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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

#61

Post by idopmstuff »

dieselgate wrote: post #9

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…

> It seems consumers should be able to choose between an AI narrated and human narrated audio book - given equal access to both.

If humans want human narrated books, they'll get access to both. Human narration will only disappear if people aren't willing to pay for it. I'm pretty sure that ultimately AI narration will be so much better that human reading will be a niche thing, but I view that as a positive overall. More books get read with high quality narration, and consumers don't have to cover the cost of a human narrator.

Obviously unfortunate for the human narrators, but that's why we should be pushing for UBI - AI and robots are going to eliminate a lot of professions, and I think it's wrong to keep jobs around for no other reason than to keep people employed, especially when doing so ultimately leads consumer costs to be higher. You see this in lots of places now - a big one is the teamsters using their union power to keep automation out of our ports. Literally everyone in the US could benefit from goods moving more quickly, efficiently and cheaply through our transportation infrastructure, but instead everyone has to pay a bit more so humans can keep unnecessary jobs.

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

#62

Post by duskwuff »

msp26 wrote: post #55
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…

Wouldn't that be caused by an OCR issue? No matter how primitive I doubt a TTS model would mistake I for 1. The book was probably poorly scanned, OCRed, and then had automated audiogen.

> No matter how primitive I doubt a TTS model would mistake I for 1.

"I" is the correct text, but it's intended as a Roman numeral and should be read as "one". (And, a few chapters later, "IV" should be read as "four", not "intravenous".)

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

#63

Post by squarefoot »

namaria wrote: post #26
squarefoot wrote: post #19

This is called progress. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but in a few years the trend is to have all readers replaced by AI once technology will make their voice credible, then all singers will face the same fate. I'm sorry, but in a few decades, possibly years, all movies and music will contain more and more AI generated content with fake actors and artists who never existed whose fame has been carefully planned on soc…

Ah yes. Canned mash up of an average of past human creation. Progress over actually creating.

Sadly, a big percentage of recent movies or music hits is already a mashup of old original ideas, automating the "creation" process to increase profits is just going one step further. Indie or niche movies or bands won't be touched simply because that's not where the money is.

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

#64

Post by abracadaniel »

cf141q5325 wrote: post #31
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…

This gets compounded because there is a blind spot to bad behavior of ingroup people. You know plenty of people on your side who aren’t crazy, so you dismiss the extremists as crazy people on the periphery, while those outside the group see them as examples of the norm of your group.

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

#65

Post by michaelmrose »

namaria wrote: post #60
michaelmrose wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I hadn't noticed chess engines had replaced human players. Do we have more or less professional human players today than back when Kasparov lost that historic game?

The point is that primitive engines were replaced by more advanced engines in time that surpassed humans first running on super computers and now on laptops.

Computers haven't replaced chess players because chess is recreation it is an end unto itself not a means to an end.

With voice acting it is the means toward an end which is the finished audio file which can be licenced to consumers for money.

The means costs about 300 usd per hour of finished audio whereas there is every reason to believe software can drive the per unit cost so low its impossible for a human to make a living whilst still being profitable.

Eg most of the work could end up open source leaving someone to provide 2 people to burn 6 months to produce millions of hours of audio. Lets value their time ar 150k per year and suppose they produce 3 million hours the labor cost is roughly 5c per hour.

They can probably afford to offer 4.99 per hour while being wildly profitable even after other costs are considered.

A human being doing a dozen hours a week wouldn't be able to afford a good enough tent to impress the other hobos.

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

#66

Post by hadlock »

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.

1898-02 or 1998-02 would be the years someone attended high school or college. The context of when it was written, either in 1905 or 2023 can be important. Seems to be pretty common notation when spanning centuries, particularly +/- 10 years. I grew up during the turn of the century and seemed to be quite common.

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

#67

Post by cf141q5325 »

abracadaniel wrote: post #64
cf141q5325 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

This gets compounded because there is a blind spot to bad behavior of ingroup people. You know plenty of people on your side who aren’t crazy, so you dismiss the extremists as crazy people on the periphery, while those outside the group see them as examples of the norm of your group.

Yes. Unfortunately none of this is easy. Even if you are sure you are not in a deteriorating cult (pleasant one or not) there is still a ton of blind spots not stemming from social environment but your ego for the lack of a better term. Cognitive biases are a real danger and both advertisement and cognitive warfare target those.

This is very much an asymmetric struggle. While you might be a sensible person when you are paying attention to the right aspects, most of the time you arent. Or to quote the Provisional IRA of all people

>Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.

I dont see a way around regularly checking if you have gotten unlucky and carried away. Its really easy to just be opposed to a caricature, figuring out and accepting that you have become one as well as a reaction is quite a lot harder. Mitchell and Webb made a great bit about checking regularly if you and your friends are maybe the baddies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY

If people around you take offense to you doing that, thats a very valuable indicator. If this leaves you with a collapsed reality model, dont worry, thats normal. Stuff is just complicated. Fortunately less bad is often a very reachable bar.

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

#68

Post by namaria »

michaelmrose wrote: post #65
namaria wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hadn't noticed chess engines had replaced human players. Do we have more or less professional human players today than back when Kasparov lost that historic game?

The point is that primitive engines were replaced by more advanced engines in time that surpassed humans first running on super computers and now on laptops. Computers haven't replaced chess players because chess is recreation it is an end unto itself not a means to an end. With voice acting it is the means toward an end which is the finished audio file which can be licenced to consumers for money. The means costs ab…

I get that you think software can only improve because it evidently gets more efficient and fast over time and that means anything humans do for money is liable to be replaced by computers. What I think you fail to realize is that better technology enables people to become better at what they want to do.

There are now more _professional_ chess players than in the 90s. Because people like to play chess? That's circular reasoning isn't it? People can train and learn from software, with the end goal of being better players and the economics of the game have because of this absorbed more people.

When you take a snapshot of a field of human activity and imagine the next one, you guess there will be less people and more machines. This is naive and unfounded in history. There are now more fashion designers and tailors and a more complex sartorial economy than before robotic looms. Even accounting for population growth. There won't be less voice actors in a generation because of robotic voice acting. There will be a more diverse and more complex economy around producing voice content.

Predicting machines will replace people is predicated on a industrial view of the economy where people are either capitalists or workers and capitalists vie to use capital to reduce labor costs. In practice, many trade-offs apply, and often the introduction of technology changes dynamics in unpredictable ways. Not everything in the economy is some form of inefficient manual labor that can be profitably replaced by a box.

This whole "entitled workers shouldn't expect to deserve an income" smacks of elitist propaganda. Technology changes culture and economy in complex and nuanced ways, and the caricature of workers mad at clever engineers robbing them of cushy jobs is usually just a front for selling some mass produced lower grade substitute. And the people working on the high quality stuff don't get replaced by robots. They learn how to use the technology to innovate and add more value, out-competing these sorts.

Take the auto industry for example. They went heavily into robotics for decades, automated welding heavily and raced to the bottom culminating in a heavy series of recalls in early 00s. Meanwhile, skilled welders have become some of the highest payed industrial workers and what did the auto industry do to climb up the value ladder again? Crammed their cars full of non-robot made software.

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

#69

Post by cf141q5325 »

giantg2 wrote: post #54
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…

"Making stuff that takes a lot of effort virtually effortless is a massive gain to humanity" 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.

That problem is as old as automation itself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-loom_riots

It should not be overlooked that this is less of a problem of automation but one of how we organize society. What do we do once large parts of society become redundant? With many of them already having had bullshit jobs doing busywork? The effect of substantial numbers of high paying jobs vanishing alone will be disastrous for the economy. Technological progress is just highly deflationary.

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

#70

Post by dieselgate »

idopmstuff wrote: post #61
dieselgate wrote: post #9

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…

> It seems consumers should be able to choose between an AI narrated and human narrated audio book - given equal access to both. If humans want human narrated books, they'll get access to both. Human narration will only disappear if people aren't willing to pay for it. I'm pretty sure that ultimately AI narration will be so much better that human reading will be a niche thing, but I view that as a positive overall. M…

> I'm pretty sure that ultimately AI narration will be so much better that human reading will be a niche thing, but I view that as a positive overall.

Respect your opinion but hope that's not the case.

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