I definitely do not want to support this practice, but there’s no way to filter these out 😠.
I listened to one of the Audible samples, labeled Virtual Voice. Apple had one labeled as “Madison,” so who knows whether they’re all going to be labeled so clearly.
It sounded like a TikTok narrator, passable but at the quality level I would expect from a Netflix second-screen show. The book was at the same quality level, too. (The author does “life and business coaching with innovative and adaptable strategies, transcending traditional boundaries.”)
I consider these kinds of books and narration to be slop, so I’m definitely not the target market. My worry is that publishers will use AI narrators as virtual scabs to lowball actual creators.
Yeah, I don’t think I would like them at all. I had the audiobooks for a whole series by one author, and they were all read by the same narrator except the latest book. I couldn’t handle it; it was a real person, not AI, but they were just terrible (but still better than an AI-generated voice).
Did it do distinct voices for the characters? I could maybe see biographies being tolerable read my a machine (though ironic), but books with multiple characters interacting would be a mess. That’s one of the things I appreciate about John Lee (who narrated almost that entire series). He even used the same voices for the same characters across books.
I don’t know about distinct voices. The sample didn’t cover dialogue. It’s possible with AI, but I wouldn’t expect it from low-effort AI-generation.
I very much understand the misgivings about this, and certain parts make me uncomfortable with it, too. But this could be revolutionary for media accessibility, and in my mind could easily be worth it for the ability to make new media immediately accessible to folks with vision challenges, deaf and hard of hearing individuals, and a lot of other folks for whom most media is not easily interactive/accessible. For many people in this situation, you wait months after a traditional version of something is published before an accessible version is released, if it ever is. Often, it’s just not seen as worth a publisher’s time to make their content accessible to an audience they don’t see as significantly profitable.
Like the printing press took jobs from scribes, but had far more significant impacts democratizing information and education, so might AI in the long run.
But this could be revolutionary for media accessibility, and in my mind could easily be worth it for the ability to make new media immediately accessible to folks with vision challenges, deaf and hard of hearing individuals, and a lot of other folks for whom most media is not easily interactive/accessible
As an accessibility add-on / upgrade to standard TTS, sure. Sounds great, even. But I will not accept soulless, robotic, AI-generated voices for something being sold as an audiobook. I just won’t.
If they are as shitty as the obviously ai powered closed captioning we are seeing now, they will hopefully be easy to recognize.
