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Maybe this is another union ploy, similar to the Netflix hit pieces a month ago about the ML job.
It suck for voice actors. If they’re lucky the top percent of them might retain a job due to the novelty or branding of their voice, but most will be unemployed.
edit: erroneously said dictation (which also will be solved :p)
I 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 in…
This isn't a zero sum game.
If you want to complain, complain about the Bezos-owned WaPo adding machine-generated audio versions of all their stories (linked prominently under the headline) and pushing them for a podcast-like experience (terrible quality generated audio, might I add, having clicked on it yesterday by accident while scrolling and couldn’t figure out how to stop it until I just killed the app).
Unlike Project Gutenberg, WaPo and NYT used to hire narrators for their popular stories or bleeding headlines. That is revenue and jobs that might actually be erased.
A 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.
I find 2 faults with them:
1% of the time I can tell it's a robovoice narrating the MS/PG audiobooks, and
When the book switches back and forth between multiple speakers in a conversation, the MS/PG audio book fail to change voices enough.
I have spent a week downloading most of them, and will continue to leech until I have to whole 1.25 TB collection with a back-up copy.
You loved cheap tasteless hydroponic tomatoes? You'll love cheap bland voice-acting.
The book text starts out "I." as in, roman numeral for chapter 1. The audio book read this as "eye" (or "I", but not 1).
Then the third sentence in the text says "1793-05". The audio was "1793 to 2005". Actually it was 1793 to 1805.
I listened to a few more sentences and had an idea of the state of it currently. The tech has advanced in the past few years, still has a way to go. Insofar as striking actors, they probably should be worried about what the big companies are up to.
Listening 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.
AI is one part of why actors are striking, and their fears are pretty directed at studios and employers. In particular they're worried about contract clauses that grant studios perpetual rights to use their likenesses and voices to train AIs that studios hope will replace them. It is a convenient narrative to phrase that as if they are opposed to AI entirely or that they are opposed to accessibility or voice-over technology. In reality even if actors were fully embracing AI-generated content, the terms being proposed by studios for ownership over training data and unlimited monopolization of actor voices and performances would still be egregious.
There have been conflicts about text-to-speech efforts in ebooks before, but it's not clear to me that the majority of actors have any problem with stilted, lifeless text-to-speech designed by a nonprofit to increase ebook accessibility.
And maybe actors will be furious at Gutenberg, I don't know. But that's the point, a good way of figuring out whether or not striking actors are mad at Gutenberg would be to talk to them directly, which this article doesn't do. What I'm saying is, in the middle of a highly public strike, be careful of uncritically accepting the word of writers who are not part of that strike when they tell you what the strike is about and what the people striking believe and want.