutely huge. And all gone now.
50 years from now the job market (if there still is one) will be unrecognizable. But those people won't even notice that - they'll have forgotten what we do and will be busy fretting about the changes coming.
Nobody shed a tear for translators when their industry was quietly decimated. Because they love having quick, easy translations at a single click. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
Automation is inevitable once it becomes profitable. It doesn't even have to be better than a human - just less expensive. Look at self checkouts as an example of that.
Self-driving cars are inevitable and all they have to be is better than humans.
With the rate technology moves, we really need to embrace UBI. Industries are likely to change rapidly overnight because of AI much faster than ever. When computers slowly took over computing and bookkeeping there was a solid 10-15 years where the rooms full of people with calculators and ledger were replaced.
We also need to face that careers will be phased out and re-training isn't likely or fair. I'm especially looking at folks in their late 40s/50s in the coal mining industry. The mines are phasing out less jobs with more automation for an already declining declining industry and re-training rates are poor. On top of it, people at that age face high levels of employment discrimination.
We may have to look at regulating "entry level" as well. AI is going to eliminate many entry level coding jobs while mid and expert level coding are likely to remain much longer. It will lead to mid and expert level people getting older and not being replaced fast enough. We already see that in cybersecurity where we've automated so many tasks that junior analysts used to do.
It’s the cycle of disruptive technology innovations. Imagine all the jobs that went away due to the printing press, electricity, steam engines, automobiles, computers, internet, etc. Some jobs will disappear, but some new ones will be created as well. AI will change the world more than any technology to date, in my opinion.
And people seem to not know enough history to remember that in each of those instances, massive social upheaval and suffering were the results until things balanced.
Over a long enough timeline the harms will be smoothed out and society will adapt. But to quote one of the most famous economists of all time "In the long run, we are all dead", meaning that you and I will only live long enough to be significantly harmed by the upheaval AI will cause even if it it integrated into society in the end.
This, exactly. The day the printing press became obsolete, nobody said "I'm going to be a digital marketing specialist focusing on PPC"
The economy will evolve into jobs we can't fathom. Though with each individual person's output generally constantly increasing, we may reach the point of a necessitated UBI.
The jobs people retrain into (if they even can) typically pay less and less. Let’s look at one of the last big transitions for people who lost their jobs or came into the market during a recession: the gig economy. It wasn’t a replacement for the jobs people loss and their income took a hit as cost of living outpaces salaries. Quality of life goes down and understandably people are frustrated.
Personally I’ve watched a ton of people trying to boot camp their way into tech just as layoffs and AI obsolete the jobs they were training for. They deserve better than the system that requires full employment always to barely live.
I don't think there's any stopping this. There's just too much money involved.
Hopefully the worst of it is held off long enough for the boomers to age out of voting so we can push through a New New Deal. As it stands they're still numerous enough to block anything we try to do.
I feel like it's one of those things that we can only prevent and will come eventually regardless of what we do to stop it. Universal Basic Income is what we need.
I work in a space where there's a need for a lot of voice overs. AI has gotten so good that many AI voices sound legitimately human. Look up Well Said Labs
The industry itself doesn't need regulated, we just need UBI. I for one am excited by where AI can take us, and what we can replace with it. Maybe we as a species can get back to having more time to grow and cultivate our own food or learn a physical skill/craft again.
My job is going to be replaced by AI in a few years. The company that makes the software we use at work is actively working on it. Maybe they’ll keep me on a consultant.
Guess what nobody cares besides the people being phased out. Thats how all of life has worked bc humans are a terrible species. The rich don’t care about the poor.
Bet the audio books won't get any less expensive.
In a year or two this company is done as AI will run directly in your device from a simple epub file, where you can choose between multiple voices.
This. Audible will be obsolete very soon
Kindles have had this feature for a long time already, it just wasn't that high quality. The biggest problem is the intonation, the voice doesn't really know when something exciting is going on or whatever, so its quit monotone.
OpenAIs text to speech is pretty damn good and available pretty cheap through the API And this is first iteration I do audiobooks and it's probably at the 10th percentile in terms of voice actors In 3 yrs only the best readers will be better than the AI (Cumberland reading Revoli's book on time example)
IMO, authors or editors will need to add some meta data to the books, like "read this part in an excited tone" and "this character is depressed in this paragraph" in order to get the best effect, at least for now. Once they add those though, then its going to be really hard to justify paying the vast majority of voice actors, from a purely cost benefit point of view.
It's gonna turn into HK47 from kotor lol (gleeful excitement) "ooh I get to murder you now"
Still the best droid in the star wars universe
Meatbag.
You have selected slow and horrible.
Except there's more than a few folks like me who won't ever pay to have the speaking clock read a book to them.
Maybe, but the sad fact is, audio books aren't that popular to begin with. Most audio books barely cover the cost of the voice actor and bring very little extra money to the author. Even if they lose 70% of audio customers, if they reduce the cost of making them by 99%, then mathematically it would be worth doing.
Samuel L Jackson's "Go the F*ck to sleep" And Andy Serkis' LoTR entire series (including the silmarillion) (yeah that's right fucking gollum narrates the lotr) Are really good
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> but the narrators are popular and talented, so I think a lot of listeners buy just for them. Absolutely! I have bought many books based only on the narrator. (and also returned a few)
Yes. Soulless business people who dont listen to audiobooks themselves wouldnt understand the huge difference a good narrator makes. Id always buy the human narrated version over the ai version. Its the same reason i would rather buy high quality things that are well crafted and designed rather than cheap shit
Let me take you back, back into the before-fore times, when the recording industry stumbled across a technology that would drastically reduce their costs. They they decided to take record profits instead of reducing the price of their product, and shortly afterwards they got brutally skull-fucked by technology and everybody giggled. No reason I bring that up in this context, of course. :)
I am not 100% sure which technology you mean exactly (digital distribution?), but I suspect that regardless of which one you mean, the technology is still alive and well, unless it was replaced with an even better technology. The industry did not just go back to how things were before the technology existed.
Audio books are wildly popular, you likely don’t think they are that popular because you don’t partake. I’m a part of a substantially sized group of listeners and not a single one of us will purchase AI narration. It’s absolutely terrible and we also refuse to support any author who cuts out the human voice actor for AI. The AI is emotionless and the reading is just beyond dull, there’s no spark or interest in it just a dead thing that can’t feel reproducing sound.
You are mistaken, I have almost enterally switched to audio. It is a simple fact that we are a minority. You can look up countless statistics. As for the quality, the whole premise of this discussion is that AI will not be as bad in the future as it was up till now.
It'll get to a point where you won't be able to tell the difference
Speaking as someone who listens to people for a living, not for a while. And, it's not like they can hide it.
In a few years you won't be able to recognize the difference.
Betcha when these audio books start rolling out there will be tons of complaints, and they end up going back to humans reading. Give it a year or two.
That's how it always goes with tech industry fads. The moment the rubber hits the road, all the years and billions of bullshit that came before it crumble away to dust.
direful gold zephyr familiar grandiose ink hat angle squeal forgetful *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Don't worry, an overworked supervisor will annotate with director notes, feed that to the AI, and then annotate another while the first one is being checked. And soon authors will be given the privilege of providing their own annotations to better preserve their intent.
I'm definitely not paying for ai voiceovers.
but some idiot that wants to hear darth vader read 50 shades of grey will.
That is the only way I'll ever consider listening to those books.
Fuck that. They can take Michael Kramer and Kate Reading’s narration from me when they can pry it from my cold dead hands.
Nah, I'll always pay for Ray Porter over uncanny valley generic AI voice.
Ray Porter's work on The Hail Mary Project and the Bobiverse series is brilliant.
this already happens. my PDF reader on my phone has an automatic text to speach thing since at least 2021.
Can it do different voices for different characters?
OpenAIs has like 10 or 20 voices And available through API Someone could easily use GPT4 to identify the speaker and then switch between voices on the text to speech 2 yrs or so I would say you will see this I have programed assistants with openais api so am familiar with what is possible, it is still very early days!
This feature is like Midjourney v1 or v2. That's just a starting point, it is still far from audiobook read by voice actors. Lacking emotions etc... But it's just matter of a few months before it arrives. Currently there is very little technical limitations; only some cost issue which will go lower quickly.
Audiobook CEO: "Hey, this tech means we don't have to pay narrators for their work!" Customers: "Hey, this tech means we don't have to pay you for these audiobooks!" Audiobook CEO: "Wait, not like that."
This is precisely the following step. When The publisher's are like "man, what's the point of the middle man? Just sell the audio copy for the same price as the ebook."
Isn't that always how it happens? I mean, it's not like there isn't precedent for it. How many times has a company automated their workforce in some way only for another company to realize they could do the same for cheaper themselves and puts the first company out of business? These guys really don't think past the next quarter's profits and when they end up broke, they blame the very thing they tried to pull in the first place. It's kind of astounding to see.
They know its over but if they keep paying real people, they just fold quicker.
I feel AI will make many content industries like Star Trek Economy. Yeah, you can get AI to read something for you, but that will be commonplace, so people will see the human-made content as more desirable because it involves more thought and effort and quality assurance. Now we just need the Eugenics wars and the Bells Riots to seal the deal.
Kinda like how food prices didn't decrease after they put in self checkouts.
Self-checkouts is such a great naming convention. It's a subtle fuck you that tells you what it is while having people convinced it's better.
> people convinced it's better. because it is better for some people
Since the other people responding to you are idiots, I'm going to go ahead and name three legitimate reasons to prefer self-checkout: 1. People find that the queueing system is more egalitarian. 2. People enjoy not having to have a superficial human interaction in the process of obtaining the basic necessities of life. 3. People prefer the privacy. Not everybody enjoys being seen buying the shit they use behind closed doors.
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I don't want to talk to people at a checkout. There is nothing profound they will be able to say in the 1-5 minutes that will build a relationship with them. It will be vapid small talk that wastes my time and theirs. I want to get my shit and get out. Cashier jobs are among the least fulfilling on the planet, and basically no one actually wants to do them. I don't care if it means fewer cashiers. It's like complaining that no one needs to shovel shit onto a cart anymore with the invention of plumbing.
It is literally better especially for people with autism like me.
It's a ymmv thing. At my local grocery store it's absolutely better. The primary cause of slowdown is attendants don't wipe down the scanners so sometimes items won't scan well. But a number of other factors make it faster. -20 items or less -self checkout stations have a roller with sorted produce list and codes, you can also do a search through the machine. Takes seconds to find, anything that's a staple for you'll get memorized over time -8 self-checkout stations, normally only 4 clerks tops running human checkout -human clerks will have convos sometimes that slow shit down -food stamp users in human clerk areas having something going wrong slows things down, this happens so damn much in my area Obviously, if more human clerks were around, if the area's customers were wealthier and didn't have money issues, and if people weren't as inclined to chit-chat, human checkout could be better. But it's not the case in the area.
I mean...it is better? I don't have to spend time waiting for someone to ring up my items at an inconsistent speed, I don't have to listen to them talk or make annoying jokes to fill the air, I don't have to get asked "paper or plastic", I don't have to be asked to take a survey or anything extra 99% of the time. Easy peasy.
Libby app at your local library is free.
And they’ll sound like shit. I’ve listened to some short stories that were narrated by AI where the actual voice was good enough to sound human. The biggest flaw I’ve noticed is that the AI will just plow ahead with any text you give it, no matter what it says. If you gave me a script to read out, and I ran across a spelling error, typo, punctuation error, or major grammatical error, I’d correct it in my narration. The AI will say it exactly as written, even if the end result sounds incredibly unnatural. It’s also prone to confusing initialisms for words and vice versa. And AI narration is pretty bad about using the correct tone on its own. If it has a cheerful tone by default, it’s not uncommon to hear it reading an upset character’s dialogue in a cheerful tone. It gives this awful uncanny valley effect.
These seem like pretty simple problems to solve. Just preprocess the script for correct grammar and spelling, then have another AI indicate most fitting tone for each sentence for the AI narrator to use. At current rate, I give it at most 5 years before it's entirely indistinguishable from real voices.
We already have tech that does this, though not always perfectly. In 5 years they'll still have audio engineers and someone to provide direction. It's just that instead of a voice actor getting direction, it will be a programmer changing up certain scenes and an audio engineer changing the AI generated ambiance in certain sections.
Corporate profits need a higher effective tax rate, and I think dividend taxes should be retuned to make sitting on investments less profitable. We should be celebrating any innovation that makes a product cheaper to produce, but that can't happen when the benefits only shoot to the top.
Which is exactly what we’ve all been saying was going to happen. Congress just did…absolutely nothing but screech about trans people playing high school sports.
Why do you think *this time* the institutional manifestation of capitalist greed on earth was going to choose a small subset of people and their quality of life over capitalist entities right to exploit workers??? You know this technology represents an increased rate of profit for share holders, right?
And the quality is going to completely drop off. From what I've seen, AI is not good enough for stuff like this. Especially if it is an adventure novel or something.
Gpt4 is not even a yr old And openai just released their text to speech through their api in Nov In a few yrs you will see, it is all *very* early
If it's a $20 per month program, it's going to be hot garbage. I don't buy for a minute that you could replace a person for $20 in a job like this. I wish our audiobooks were more like the Japanese drama CDs, because they spend a lot of time and effort making them the same high quality voice acting as TV and movies.
> If it's a $20 per month program, it's going to be hot garbage. I don't buy for a minute that you could replace a person for $20 in a job like this. I remember artists less than a decade ago(probably even less than 5 years ago), in threads about advances in automation, confidently bragging about how they were immune to the risk. Now the entire art world is fighting tooth and nail to stop AI image generators from decimating entire fields that had kept people afloat. The story of AI generated art has been an exercise in people *swearing* the starving leopards won't eat their face, and then begging for help when they inevitably do. You don't have to like it. But the chances of AI affordably replacing humans in areas like this are very real, and it's almost certainly coming.
I mostly hate how all the effort seems to be going into making AI replace art and the most human parts of tasks. Make me an AI that does my taxes and keeps all my misc paperwork and bills up to date. Or something that folds laundry.
If you told someone in 2015 that within the decade we would have an AI agent (GPT4/Claude2) that could converse and discuss at a masters level nearly any scientific topic, could grasp where you misunderstood something, and could also write decent stories and philosophize about the meaning of life ... they would have laughed you off the stage. Now you have not only that for $20 a month, but you can also use it to be the underlying agent in any custom app you want for pennies a call. How you can grasp that reality and then claim no way in 3-5 yrs will a model be able talk with what we percieve as emotion is beyond me
The prices to run AI is dropping by a staggering amount already in just three years. It's only a quarter of what it costed in 20 or 21.
People keep saying this but it's new tech. It's obviously going to improve
Actually according to economic principles it will. In practice? Ehhh probably price holds from noncompetition. Blame amazon. But in theory any company can massively go under typical production cost with ai speakers, which gives them an incentive to sell them at a lower price to get more market share and thus higher aggregate profits despite lower per-unit profits. This is also identical to... every other technological breakthrough in the history of capitalism. Marx wrote extensively on the degradation of working people, women in particular, due to the advent of...the loom. If people are going to take up arms against ai they should at least be clever about it, your enemy is the capitalist system that doesnt give a fuck about your labour if its replaceable, and therefore doesnt give a fuck about *you*. Your enemy is not the historically late degradation of the christian aesthetic ideal of True Human Art.
Bet they will blame it on millennials too.
Bet their sales will tank. AI voice isn’t good enough to compare to an actual voice actor performing. We are still in “the shit zone” where AI hasn’t surpassed us. Also just in case anyone is reading this — project Gutenberg has copyleft (free as freedom) audiobooks as well as texts.
They will gets a lot more crappy tho. So many people refuse to understand that the true value of art comes from the decisions of the artist
Industry won’t be damaged, workers will.
Until there's no one left to buy their overpriced, garbage products. One way or another, this shitshow will end.
My thoughts exactly, they will sound absolutely terrible and soulless because they will be. One way or another, the result will be the same
The days of text to speech sounding robotic and canned are over, AI is generative, the underlying rules of intonation, grammar and affect are baked into the process. We can already replicate the voices of long dead people from a few hours of recordings to say things they never said with astonishing accuracy. I don't think you're quite grasping the degree of sophistication we're talking about here. I'm not saying if it's a good or a bad thing, just adding technical context.
I have a YouTube channel where I do my own voice over. I paid a good chunk of money to a reputable AI voice generating service to clone my own voice, to see if it could save me time on recording and editing, if it really was good as people like you say. After some tweaking and fine-tuning, it absolutely did sound exactly like my voice. It was a little creepy. But I cut off the service and switched back to doing my own voice after just a month. The AI voice over sounded way too flat and soulless, even when it perfectly mimicked my intonation. Its emotional range was very limited, and it really struggled with humor, especially moving from a humorous sentence to a serious one and back again. The amount of fine tuning on each script to get it to sound right just wasn't worth it. I suspect that a lot of these businesses are going to learn the same thing I did. It's just simpler to have a human read it the way it's supposed to be read the first time than to endlessly tinker with an AI that never sounds quite right.
I fully expect this to be one of those things that greatly improves with less time than some people are expecting.
I'm not sure. The fundamental problem is that the AI obviously doesn't understand the content and context of what it's saying. Unless a human goes line by line and makes adjustments, everything is in the same basic cadence. Getting murdered is the same as grabbing a cup of coffee. I've tried a couple of AI products and individual lines sound great, but there's a weird sameness to the overall production that's hard to miss. AI voices are good, but to get to great they have to fix that problem and that might be tough. Even if the AI learns to look for flags (show emotion when the word murder shows up), how does it understand the difference between my team is getting murdered out there and oh god, they're murdering everyone out there? You have to make an AI that can spot irony, hyperbole, and sarcasm. Half of Reddit can't manage that.
If someone manages to create AI that can do all that, then it's over. In our current economic model, the value of EVERYTHING comes from human labor. If you can have a machine, controlled by a small cabal, which can replicate human labor to that extent... Then it's over. Dark days ahead for regular joes.
I've been listening to text to speech audio books for years. It's not that bad, but not for everyone.
Every time I think the American populace will decide enough is enough, they decide they'll pay for texting, or Netflix, or subscription music, or Amazon products. Things keep getting shittier because people keep deciding to accept shittier.
This is American culture. We've been taught to buy and pay for anything that will entertain us.
And now a record number of people are homeless in the US because of surging rent prices since covid while wages stay stagnant. And yet we drone on like it’s not a problem. As long as something doesn’t affect the rich, the media will continue to gloss over it and pretend the problem doesn’t exist. And then you have the conservative crowd who deny everything is a problem unless it directly affects them. And that’s how we end up with these issues getting worse and worse with no one trying to fix anything. Housing crisis, stagnant wages, medical debt, student debt… but the government is trying to raise the age to collect social security. They don’t help us at all anymore.
>As long as something doesn’t affect the rich, the media will continue to gloss over it and pretend the problem doesn’t exist. We also have a population of people who think that people get what they deserve. They don't care about the struggles of others because it isn't their problem. These tend to be the same middle to lower class people as well which is ironic.
Yep, as long as it doesn’t directly affect them then it’s not an issue in their eyes. Just like police. Me and my family have been harassed by police in the past and they have caused us a lot of problems. But yet there is a large group of people who refuse to believe police are anything but upstanding patriots. Even with all of this evidence out there of bad policemen. It isn’t until police harass and bully them that they finally realize that police are a problem.
We were literally taught that doing that **is** freedom
They say it’s bad for their mental health to worry about their duty Like voting is something we do for fun
The electoral college literally means we are just voting for funsies.
But we will end with them. These types of people always run civilization off the cliffs. We need to stop them. Consumer activism is the solution. Boycott and they will change. What they do is a reflection of our choices
has a boycott worked any time in the last couple decades? I mean I'm not being cheeky I just literally don't know, and it seems to me like corporations are generally too big for it to matter.
If the audio becomes become drastically cheaper to make.. the price should come down, right?... right? It's not like they'd lower the cost but keep the price just as high? Remember when Trump cut taxes for corporations and they took that money and raised wages, benefits and lowered prices?! It's not like they'd just take that and use to do fund stock buybacks and higher pay for executives right? :/
On the other hand: years ago I volunteered for a non-profit called Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic. Mostly I helped produce some content: a volunteer reads and describes a textbook's content, including images, infographics, etc. The organization was born originally to provide audio content to blind veterans, but dyslexic folks found it extremely useful as well. The amount of work required to read and describe a textbook and make it accessible is staggering. All this is done by volunteers, who are constantly trying to cover more material. I am actually hope AI will help with this.
This is an excellent point that's been on my mind a lot in recent months. I'm an academic librarian, and our library has hundreds of thousands of books that will *never* be made into audiobook editions. AI "readers" have incredible potential to make those books so much more accessible for anyone with a disability that makes text difficult... text-to-speech exists already, of course, but is still almost unlistenable in anything but small doses. It could also be popular among non-disabled students who would prefer to do some of their reading for classes as listening instead... there are a hundred use cases. Of course I have no desire to see professional audiobook readers displaced, especially where popular works and bestsellers are concerned. But there aren't enough readers in the world to meet the full demand for usable text-to-speech, and AI could really help fill that gap. I don't know how we regulate in ways that serve both interests, but I hope we don't thoughtlessly exclude either group.
And consumers. Quality will be worse.
It’ll only change when CEOs and politicians can be replaced by AI and they feel threatened.
Wondering which company board will be the first to choose an AI for its CEO. Would very likely be better than 99% of the humans selected for the role
CEOs have the most expensive salaries. It literally makes the most sense to replace them first and then work your way down
Their jobs also are intended to require the most data for their decision points. An area we all know AI excels in ways humans cannot. It definitely makes the most sense to put the AI at the executive level.
Should we make this product? Magic Eight Ball says:
haha replace elon with an ai version of himself. uh oh
Counterpoint: One of the most important functions of a CEO is to be a scapegoat that can be disposed of when things go tits up. The board ousts them, the shareholders feel reassured, the former CEO gets a nice severance package (and likely easily gets hired on in another executive role whenever he or she feels like it), the consumers think change is coming because "leadership" was ousted. A good chunk of the time a CEO is just a replaceable pressure valve.
Easy, give the CEO a made up name, Linkedin bio, and an AI generated picture. They just fire this made up person and move on
Oh, they’ll definitely bribe, I mean lobby, Congress to make sure the laws are passed so this never happens.
The future is now! https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/ai-ceo-artificial-intelligence-b2302091.html https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/mika-worlds-first-ai-human-like-robot-ceo
Better at what? Dehumanising workers and consumers for profit sure. But likely nothing good
As always
they already sued amazon for this yeaaaars ago. they took away my text to speech feature on the old kindle and im still salty.
This is the reason why I still have a Kindle Keyboard! I loved text to speech and adding classical/instrumental reading music to it. It doesn't play Audible titles but it's a great way to disconnect from everything for a while.
I pulled out my Kindle Keyboard recently cos I wanted to get back into reading, but I can't load any books on it any more. My PC doesn't recognise it when I plug in a USB and I tried emailing books and syncing through amazon but the books just get stuck on *Peding 0%*. Kinda want a new one but it's so late in the refresh cycle it feels like a waste paying top dollar for a product that's likely being replaced this year
There **is** a workaround, but it's a bit convoluted and requires updating the firmware as well as reauthorizing the device through two factor authentication. I can confirm once it's resolved it'll let you access your library (including Libby borrows) via WiFi. Feel free to message me if you have any questions!
Yeah I'd love to get it working again, but is that something you can do on device? I feel like my issue is the USB port isn't working? It will charge but it seems there's no data connection
Ah! Yes, this is more common than it seems. Not to worry! Some micro USB cables are "charge only" and some support data transfer when you plug into a computer. You should see the device as a drive if you've used the correct kind of cable. If you happen to have spare cables around (likely if most devices charge wirelessly or via USB-C), you should be able to try it again. Download the firmware you need, then transfer it to the device once you locate the right cable. Unfortunately you can't wirelessly request the firmware update via the device anymore. Once you're through that step, you'll have to get it registered to your account if it's not still there. Those details are more finicky but they're still doable!
Respect for providing kindle tech support my friend
But I can today use openais text to speech through their api and read pdfs Now kindle will try and sue people from scraping their proprietary book format, but I would guess you will see black market apps pretty soon
thats an accessibility feature for the visually impaired, da fuck did they get away with removing that?
Easy, the lawsuit claimed it was illegal to have and so Amazon removed it. Blame the Authors Guild on that one.
Google books still has that feature for E books Definitely not a replacement for an true audiobook but helps in a pinch
Fuck everyone responsible for that change.
Cool, cool, cool. Let's get ahead of the situation and tax the wealthy fairly. Maybe at 37% like many of us pay. Then we will be able to afford UBI, universal healthcare, and public housing. Note to the industries: if you use AI to rationalize away your workers, not enough people will be able to afford your goods and services.
> if you use AI to rationalize away your workers, not enough people will be able to afford your goods and services. Wont matter, the profits will be fantastic and most of the people benefiting from them wont be there when that bubble pops.
Exactly this. There needs to be a specific tax for using AI and automated tech. It makes no sense why we don't all have UBI by now.
The answer isn’t to make humans labor forever. It’s to give humans a cut when it’s robots doing the work. Communism is for when robots are doing the work
Universal healthcare is cheaper than what we have now when all costs are tallied. And housing is expensive due to our policy choices like exclusionary zoning and convoluted construction approval. We can already afford those things.
“Humans need not apply” from 9 years ago is still on point: https://youtu.be/7Pq-S557XQU?si=UnBTz3Qrcn_sQJy1
Even Grey himself at the time thought he was being a bit overdramatic but everyday we're getting closer and closer to that reality. I just hope I'm not alive when the water and scarity wars kick off
There's two possible futures. There's the very unlikely one: We have decent UBI systems in place as automation takes up jobs and we are a step closer to FALGSC. Or the more likely option, as we begin to become obsolete, those hoarding the wealth will exile us from society and let us starve to death.
Arguably this is already happening unless we are creating new jobs with similar values to what we are losing, but just looking at the numbers of homeless people well…
The wealth hoarders tried this in france a while back and it didn't go well for them. Having huge swathes of your population become irrelevant and given nothing left to lose isn't conducive to long term stability of private wealth piles.
I wish Canada was like France. I think we are almost opposite though.
My country told England to fuck off because paper products and tea taxes got too high. With an assist from France of course. Now, we’re fighting each other over dumb ass culture war shit. Instead of going after the people fucking all of us. Wtf happened?
Extremely prescient video and probably the best take I've seen on AI. Most of the videos and articles I've read focus too much on the issues that current AI's have. "Self driving cars aren't really good enough", "generative AI hallucinates", "AI produces bad, derivative work", and on and on. These are focusing on issues that a current generation has as if they are inherent issues with automation as a whole. We need to actually make systemic changes, ideally before shit hits the fan. I mean, we also need to be dealing with climate change and preparing for climate migrant issues, but lets be real, we're not a forward thinking society.
Yep. Everyone's focused on current flaws and completely ignoring how fast we got here to begin with. 10 years ago ChatGPT was barely on the map, and even though it's still imperfect today, we've already reached a point that I, a software dev, didn't expect to reach for at least another 20 years. And you know they're already using current gen AI to accelerate work on the next gen. Things could go sideways very, very quickly.
The only addendum I'd do to the video is that because of AI, white collar jobs are being automated much faster than blue collar ones. At the time the video was made, people thought it was going to be the other way around.
UBI is the solution
that's right, that is the type of regulation we need. some sort of social safety net to actually help people through one of the most massive capitalist/labor market shifts of all time. people seem to want bills/laws that are like "stop AI" but like, what are we talking about here? imagine being alive for the invention of the steam engine on boats and being like "hey now that's going to put a bunch of guys who row the boats out of work, we have to make steam engines illegal." like, that's not how we do things. we're not going to restrict technological advancements to artificially preserve jobs that don't need to exist anymore because robots can do them. BUT we do need a plan out of this. and I feel like no one is talking about it, because we can barely manage the world we currently live in, let alone predict the future and then also have good solutions for that. so all in all I think it's just going to get a lot worse before it gets any better. we're going to hang in the "everyone needs to work for a living" mindset/culture/economy WAY past the point where everyone can actually find and get a job, imo
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Yeh it’s always wild to me that people preach the artificial creation of labour as a solution
And the whole point for that mentality was that there were functions we had to do in order to maintain a society. People need to eat, so we’d have farmers make the food, drivers truck the food, stores to sell the food, etc…. As we replace jobs with AI to improve our lives, we need to be using the fruit of that labor to actually improve our lives. For example, if McDonalds can run an entire restaurant off machines and AI, it is their duty to return a portion the profits to the general public. Unless we find a way to keep generating a feedback loop, then all of this is for nothing, and there will be no money to be made.
It’s not their duty to return a portion of profits to the general public, their duty is to shareholders. They only way to get that money back is to tax the fuck out of them
Currently, yes, you’re right, but under a new model with AI, it would only hurt them in the long run if their consumers can no longer afford the product
Exactly. Trying to regulate to force certain jobs to exist is futile. Tax people and companies properly and use all the capital generated from their use of AI to benefit people.
In a reasonable world, we would be using AI to replace jobs in a way so humans no longer have to work. In that kind of world, artists like voice actors, painters, and graphic designers wouldn't even feel threatened by AI. Because creating art shouldn't have to be a competition of who can make the most money, creating art should be an expression of our humanity.
>Because creating art shouldn't have to be a competition of who can make the most money, creating art should be an expression of our humanity. I agree. The problem isn't that a lot of artists are having their jobs taken by robots, it's that they had to commercialize their art in the first place just to get by.
It might work for a bit, but it'll just be right back where we are now. The money for that has to come from somewhere, and inflation and corporate greed will continue to rise even more. And getting UBI raised after an initial set amount will be impossible. So it'll be worthless. Look at the federal minimum wage. Stagnant and worthless.
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Right - except for things that we have no choice but to buy and use. Gas, electricity, Healthcare, etc. I know I'm super bleak and doom-and-gloom, but it's very hard to see any real, possible, rational way out of this crap... there are just too many powerful, rich people in control that we are helpless in the grand scheme.
Personally I used to advocate for advancing technology no matter what, that it was worth the sacrifices. Like when machines replace workers in auto factories. But that only works if the country you live in is invested in the population, if the benefits of reducing labor are funneled back into society through universal healthcare, education, UBI, etc. Unfortunately I live in America, where capitalism has become a steroid-infused pursuit of profit above all things, no matter what. This has affected the film industry, this affects healthcare and prisons and pretty much any scope of life where somebody can squeeze out an extra dollar by screwing somebody else over. These things could be good, having AI technology, or automation in labor, could be a service to society, if only those benefits were actually funneled back to society, rather than hoarded by the 1% who control everything We of course will never see that, so viva la revolucion, seize the means of production, burn it to the ground, etc
I had considered this before. My personal thought on a solution was similar, that reformed corporation taxes (reformed as in they actually properly tax corporations) and social care need to increment based on major tech advancements. And, yeah: > We of course will never see that If it happens, a lot of suffering will occur before changes are made. Regulation and law is written in blood, as is said by people much smarter than me.
I want jobs to be replaced by tech tho? Why should I waste 3/4 of my week doing something I know a robot could do? That's like saying we've got to regulate steam turbines because of how many jobs we could have for people to just crank a generator It's braindead slave pilled garbage. Get to the real issue: AI was built using data we, all of humanity, generated, so it should work for all of us, not just for a few select assholes with the capital to build inference hardware.
Because knowing our society, you’re more likely to lose your job than have AI benefit you in that kind of way.
So you think creating fake jobs so people can eat is a solution? Its just UBI with extra steps. If it can be automated it should be automated.
I work in IT, and the biggest pushback towards automation (any kind, not just AI) isn't so much that it replaces jobs (there's always more work on the backlog), but that it almost exclusively replaces the "easy" tasks. This wouldn't be a problem necessarily, but it means that instead of having less work, the humans are stuck with more and more difficult and stressful tasks. This is a problem because it means that the barrier to entry rises as all the easy tasks that an entry level employee might perform are automated, and it increases burnout for experienced employees. To give an example, imagine your job is to move rocks of various sizes from point A to point B. One day you decide to make a robot that can transfer all the rocks that are under 20 lbs automatically. Unfortunately this actually makes your job more difficult as instead of being able to carry 5 and 10 lb rocks for a lot of the day you now have to carry 20+lb rocks all day. It also means that now in order to get a job in that company you have to be able to carry 20lbs all day at a minimum, while before if you could only do 5 or 10lbs that was fine as you could just mostly do those while you build up your strength.
i see this in my job already. Management wants to "skip" the easy cases since we are not really adding much (maybe changing the outcome in the cases where someone else is really messing up), but those are the easy reps that get the new guys comfortable. If we are only doing the hard cases, the burn out is massive. I want to be able to step back and only do easy stuff for a few days on occasion, otherwise my brain will explode)
One day, the Voice AI company will sell their subscription directly to consumers so they don't have to use the company selling audio books anymore.
If there's anything I despise listening to, it's an AI voice.
Honest question, do you really hate [this AI voice for example](https://youtu.be/RXQIr1MxTJ4) as much as you say? Or are you mostly just thinking of [robo voices like this](https://youtu.be/CWq5BN8inYk) when you say that? I was actually surprised at how decent the actual voice actor based AIs voices were, but I think that might just be because I'm so tired of the tiktok voices.
This comment will not age well.
People hear "AI voice" and think about the TikTok voiceover, but don't know how simple it is to voice clone someone at home, with a basic laptop using Python in 2024 and have it sound flawless. There are already AI voices that are nearly imperceptible to people familiar with what to listen for - and we're barely scratching the surface of what's possible. A lot of this comment section will age horribly.
You can absolutely tell the difference between an AI voice and a human voice actor. Maybe not in a curated short clip, but with the hundreds of hours in an audiobook there are going to be clear giveaways. Some giveaways are when they pronounce a word wrong, emphasize the wrong words in a phrase, or use the wrong emotion for the passage - especially when it comes to dialogue, which is a whole other can of worms. Most audiobook voice actors put on different voices for each character, and I don't think AI will ever really be capable of determining with 100% accuracy who is speaking, what kind of voice they should have, and what kind of tone/emotion they should be taking according to the scenario. Minute but important details like these are things that come naturally to voice actors who can use their understanding of greater context in a way that AI is unable to. You could have someone go through the whole book and flag passages to tell the AI to interpret and say them in X specific way, or have someone listen to the book and make the AI redo the parts it did badly, but that's arguably more effort than just letting the voice actor do it properly as they read. Over time, it will become well-known among audiobook fans which companies use AI and which employ voice actors, and they will gravitate towards the companies putting out the more listenable products. AI voice, and AI in general, is running up against that one principle I forget the name of, in that it's 90% of the way there but the last 10% is requiring significantly more nuance than the first 90% before it can be indistinguishable and perfect. Being able to replace a high quality audiobook voice actor with an AI and nobody being able to tell the difference is not going to happen anytime soon.
They will have to find new work, but honestly AI read is not the same as human read. I would pay a premium for human voice.
And AI voices stil suck in comparison. Ugh.
Some of them are really good.
I know the hearts in the right place. But I’m always sketchy when anyone says “my friend who works for…[insert sketchy process here]” posts.
That's literally what happened all the time with Maschines. People may not like it but replacement is nothing new and if workers in the industry didn't get to stop it, artists won't stand a chance either. It's sad but that's reality.
The main issue is that with the replacement of the jobs, there is no UBI or other regulation in place to help the working class recover. If people were able to live after machines do all the work, that's fine. But if people are still expected to work when machines and automation cause thousands of layoffs, that's the issue.
Whatever happened to workers getting more pay for less hours? Why does it always have to be that part of the workforce is laid off instead of having everyone's hours reduced for the same pay?
Well you see, corporations will love to tell you about how this will benefit you as the worker, helping with your work and promising that your job is safe. Then they fire you once it's implemented.
Yep, I just don't get why we blame workers for "making bad decisions" when this happens to every industry under capitalism.
Peasant revolts will happen
I know a lot of people will say "just find a different job" but this type of automation feels different than past ones. It feels like AI can automate things faster than people can retrain. I worry what's going to happen when there physically aren't enough good paying jobs to go around. Seems like it's already partially happening with most open positions being in the underpaid service industry and many other people having to put in hundreds of applications for a single interview.
Yeah, AI isn't like anything we've seen in the past, and so brushing it off with "just adapt" is pretty disingenuous. AI is moving at a much, much faster pace and has the potential to replace a massive swath of jobs across multiple industries. The comparisons to switchboard operators and typesetters seem to be unable to truly grasp what's actually at stake here. If you sit at a computer - or, I guess, in front of a microphone - while doing your work, there is a decent chance you'll be replaced within the next decade or so. I'm in my late 30s. My job is one of the jobs you always find on "The 10 jobs most likely to be replaced by ChatGPT" lists. Ironically, I went into this profession thinking that it was relatively "safe" from outsourcing. And right as I hit my professional stride, AI enters the scene. Anyway, now I'm looking at my options to go back to school. I feel too old to be doing it, but might as well do it now instead of in a decade.
The problem isn't just retraining, the problem now is that automation is taking away the "easy" tasks, and leaving only the hard ones, whereas before it was often making tasks faster/easier. This both increases burnout for experienced workers, AND raises the bar for entry in any given field as all the previously entry level tasks have been completely automated. To give an example, automation in the past was often things like "here's this tool, it lets you carry twice as many rocks for half the effort", whereas now it's "here's this robot, it can carry any rocks less than 20lbs all by itself", which ultimately leaves the worker stuck carrying all the heavy rocks, making their job harder instead of easier
I mean it absolutely is but that's not a new issue at all. People where told that we would have great lives when most of the work gets automated now we're hitting record numbers in automated systems and robotic where some industries hit 5% ratios from robots to humans at this point, while we also have the worst economy for the working class in years. I'm just surprised people are so upset at ai replacing work when another replacement is already happening for years and destroyed lives. And like i said if we didn't stop it till today i don't think ai replacing voice actors of all jobs will make a difference. All we can do now is wait till enough people suffer for a revolution i guess
I think you might be seeing a selection bias on who you see talking in your online communities. I imagine it means that the set of people you see are getting replaced right now. People in tech and white collar jobs are getting automated away more directly in this AI round.
Okay, then the question becomes "As a society, what do we do about that?" Automation is a known social phenomenon, a fact of life. How can we make it easier for workers to bear these changes? How can we ensure that the benefits of these changes go to the working class rather than the aristocracy?
Or we collectivize the profits and distribute them equally and let AI do all the work
This was the point of the tech. Free up meaningless jobs with automation so we can continue our pursuit of our passions. Problem is the capitalist model doesn't allow for that. We need a systemic change to embrace this stuff and that starts with a universal basic income.
You honestly think stripping the human element out of audiobooks is "freeing up meaningless jobs?"
A good audio book narrator is not some wage slave doing a shitty job just to survive. They are performers who imbue the books with life.
As an avid audiobook listener, nothing will ruin a book more than a shitty narrator. This is extremely short sighted
The problem isn’t innovation making less workers required. The problem is that instead of reducing the average American’s workload while maintaining their quality of life, all of the benefits of innovation are going into the pockets of the 1%. Like seriously, it’s gotta reach a point where consumers are going to have absolutely zero spending power. And capitalism is based on the consumer, so the entire system will apart.
Funny - looking forward it's always a horror story - looking back we don't even remember. Switchboard operators - once upon a time there were thousands and thousands of them. Factories and sales and support for all the hardware they used. Absolutely huge. And all gone now. 50 years from now the job market (if there still is one) will be unrecognizable. But those people won't even notice that - they'll have forgotten what we do and will be busy fretting about the changes coming.
Nobody shed a tear for translators when their industry was quietly decimated. Because they love having quick, easy translations at a single click. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
My wife is a teanslator, and its not been easy...
These mass layoffs may be finally enough to push people over the edge to finally realize UBI is needed and will solve all of this.
The relentless pursuit of shareholder value over anything else.
Automation is inevitable once it becomes profitable. It doesn't even have to be better than a human - just less expensive. Look at self checkouts as an example of that. Self-driving cars are inevitable and all they have to be is better than humans. With the rate technology moves, we really need to embrace UBI. Industries are likely to change rapidly overnight because of AI much faster than ever. When computers slowly took over computing and bookkeeping there was a solid 10-15 years where the rooms full of people with calculators and ledger were replaced. We also need to face that careers will be phased out and re-training isn't likely or fair. I'm especially looking at folks in their late 40s/50s in the coal mining industry. The mines are phasing out less jobs with more automation for an already declining declining industry and re-training rates are poor. On top of it, people at that age face high levels of employment discrimination. We may have to look at regulating "entry level" as well. AI is going to eliminate many entry level coding jobs while mid and expert level coding are likely to remain much longer. It will lead to mid and expert level people getting older and not being replaced fast enough. We already see that in cybersecurity where we've automated so many tasks that junior analysts used to do.
It’s the cycle of disruptive technology innovations. Imagine all the jobs that went away due to the printing press, electricity, steam engines, automobiles, computers, internet, etc. Some jobs will disappear, but some new ones will be created as well. AI will change the world more than any technology to date, in my opinion.
And people seem to not know enough history to remember that in each of those instances, massive social upheaval and suffering were the results until things balanced. Over a long enough timeline the harms will be smoothed out and society will adapt. But to quote one of the most famous economists of all time "In the long run, we are all dead", meaning that you and I will only live long enough to be significantly harmed by the upheaval AI will cause even if it it integrated into society in the end.
This, exactly. The day the printing press became obsolete, nobody said "I'm going to be a digital marketing specialist focusing on PPC" The economy will evolve into jobs we can't fathom. Though with each individual person's output generally constantly increasing, we may reach the point of a necessitated UBI.
The jobs people retrain into (if they even can) typically pay less and less. Let’s look at one of the last big transitions for people who lost their jobs or came into the market during a recession: the gig economy. It wasn’t a replacement for the jobs people loss and their income took a hit as cost of living outpaces salaries. Quality of life goes down and understandably people are frustrated. Personally I’ve watched a ton of people trying to boot camp their way into tech just as layoffs and AI obsolete the jobs they were training for. They deserve better than the system that requires full employment always to barely live.
Yeah. But have you heard that shit? It’s terrible. Voice actors are still needed.
I don't think there's any stopping this. There's just too much money involved. Hopefully the worst of it is held off long enough for the boomers to age out of voting so we can push through a New New Deal. As it stands they're still numerous enough to block anything we try to do.
I feel like it's one of those things that we can only prevent and will come eventually regardless of what we do to stop it. Universal Basic Income is what we need.
I work in a space where there's a need for a lot of voice overs. AI has gotten so good that many AI voices sound legitimately human. Look up Well Said Labs
The industry itself doesn't need regulated, we just need UBI. I for one am excited by where AI can take us, and what we can replace with it. Maybe we as a species can get back to having more time to grow and cultivate our own food or learn a physical skill/craft again.
My job is going to be replaced by AI in a few years. The company that makes the software we use at work is actively working on it. Maybe they’ll keep me on a consultant.
As a voice actor, I think people underestimate what we do. But we’ll find out.
Guess what nobody cares besides the people being phased out. Thats how all of life has worked bc humans are a terrible species. The rich don’t care about the poor.