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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

#31

Post by cf141q5325 »

contravariant wrote: post #8

This 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 wh…

>it almost seems to be trying to hurt the cause of the actors currently on strike.

Thats a lot less strange then it sounds. Sabotage is a real strategy and it has become incredibly easy with increasing tribalism and the inability to call peoples stupidity out. The rational goes the more i can make your side look and act stupid, the better chances for my side. It becomes increasingly easy if there arent any checks and balances in your ingroup. It of course leaves everyone in a worse situation but a lot of people dont seem to care.

Re: Project Gutenberg has implemented one of the worst AI fears of striking actors

#32

Post by paradox460 »

contravariant wrote: post #8

This 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 wh…

You'll see this happen whenever the tech becomes slightly widespread. When DALL-E was the only kid on the block, and stable diffusion and midjourney and such barely existed, the media was breathless with excitement over how cool these tools were. Then as soon as sd came out, and made image generation available to a ton more people, without corporate censorship and control, you started to hear about how bad it was, how it was undermining artists, and so forth

Re: Project Gutenberg has implemented one of the worst AI fears of striking actors

#33

Post by atrus »

lacrimacida wrote: post #18
jokethrowaway wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is step 1. Bark already has some models which try to match the tone to what's written. We'll get there.

Why do we need to get there? What’s the end goal?

To eliminate work of course. To advance the state of technology where everyone can have the base essentials for free, or as low a cost as physically possible.

Re: Project Gutenberg has implemented one of the worst AI fears of striking actors

#34

Post by Dr4kn »

littlestymaar wrote: post #16

> What the reading does lack is the versatility and depth that human actors bring to the same work. It’s a far cry from, say, Stephen Fry, who created a unique voice for dozens of characters while reading the Harry Potter audiobooks. But Project Gutenberg’s audiobooks are free, the process is quick, and the text-to-speech system used is scalable. You loved cheap tasteless hydroponic tomatoes? You'll love cheap bland…

You might not be good at reading, blind, do not have the time to read and the money to buy audiobooks. It's far from perfect, but it's better than what these people had before.

Making these works available to most people is the goal of Project Gutenberg and this is another step in that direction.

They do not have the money to hire voice actors to record audiobooks even for their most popular titles

Re: Project Gutenberg has implemented one of the worst AI fears of striking actors

#35

Post by fnordpiglet »

tredre3 wrote: post #28
StopTheWorld wrote: post #17

I just listened to the beginning of one of these books. 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…

> Then the third sentence in the text says "1793-05". The audio was "1793 to 2005". Actually it was 1793 to 1805. Bit of a tangent here but did you get 1805 from context or is YYYY-YY a common year range notation that I'm not aware of? Because I would never guess 1793-05 meant 1793-1805 either.

It’s not but it’s obvious from the context, which I think is the point. A GPT-4 LLM could probably figure it out from context, but most text to speech models probably don’t have as much semantic training.

Re: Project Gutenberg has implemented one of the worst AI fears of striking actors

#36

Post by Tao3300 »

Ok, show me the actor who is afraid of losing a meal ticket by not getting to bring their talent to an audiobook reading of Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius.

Do the author and the imaginary picketline behind them take issue with Librivox recordings of public domain works?

Re: Project Gutenberg has implemented one of the worst AI fears of striking actors

#37

Post by VanTheBrand »

sprayk wrote: post #23

I was under the impression that striking actors concerns with AI were over AI reproducing their likenesses, but this article is claiming that the fears would also consider non-specific (non-imitation, non-likeness, ?) generated voices a threat. The former is at least what I've read as far as union demands go. Actors demanding a cut of revenue generated with their likeness I can understand, but trying to stop all AI-g…

The article is just wrong. SAG is trying to prevent the specific companies that hire their members from recreating a performers actual visual or vocal likeness without compensation or for very little compensation. To the extent they oppose a “generic” AI voice it would be in the context of that voice being trained on material that was originaly created by SAG performers or under SAG contracts and used for training with little or no compensation.

Re: Project Gutenberg has implemented one of the worst AI fears of striking actors

#38

Post by namaria »

michaelmrose wrote: post #27

This ship has sailed and worrying about AI copying a particular actor or voice of a professional actor is virtually meaningless long term. AI will enable the creation of voices and people who never were and even the corpus of people used to train the AI wont need to include actors. If you read books out loud or are an extra you don't and honestly shouldn't expect an income from it and this problem stands to get worse…

> If you read books out loud or are an extra you don't and honestly shouldn't expect an income from it

It's the other way around. If people cannot expect an income from doing work, the work will be left undone. Or it will be done poorly by cut rate profiteers.

Re: Project Gutenberg has implemented one of the worst AI fears of striking actors

#39

Post by tredre3 »

lacrimacida wrote: post #18
jokethrowaway wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is step 1. Bark already has some models which try to match the tone to what's written. We'll get there.

Why do we need to get there? What’s the end goal?

We have millions of digitized books by now. Only a very very small percentage of those are worth spending the money to turn into an audiobook narrated by a human.

A lot of people do not read books (for various reasons: they are blind, they are driving, they are jogging, they are doing chores, they just don't enjoy reading), leaving millions of pieces of art inaccessible to them.

Getting TTS quality up to near human narration level means absolutely everything will become available to them overnight.

It seems like a big win to me.

Re: Project Gutenberg has implemented one of the worst AI fears of striking actors

#40

Post by WalterBright »

danShumway wrote: post #20

Missing from this article: any quotes from striking actors or union organizers actually saying that they oppose Project Gutenberg's efforts specifically. 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 r…

Screen and voice actors have already put out of business legions of live performers, such as burlesque shows, stage shows, minstrels, etc.
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