Project Gutenberg has implemented one of the worst AI fears of striking actors
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Re: Project Gutenberg has implemented one of the worst AI fears of striking actors
#2Listening to an audiobook narrated by an AI voice can get old after a few hours. There is absolutely still hope for traditional voice narration, especially if different voice actors want to voice different characters in the story.
Re: Project Gutenberg has implemented one of the worst AI fears of striking actors
#3There will still be a market for premium audiobooks with an engaging narrator.
This will help fill the gap for books that would never have an audiobook, or for people that never would have paid anyway (so they aren’t lost customers).
Re: Project Gutenberg has implemented one of the worst AI fears of striking actors
#4Listening to an audiobook narrated by an AI voice can get old after a few hours. There is absolutely still hope for traditional voice narration, especially if different voice actors want to voice different characters in the story.
This is step 1. Bark already has some models which try to match the tone to what's written.
We'll get there.
Re: Project Gutenberg has implemented one of the worst AI fears of striking actors
#5Listening to an audiobook narrated by an AI voice can get old after a few hours. There is absolutely still hope for traditional voice narration, especially if different voice actors want to voice different characters in the story.
I imagine this will sit where the LibriVox recordings did before. "Good enough" to cover the vast amount of works that never received studio treatment, but not anything that will ever replace a human at the high end. Even if the likeness is absolutely perfect, people will still prefer to know they are actually listening to their favorite actor.
Re: Project Gutenberg has implemented one of the worst AI fears of striking actors
#6Possibly a misleading title, the paper [1] is mostly of Microsoft affiliated authors, with one member of PG.
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.03926.pdf
edit: I'm not sure what's particularly exciting about this paper otherwise, it just seems like they parsed the PG html format and then applied some previously developed speech model to them.
Re: Project Gutenberg has implemented one of the worst AI fears of striking actors
#7A well read audiobook by a professional is a joy.
AI read audiobooks are unlistenable.
I’d argue that no one should be getting AI to read audiobooks it’s a terrible experience.
Re: Project Gutenberg has implemented one of the worst AI fears of striking actors
#8This article is disparaging Project Gutenberg so badly that to me it almost seems to be trying to hurt the cause of the actors currently on strike.
Spreading FUD about text-to-speech technology that is not completely lifeless is a bit like blaming google translate or OCR programs from taking away jobs. Making stuff that takes a lot of effort virtually effortless is a massive gain to humanity, especially for people who depend on technology like this to access media (especially so for media in the public domain).
It's such a weird argument that honestly it feels like a trap designed to hurt the striking actors. I hope none them are stupid enough to latch onto this article to support their argument because as an actor saying you're afraid a robot might be better at understanding and conveying the emotion in a book is not a good look. Even more so when you're aiming at accessibility software.
Re: Project Gutenberg has implemented one of the worst AI fears of striking actors
#9I believe the human voice-actors are justified within this context. No comment on anything else but how does a “free market” come into play with this? It seems consumers should be able to choose between an AI narrated and human narrated audio book - given equal access to both.
I personally am not a big fan of AI but playing devil’s advocate to a degree it seems AI narrated books may be useful for translating works into less common languages.
I hope we can widely implement “generated by AI” labeling for works/items to notify consumers.
Edit: fwiw I have a difficult time listening to audio books read by humans in the first place. But that’s largely irrelevant
Re: Project Gutenberg has implemented one of the worst AI fears of striking actors
#10Listening to an audiobook narrated by an AI voice can get old after a few hours. There is absolutely still hope for traditional voice narration, especially if different voice actors want to voice different characters in the story.
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