51–60 of 77 posts
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.
It was probably even written by AI!
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://ai.meta.com/blog/voicebox-generative-ai-model-speech...
https://news.play.ht/post/introducing-playht2-0-the-state-of...
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…
Sure, and having AI generated movies and stuff would reduce the physical and human resources needed to make movies. In either case, the people who lose those jobs won't be happy about it, despite the gain to humanity.
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…
> 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
In a competitive market, bad product drives out good.
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.
There is a huge effort going on to frame striking actors as if they're anti-technology and to turn what should be a conversation about clearly unacceptable studio terms around IP rights into a philosophical debate about the nature of progress. If the union organizers all come out and start condemning Project Gutenberg then fine, we can have a conversation about Gutenberg then. But as far as I can tell online, that hasn't happened yet.
And even if we do end up having that conversation, it's not at all clear that striking actors are going to feel the same way about nonprofit accessibility tools as they would feel about purely profit-motivated projects for Amazon books or (more relevant to the actual strike going on) movie studios. These conversations oversimplify what actor demands actually are.
Before you get into a giant argument, check to make sure that the argument is actually happening and isn't just the result of a single Internet article by a single writer. Made-up conflicts online started with "people on Twitter say" junk pieces that would quote single-digit follower Twitter accounts as if they represented a consensus, and have now moved past that into pieces just kind of confidently stating what demographics believe with literally no sources at all. If union organizers have a problem with Project Gutenberg, they will say something about it at some point.
And maybe they will! But I can't find a source on that yet; as far as I can tell from some quick searches we have one isolated article online framing this as a major conflict with unions even though there are zero actual union organizers in the article saying that it's a conflict.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Maybe we should all go back to hand making our own soap, too, instead of having cut-rate profiteering industry do it. 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
There wont be much space for people doing this for work for money in 10 years. There is no reason to believe the quality of automation will continue to be poor any more than we would have been reasonable to believe that chess engines would continue to perform poorly.