A lot of people just aren't aware of how fast AI is moving. AI voices were pretty meh earlier this year. A lot of people working on the audiobook/voice acting scene have been talking about this though.
I recommend everyone to check the YouTube channel "two minute papers" who have being doing videos about papers on AI for the last 10 years on so to see the accelerated progress AI have. Like 5 years ago those images generating AI looked like LSD infused dreams and now they look almost perfect.
I wish I could watch his videos but the way he talks is awful. It's like some exaggerated evolution of YouTube talk.
Ah yes, Audio AI. I can't wait for this rapidly-approaching future where you literally won't be able to trust the validity of anything your senses tell you anymore
"Text was never trustworthy."
-- Abraham Lincoln
Lincoln was a smart man
Ahead of his time too:
Nobody lies on the internet
-Abraham Lincoln
Truly one of the wisest men to ever live
Imagine the day when people post videos of the president saying literally anything with pitch perfect audio voice synth
Imagine going to prison for a generated clip of you confessing to a crime.
Once the tech is that good, a recording of your confession will be useless as evidence in court.
...but it is already that good? The fact that celebrities are having to come out and say it wasn't them in an ad is proof enough that it can fool people
You only need to fool a jury
Then we'll have to take more care with how jury trials are conducted. It's always been possible to fool juries, that's often a lawyer's entire strategy.
Everything will be useless in court. Audio evidence? Worthless. Video evidence? Worthless. Physical evidence? Prove that it wasnt planted. That kind of AI is a fucking nightmare and no one really understands the danger that kind of AI poses.
AI can't tamper with physical evidence. It can't fake financial records or witness testimony. Many kinds of audio and visual recordings will still have sufficient authentication and chain of custody to be worthwhile.
The main kind of evidence that these AI generators makes untenable are the ones where someone just shows up and says "look at this video of X confessing to Y that I happen to have," which was never a particularly good sort of evidence to base a court case on to begin with.
Witness testimony is already a very unreliable source of evidence. And again, evidence can be planted. Hell there was doubt about the chain of custody before AI could just make up audio and video. The validity of the chain of custody boils down to the cops and government in general being trusted enough to not falsify it when it suits them.
Sufficiently advanced AI can, and eventually will, be capable of creating deepfakes that cant reliably be proven to be false. Every test that can be done to authenticate that media can be used by the AI to select generated media that would pass scrutiny in principle.
I love the optimism and I hope you're right but I don't think you are. I think that deepfake AI should scare people a whole lot more than it does.
That got me thinking about when we'll hear the first case of AI generated security camera footage used to frame someone. Which leads me to wonder when it will be standard procedure for cameras to digitally sign their footage.
Or imagine politicians like Trump saying the most heinous stuff and then denying it saying it's fake or AI. How will people know? You won't even be able to trust your eyes or ears anymore.
Soon the schizophrenics will become neuro-typical
Alright but hear me out: AI-generated odors
You know some people are just gonna generate that fucking locker room smell, the reek of hormones and axe body spray, to terrorize people
Have you watched a movie, ever? There have always been special effects trickery.
Yes, but you could tell they weren't real. They still needed real voice actors, real sound design, studios and stages and resources. Anyone with a halfway decent rig can fake shit to a very believable degree. Even with CGI you swear is fantastic, you see its fakeness once the novelty wears off
I want TTS made better with AI so that I won't need huge audiobooks filling up my phone. The epubs that I already have would serve as audiobooks when needed.
If your phone is rendering TTS on the fly that's probably going to be a drain on battery.
As someone who only consumes books in audiobook form this is great news for me, I tried to listen to some automatically generated audio books around 2 years ago and I found them horrible to listen to just because they sounded so off.
I'd love to be able to copy in the text of a book and get actually listenable (is that a proper word?) audiobook out of the other side for some books that will just simply never be recorded by actual people due to being too old / obscure.
I've been wanting to be able to listen to the Pelucidar books for years but they just don't exist in audio format, is there somewhere publically available that I can do this?
I would guess there is a LOT of work going into each voice. Playing with different parameters and prompts. I don't think it's as simple as just copying the text into a box. Not yet at least :)
That's a good thought there though. Audiobooks could have each character voiced uniquely.
This is literally the only upside I see from this.
One of the Dune audio books started off as multiple voices and then part way through it was finished by just one guy. Really impressed with it at first, and then really kind of debuffed by it. I had already read the book years before so it wasn't a big deal, but like wtf?
Lol what a troll audio book.
Just curious, but how come you only consume books in audio format? (Please forgive me if this was rude to ask.)
I can't speak for OP but I do this as well. For me it's because I listen to them on the drive to/from dropping my kids off at school and I'll have it playing while I'm working or playing a game.
As someone who would like to do this, how well do you actually pay attention to what is going on? I'd do so much more reading if I didn't have to go back and reread paragraphs several times over because I simply can't pay attention, let alone if I'm doing something else entirely
It depends. It definitely is easy to get distracted and need to rewind but I found that happens much less often than with sitting down and reading in text form.
Its a solid solution and I recommend you give it a try.
AudiobookBay and youtube have tons of books
If you're interested further, check if your local library has a partnership with Libby. It's an app that you can check out audiobooks from.
Not OP, but I almost exclusively read novels and non fiction via audiobooks. For context, I’m on pace for 70 books this year.
My main reason for audiobooks is I having a driving commute. Two hours a day round trip. Audiobooks keep me sane in a way that podcasts or music do not. I also do audiobooks when doing chores around the house.
Second, I struggle to focus on reading a book on my phone. Too many distractions and I think the reading experience is subpar. I do have an eInk reader, but I haven’t charged it in years because it’s easier to do audiobooks.
Physical books are rare in my home, but that’s a self-reinforcing cycle since I enjoy audiobooks so much.
I like to read books before bed, but need darkness for a while before I have any chance of going to sleep, so me and my wife listen to 45min of audio book a night before going to sleep. Plus when we listen together there is no need to worry about getting ahead of each other and spoiling stuff.
I read books in other scenarios but that ritual is by the most time I have for reading and the most consistent as well.
Well you can always pay someone to read it for you. Blind people do that.
Are any of these books public domain? If so the print version could be eligible for inclusion at Project Guttenberg. PG has very specific docs about eligibility for this. You could probably get a scan from archive.org if you don't have one. You would have to clean up the OCR by hand.
Then it would eligible to be requested from the volunteer (human) readers who have been pumping out Libra audio books for years at LibriVox.
Recently I saw Gutenberg has a collab. They are producing and distributing Libre guidebooks generated by AI. I believe I read on one of the pages they have 4000 done. I haven't tried it out but I guess I should.
Project Gutenberg, Microsoft, and MIT have worked together to create thousands of free and open audiobooks using new neural text-to-speech technology and Project Gutenberg's large open-access collection of e-books. This project aims to make literature more accessible to (audio)book-lovers everywhere and democratize access to high quality audiobooks. Whether you are learning to read, looking for inclusive reading technology, or about to head out on a long drive, we hope you enjoy this audiobook collection.
I assume this is also a great benefit as fertilizer down at the old AI content farm which is otherwise totally run over with reddit shitposts.
If anyone tries it let me know how it goes.
That sounds pretty cool, though I'd be concerned it will suffer from the classic problem of current AI (...and humans, but that's by the by) of confident incorrectness. Like an automatic transmission can miss meanings and types of context that a human will spot, programmatically generating speech can probably mess up punctuation and flow - even the way a human reader sometimes will get part way through a sentence and realise they need to start again for it to come out right.
That said, I can't see it being a big problem for most works, just unfortunate here and there. For once it seems an AI application short on downsides! (Except for the usual economic ones for many people previously trained in the field.)
There was a fairly big 40K lore channel on YouTube with a rather good AI impersonation of David Attenborough's voice and narration style/scripting. However, I just went to check it, yet it must have recently gotten hit with a DMCA and taken down. A shame really. Though I never got into 40K lore before, or the 40K franchise in general, I am a big fan of David Attenborough, and so that ended up really drawing me in to a new literary universe. However, it was a big mistake by the YouTube creator to use the name and photo likeness of Attenborough in the branding, video titles, and thumbnail art on the channel. I think without pushing that line, the AI voice with a clear disclosure could have kept the channel under the legal radar.
From the pinned comments made here, this looks to be the same creators new channel, now using a different voice, no longer based on any one real person:
Because it has the potential to become actively harmful to the audiobook industry
And great for accesibility for people who can not read well.
why should i care about the audio book industry? The biggest player is Amazon, it doesn't add value to the art form, its just another way to become informed, and the more people who have that ability the better.
Audiobooks are offputting to me and I strongly prefer to read text, but this seems like a great thing overall for making books more accessible to people. More people experiencing a wider range of books is good.
Audiobooks have been a great coping mechanism for my ADHD, they've also made me a better driver.
For the latter, if I listen to my music I definitely feel a bit more aggressive, whereas if it's an audiobook (and I've given myself sufficient room), I'm much more forgiving.
For the former, I can mix them with menial tasks and it makes them so much more doable.
I’ve been getting into audiobooks in a big way recently. This is interesting but somehow seems off to me. Maybe I’ll try listening to one and have my mind changed. We’ll see!
Because they’re shit and shouldn’t exist.
I'm sympathetic to the view that artists should be paid for their work. Collectively, artists have produced so much, and these tech companies are funnelling all their work into a machine and recycling it into new works, and profiting off that, without any compensation for the people partially responsible for this new reality. I'm also not interested in people who argue "but actually it's not copying that's not how the technology works it's actually a really complic-" yeah I don't care. Without the artists you would have nothing.
BUT
Don't confuse the business practices that make this technology a reality with the technology itself. These tools are incredible, and will result in things that could have never existed previously. I just believe we need to have serious conversations about what they mean for our future.
Exactly! I would do unspeakable things for a tool that would let me pop an epub file in and let me tune the voices and audio effects to my liking. I always have some problem or another with the voice actors.
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