Beautiful, it works. Why not.
Is voice AI trained on stolen data? I was under the impression that was LLMs.
Pretty much anything handling unstructed data (audio, video, text) is using training data that has copyrighted content.
This consumer says you don’t get a red cent then!
It’s already a plague on youtube where half of the docu style vids are AI narrated already. I quit them in disgust. It’s so frustrating. It has eroded my perception of Youtube in short time.
Well that’s a great way to keep me unsubscribed. Glad I canceled my membership.
Meanwhile I unveil a plan to continue not giving a goddamn cent to J Bozo. Ever.
trained on stolen books? then I guess I can download these from anywhere I may find for free as well, right?
Well, yeah, you can. Whoever told you that you can’t, don’t believe them, they are probably being payed to say it. You could also pay for the book to support the author but most likely your money will not go to the author so don’t bother.
This has actually got me thinking differently about AI all together.
The best use for AI needs to be for the individual. I want MY ai to read books or research with or complete tasks for me.
I don’t want another company to do it for me or monetize it or steal content with it.
I like your way of thinking
AI voices are not trained on books.
The ethical issue there is more around cloning celebrities
but AI itself is
Not sure what you are trying to say here. AI itself is an equation.
AI models have been trained on copyright protected books illegally. Maybe the voice have not
In this case the AI voices are reading the exact copyrighted material so the original author or rights holder must be contacted to secure the necessary rights and licensing agreements. There is no free use argument.
Now, if the voices have been trained on copy protected sources to create a likenesses (e.g. Scarlet Johansson) then there could be a lawsuit.
isn’t the current law not recognising AI stuff for copyright?
IE, downloading their audiobooks illegally is impossible are they are by default in the public domain.
Hmmm, you might have a case but maybe not.
The US Copyright office currently does not recognize protections for AI-generated works, and for portions of complete works that are AI-generated. For example, if a comic has graphics generated by AI but a script written by people, the graphics and character likenesses, etc are not protected by copyright.
For audiobooks, the original work and the accompanying recording are both protected by copyright. The audiobook is considered a derivative work, so it may still be protected based on the fact that the original work is rightfully protected by copyright.
Yep, copyright doesn’t apply to AI generated content.
(edit: the original book copyright would still apply however… So would only be public domain if the book itself was also public domain)
free AI read audiobooks coming up
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Me too: there’s just something about how repetitive thier cadence can be, and putting random infections and stresses on words where it doesn’t make sense.
How about I spin up an AI model that outputs a near 1:1 copy of the training data?
Does that circumvent the copyright?
Duno, probably to some extent, similarly to how remixes of music sometimes have to pay royalties to the source of the sample if it’s recognisable…?
Actually would probably be more similar to the George Carlin AI impersonation lawsuit , but they settled, so idk.
It’s Amazon, what did you expect? Enshittification and monopoly abuse, no surprise.
Idk, they have pretty good stats that nobody will listen to an audio book if they don’t like the narrator, so being able to choose your own narrator on the fly isn’t really shitty
Enshittification isn’t adding new features that people want, it’s gradually lowering the quality of the product. So here if Audible is solely adding more possibilities, never at the cost of higher quality ones degrading, then indeed I’m wrong.
If though they hire less people to do good voice acting, then it’s really shitty.
I genuinely hope I’m wrong and they are ONLY adding new capabilities… but my entire experience with capitalism is that obtaining a monopolistic position is not done to improve quality but rather to increase margins regardless of how.
We’ll see!
Fucking gross. Maybe it’s the 250+ audiobooks I have influencing me, but the very best ones I’ve listened to transcend just turning words into sound. Sound effects, music, tone, emotion, accents, sarcasm, and god damn BLOOPERS all improve the experience beyond just hearing what is written down.
I’m against it, fuck that literal noise.
Sound effects, music […] improve the experience
Actually hard disagreeing on that. I absolutely hate the audio drama versions of audio books and prefer the narrator only ones since they are much clearer and require a lot less focus to listen to and work in more contexts (background noise,…). Sound effects and music (while something is read, intro or outro style music is okay) distract from the actual content.
Usually I agree with this with the exception of hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy where the audio drama is much better than the audiobook version.
All I can think of is Jim Dale’s reading of the Harry Potter books. Fucking epic.
What, no way, they did not replace Steven Fry.
They didn’t replace Fry. When the Audiobooks were released in the US, they were read by Jim Dale. Fry was for the rest of the English language releases. During the run, Jim Dale broke the world record for the most character voices performed by a single actor in an audiobook (146).
That award was rescinded and given to Roy Dotrice for A Game of Thrones (2004) where he voiced 224 characters. I believe Jim Dale did hold the record before that though with 134 voices for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
Also Andy Serkis reading the lord of the rings. 11/10
No publisher is going to pay a professional to narrate their audiobooks when they can have AI do a shitty job for much less.
A shitty narrator can get me to hate a book I like. A great narrator can bring the characters to life, enhance the experience, and turn me from a listener to a fan. I’ve searched for books by narrators like Nick Podehl and Jeff Hayes and bought audiobooks I wouldn’t have otherwise.
Nick Podehl is such an amazing narrator. The voices and performance are amazing.
I’ve been slowly getting through the Kel Kade books and the narration just makes it for me
Honestly audible are terribles. They are constantly doing things that annoy me, like they must have a team somewhere that spends its days going, how can we kill this golden goose?
They are going through and replacing audiobooks recorded in the 1980s with new ones which in theory should improve their quality but they’re getting rid of the classic sounds of those books.
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I tried, and failed, to get into audio books for years. Then I listened to Dungeon Crawler Carl narrated by Jeff Hayes and what an absolute delight it was. There’s no way I would’ve gotten even 10 minutes in if it was one of those soulless AI voices instead.
Currently listening to the first book.
I’m not sure why AI would automatically mean it’s doing a shitty job.
Because… the tool has no understanding of anything? It reads written words, yes, but no intention, no cultural context, no intonation. Unless everything is spelled out like a script, then it will not sound great, would it?
Someone can manually go through it and correct and edit it, as one would a regular, human made recording. It’s not rocket science exactly. It wouldn’t be a story time for children but it would probably be alright for more plain stuff
If the “fix” for an AI implementation in a use case is, again, to manually correct it and find a less demanding audience then… yes, by definition it’s shitty.
The point isn’t that it’s infeasible, just that it will be low quality.
I mean you have to correct and edit human made stuff too, doesn’t mean it’s shit lol
If you want the stuff read out and don’t care for the radio type stuff, I’d imagine the better voice AIs do a pretty good job. And I personally prefer the more neutral voices to the story time stuff, so works for me.
This is me just speculating here but if they follow the path of this CEO who fired his human staff to replace it by AI… then rollback admit it’s shit https://gizmodo.com/klarna-hiring-back-human-help-after-going-all-in-on-ai-2000600767 then my bet is that it’s not done to improve quality but rather margins.
If AI is done alongside professionals, and done so ethically (not stolen training data, not ignoring ecological cost by pumping water in dry areas to cool down GPUs, etc) and economically (i.e. not having it “cheap” now but once a monopoly position is obtain, raise prices for a captive set of consumers) then yes it can be potentially empowering. This though is pretty much never the case.
That being said, if one “just” want read aloud, there are plenty of FLOSS alternatives and I believe Mozilla even a TTS/STT system based solely on voluntary voices.
It’s a company, of course it’s done to increase profits. I’m just saying it being AI doesn’t automatically mean it’s shit, it could be done just fine. AI is a tool, the end result depends on how that tool is used.
These people just want to hate AI. Read through and see how many times they complain about copywrited material stolen, but claim piracy is the solution.
Maybe we’ll start reading again.
There is literally zero shame in someone consuming audiobooks, and it’s deeply weird to act like something is lost to you if others enjoy them. And this is coming from someone who virtually never listens to audiobooks.
I never said there was. I offered an alternative. . Outrage is misdirected and it’s by design. There are constructive ways to direct it
“Maybe we’ll start reading again” obviously implies that something is lacking presently and that with luck, we’ll go back to the way things were
Not sure if you’re saying I’m outraged but I promise you I’m not, just thought it was lame to try and imply audiobook enjoyers were somehow less than because of how they prefer to enjoy stories
That depends entirely on how profitable it is and how much they can get authors onboard.
I do agree that a good narrator delivers a performance that adds the work. James Marster will always be Harry Dresden in my head.
That depends entirely on how profitable it is and how much they can get authors onboard.
A. Anything can be profitable when the cost to generation will be counted in singles of dollars instead of multiple thousands for a good narrator. They don’t even have to sell many to turn a profit too.
B. You think authors are going to have a choice? Lmfao. It’s the publishers that hold any real power and they will jump all over everyone’s IP with AI slop to make an extra three cents.
Your view seems to be hyper focused on the most pessimistic way of interpreting things. Are you doing OK? Seriously, I know how easy it is for everything going on to overwhelm you with negativity. How are you doing?
Maybe this is a culture clash thing, but FWIW, to me your post comes across as incredibly condesending asking a total stranger about their mental helth and implying its bad like you were their close friend.
I find the constant stream of people hyper focused on the worst possible outcome tiresome and frustrating. But instead of responding with that, I intentionally tried to express compassion and concern for a complete stranger. But because this is the Internet, naturally people interpret my actions with the worst possible intent.
That being said, how are you doing? Have anything fun you are looking forward to?
So despite me giving my opinion that that style of posting seems (to me) to be condesending you decided to apply that same style of message, which i just said I thought was invasive, to me?
I get you think you are being nice but trying to force unearned intimacy comes off as creepy.
This isn’t the worst possible outcome. It’s the most realistic one. The worst one would be publishers just straight up replacing their writers with AI
It’s the publishers that hold any real power
It might be time to finally change that, especially considering what a piss poor job they have been doing for decades at their own part of the production of media.
The thing with this is that there won’t be shitty narrations any more. Hate it all you may, fact of the matter is that AI-powered voice generation is pretty good at what it does. So in the future you won’t have shitty narrations and great narrations. You’ll have decent narrations and great (human) narrations.
And teslas will have full self driving tomorrow and crypto currency will replace normal currency within one year! Always believe in the hype!
A shitty narrator can get me to hate a book I like.
And that is where I see potential for AI. There are quite a few books which I’d love to listen to but they are all narrated by a guy whose narration I can’t stand. AI would open the possibility to choose a voice and I might actually get to enjoy those books. It’s Amazon though so the ethical implications and quality concerns are something I’m worried about.
I made some AI animated content that I never released because I don’t have the rights to the voices I was using. Even though I was blending several voices together to make them unrecognizable, it made me uncomfortable.
But in the process I learned the capabilities and limitations of AI voices. If you’re going purely from text to speech, it’s horrendous (as far as I experienced). Very robotic. It’s a bit better when melodic information is included (as in Suno) but still sounds like AI.
But when I recorded my own voice saying the lines and then converted it to another voice, it took all of the nuance of my line reads and converted it into the other voice.
So, would your opinion change if it turns out they’re going to use purchased voice rights to have a single narrator perform the whole book and then use AI to turn the narrators voice into a full voice cast?
I could see how it would allow lesser known books to have a better experience with a truly separate voice for each character, but I could also see how this might drive out lesser known/minority voice actors. Not advocating one way or another, just providing a piece of this conversation I think we should bear in mind.
So, would your opinion change if it turns out they’re going to use purchased voice rights to have a single narrator perform the whole book and then use AI to turn the narrators voice into a full voice cast?
It would make me hate it even more because I already hate the existing full cast of humans audio dramas 99% of the time and actually prefer a single (or low number of) narrator approach.
Completely fair. I kind of like them. They did it for Redwall and I listen to those books on long drives sometimes. It works for me. Now I guess the advantage could be to have both versions and get to choose which you listen to–but even I’m skeptical that a corporation would have that much regard for the preferences of its consumers.
Oh. That’s an interesting use-case I hadn’t considered.
For fiction, yeah, that’s true. For nonfiction, this could work pretty well.
I’m still generally opposed to it because it’s using the work of existing voice recording without compensation, though.
Why would they when you can just plug any epub into a program and use google tts. Ive listened to about a book a day for the past few years doing this and i love it. Yeah it took getting used too, but once you find an ai voice you like and figure out which words to auto replace to sound right its honestly better then an audiobook. Well at least to me it is, i could never stand when the reader would change their voice for different characters.
This is what I don’t get from a business standpoint. Why would anyone buy an AI read audiobook for $20 when they can get the exact same audio by buying the ebook for $0.99 and running it through AI?
My experience is these systems never get the intonation and stresses right. It drives me nuts and I can’t listen to it.
Idk how much experience you have with this type of thing, but when I listen to my books i use my imagination to picture and hear things the way i want just like when i read a book normally. Ive read well over a 1000 books doing so, and that doesnt count rereads, and having the ability and willingness to use this method has drastically increased the amount i read but also my enjoyment doing so. The app i use also allows me to edit words and phrases throughput the book where i can correct how things are pronounced. Hell there’s a series that has this stupid catchphrase that i completely removed from all 20 books cause it was annoying. Im sure im only a single person that likes this method, but if i can find it enjoyable then when real ai gets put to work it’ll capture others.
youtube already does it.
And it’s shit
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like how fans got obssessed with AI generated DBZ(what ifs)
I just wrote a novel (finished first draft yesterday). There’s no way I can afford professional audiobook voice actors—especially for a hobby project.
What I was planning on doing was handling the audiobook on my own—using an AI voice changer for all the different characters.
That’s where I think AI voices can shine: If someone can act they can use a voice changer to handle more characters and introduce a great variety of different styles of speech while retaining the careful pauses and dramatic elements (e.g. a voice cracking during an emotional scene) that you’d get from regular voice acting.
I’m not saying I will be able to pull that off but surely it will be better than just telling Amazon’s AI, “Hey, go read my book.”
I think it would be a good idea to do a section of your work with and without AI modification. Then have people listen to both and give feedback. Good to find out if people like the modifications before you do a tone of work.
do a section of your work with and without […t]hen have people listen to both and give feedback.
Yes, that’s the principle of prototyping. De-risk while testing solely the crucial part!
Would infinitely prefer no voice changer.
Agreed. No AI voice changer please. Hopefully every one of us at one point in our lives has been read a story by someone else. Never once did the fact that all the different characters dialog was coming from one voice did that detract from the story or the immersion.
I’ve listened to audiobooks recorded with extremely deep masculine voices (think James Earl Jones) and when the voice actor was doing the voice of a 5 year old girl, (in only a slightly higher whiny timbre which matched the character traits) it was never immersion breaking. However, AI voice would. If I want different actors for different characters I’ll listen to radio dramas.
AI aside, different voices may be immersion breaking. I tend to avoid audiobooks with more than a single narrator.
Two narrators with one reading the male and one reading the female characters is usually okay but the full cast dramas are the worst.
They are redoing all of the discworld books like this, and personally I can’t stand it.
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AI will write them and AI will read them to us.
Stock up on old physical books
that’s gross.
Let AI pay for them and AI listen to them too. That way we can pay for and listen to actually good ones.
For now at least I bet this’ll be pretty mediocre. I’m a big audiobook fan and voice actors have a massive impact on the quality of the finished product. A great voice actor can make a mediocre book fun and engaging, a bad one can make a great book unlistenable. The best do great voice differentiation. As an example I’ve really enjoyed Andrea Parsneau’s work in The Wandering Inn series.
Patrick Tull’s Aubrey/Maturin series is fucking amazing.
Imagine not liking the voicing of a book, so you just pick a different one.
You seem to be implying that’s ridiculous, but it is indeed exactly like that, though it’s not like I’m expecting every performance to be a masterpiece.
It’s also pretty subjective, for example folks either seem to love or hate R. C. Bray. My mother can’t stand the guy’s style, I think he’s okay.
No, I think it’s great to be able to get rid of shitty voice work with the click of a button. Wish I could use it on my bf’s Brian Sanderson audiobooks. That guy’s simpering, exaggeratedly high pitched female voices are so unpleasant to listen to.
Ah, I see what you’re saying, I misunderstood and thought you were taking about picking a different book. Indeed, for the worst case scenario a mediocre AI voice could be an improvement!
