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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…
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…
And doubly so for older, long-tail content which would otherwise be unlikely to get an audiobook produced of it. There's more to public-domain English fiction than Shakespeare and Dickens, but no one's stepping up to voice-act audiobooks for obscure authors from the 1800s.
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?
As for actual creative tasks, that is another matter altogether. I can only hope that real creativity doesn't die out and that TV series and other things don't get any more homogenous than they already have become. At least there are still enjoyable outliers in this plethora of entertainment output. And in some way, audio books can also be creative if they really add emotions that aren't written down exactly. Similar to how the same sheet music can be adapted by different musicians in slightly different ways or instruments and such. Even if all of that could be synthesized, what it means is that selection of the results would become the creative task. Just like stable diffusion and others output hundreds of images for a prompt but only a few are actually interesting. By definition of this automation, you will always end up with more than you can consume and finding the right result for the right people then becomes the next hurdle.
I still wonder though, whether new entertainment really is necessary until the end of times. There probably are already more books and music in the world to last you a lifetime. And after 100 to 200 years of continuous TV and movie output, you probably could just reshow the ones from a decade ago for the next generation, no need to rehash everything. This assumes that there are no new media though, such as maybe walkable VR movies. But even film from decades ago can be remastered in 4k and I begin to doubt that anything above 4k makes much sense. Even 2k is still perfectly fine to me.
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.
https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/home/cleaning/a20705805/how...
We should also go back to making our own thread, weaving our own cloth, and sewing our own clothes.
Naaah.
> Speaking at the tech-based CogX festival in London, he played a clip of a history documentary that faked his voice, without his knowledge. It appears as though the actor is narrating the show but the AI-generated voice was actually created by technology learning from Fry reading all seven of the Harry Potter audiobooks.
https://www.standard.co.uk/tech/stephen-fry-voice-ai-cloned-...
However, the notion that it's somehow nefarious to create a new voice to read audiobooks (with the permission of the person supplying the training data) is ridiculous.
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.
Why are people (or maybe it's AI, ha!) writing hit pieces about a non-profit who attempts to make classical works widely and freely available? Not sure who/what "quartz" is but it's giving off major writing-for-hire vibes. Likely there is not a single member of SAG who cares what Project Gutenberg does. Maybe this is another union ploy, similar to the Netflix hit pieces a month ago about the ML job.
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.
Read more books.
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…
But since I'm not a native English speaker and these models were incredible for learning the language, also speech-to-text models, all these accessibility models are used in the vast majority of cases where there would be no human alternative, for example transcribing all Youtube videos, or correcting the grammar of this HN comment, so I really agree with you.