[xrd]

When I read Rikki Tikki Tavi to my 8 yr old daughter, we play a game. She asks me to change one of the words in the page and she tries to listen and see if she can figure it out. It is mentally taxing at the end of a long day to do that on the fly without pausing to figure out the word to slip in. And, my daughter is very sharp and catches them.

I listened to a few of these. The voice sounds muted at times, as if the reader has a stuffy nose. H.G. Wells was read with a pause in between each period because it "thinks" that each letter boundary is a sentence change, which drove me batty. And, there is zero life in the stories. It might be a good thing to put in front of a kid to put them to sleep, maybe? But, it would not put me to sleep because it is just aggravating to listen to these stories stripped of all life by AI.

Like Louis CK said: "Everything is amazing and no one is happy." I know this is incredible that AI can take in a transcript and produce something that most people would be able to distinguish between a real human. But, we should ask if you would want to hang out with the voice actor at a party.

[ecshafer]

> Like Louis CK said: "Everything is amazing and no one is happy."

Everything is not amazing. Sure things are amazing from a technical perspective. But most tech advancements I think have been harmful to society in the last 30 years or so. Its awesome that computers are so powerful and we have awesome video and photos and can share things so easily. But technology should better lives, and not cheapen it, which it often does. Tech is being used to try and replace essential human lived experiences to try and inject advertising into it and extract money.

Technology can not replace the human, its impossible. No matter how good the AI is at reading the book, it will never replace sitting next to your parent and them reading it. No matter how easy it is to share a video or a photo, it will never replace sitting next to someone and them showing you photos, or better yet being there when the photo was taken.

[jzb]

I forget the exact quote but the thing I've seen making the rounds sums it up pretty well: Computers were supposed to do the work so people could make art and write poetry. Now the computers are making art and writing poetry and I still have to have a job.

In another life I'd love to do voice over work. (I even have a face for radio!) But, instead, technology is being used to avoid even having humans do that type of work. Sure, today it's PG, but they're definitely doing this with an eye to replacing actual voiceover actors.

Every advance in AI is "how can we replace people and save money?" and not "how can people have better lives and work less?" And it's going to continue until it's "what the fuck do we do with all these jobless people who've been replaced?"

[cxr]

As software developers, we know what getting workers to have better lives while working less looks like. There's some sleight of hand at play, though, in the employer/employee relationship (favoring the employer).

> Every advance in AI is "how can we replace people and save money?" and not "how can people have better lives and work less?"

It's not just AI, but technology generally. And it's because when it comes to managing people, organizations for the most part don't actually concern themselves with getting their employees to produce value—that is, whether they are, and how much, and at what cost (to the business) it comes at, and where that measure of productivity lies (objectively) when scored against some rubric. Instead what they make their most immediate concern is whether their employees are exposed to sufficient toil. Look at any example that involves someone accepting a new job with a set of work duties/expectations where they proceed to automate part of their workload and thus provide the same value (or more) in comparison to what they were doing before, or in comparison to their coworkers, or in comparison to whomever would have ended up with the job if the person who did accept and automate it had accepted an offer elsewhere instead: they end up soliciting feedback (or opining themselves) about whether what they're doing is unethical.

This is the mechanism that wealth disparity through concentration of wealth comes from, but everyone (the employer and the employee alike) walks around as if they either don't notice it or—if they do—as if it's wrong when there's a known path for the concentration to flow upward but it isn't happening.

[WalterBright]

> favoring the employer

If you've ever been an employer, you'd be disabused of that quickly.

[cxr]

Disabused of what?

[nonrandomstring]

> their most immediate concern is whether their employees are exposed to sufficient toil.

Protestant work ethic, twisted and disfigured through late capitalism has become a sadistic and wholly disgusting human trait. To impose moral, intellectual and physical labour on others, not of necessity, nor to create value, but to serve a system rooted in guilt and a craving for validation in the eyes of others is about as un-Christian as can be.

[WalterBright]

Wealth in a free market is not concentrated, it is created. It does not "flow", either, as free trades are an exchange of value, not a flow of value.

Wealth disparity comes from people creating different amounts of value.

[zelphirkalt]

Only until your business is targetted by big corp and goes bust/bankrupt.

Or acquired. Then the wealth flows upwards, employees are cut, to make things more profitable, and the people who originally created something great are not getting much for it. Instead, if they are not let go, they are under new lords, who take a big chunk of the profits.

Or a competitor gets VC funded and by means of marketting and sales, instead of actually making a better product and your business' product's adoption is dwarfed.

I think there are many reasons why some business can fail, and most of them are not about the amount of created value. The free market is not a rationally acting person.

[WalterBright]

The reason businesses fail is they cost more to operate than the value they produce.

[cxr]

You haven't responded (clearly) here to anything I actually said. You just posted two short, dismissive comments consisting of glib non-specifics.

If you want to dispute what I'm saying, how about starting with the example I gave (an employee figures out how to automate part of their job, enabling them to either 1. deliver the same amount of value to their employer at a fraction of the effort, or 2. deliver something like 2x–10x or more value, owing to the fact that they've been able to automate it)?

[WalterBright]

If you automate part of your job resulting in a 2x improvement of your productivity, you have demonstrated a skill that you can sell for more money. That's how you realize the value you created.

The wealth didn't "flow" to you. You created it.

[timmb]

I think it’s more complex than that. Wealth is often created by monopolising things (e.g. enclosures) instead of by creating them.

[WalterBright]

There are 33 million businesses in the US. Are they monopolies?

[RichEO]

On what do you base these statements?

[WalterBright]

Listening to and reading books by economists. If you think about it, you'll see it in action all the time. After all, consider yourself. Does wealth "flow" to you? Or do you create value at your job, and exchange that value for your paycheck?

[reddit_clone]

Some Iyn Rand novel would be my guess.

[mistrial9]

> Every advance in AI is "how can we replace people and save money?"

this is not true now, and also does not have to be true. Instead of a "look at the incentives" talk to someone having a bad comment moment.. instead we can be reminded of Doug Englebart, who said "computer systems can augment human intelligence and team interaction" and specifically NOT "replace humans" .. As I understand it, in Palo Alto, Doug found great interest among the DoD crowd .. a good portion of whom would have a second meeting after his demos, and then discuss how they can get back to the important work of replacing people.

Consider the incentives, consider who has an interest in this hype cycle, and sales profits. When you see a US visit to Vietnam this week, with MSFT pitching "social trust" AI services to "ordinary people" .. does this really sound like trust in the making? Is AI drones in combat really what we need now ? Replacing striking Hollywood writers and getting name-brand actors for pennies on the dollar, is that what "we" need?

I do not agree that AI can only replace people.. however, there is a lot of short term profit and control ready for those that do.. maybe something needs to be done about that?

[WalterBright]

> what the fuck do we do with all these jobless people who've been replaced?

Around 1800, 93% of labor in America worked on farms. Today we have jobs that were unimaginable in 1800.

> "how can we replace people and save money?" and not "how can people have better lives and work less?"

Those two are actually the same thing.

[zelphirkalt]

In my opinion we seriously need to think about providing people with new perspectives, as we replace their jobs / automate them away. We need a social system, that encourages learning at every step in people's lives. A nation should have an interest in getting people back into meaningful jobs and should act according to that interest. The coal mining industry worker, who loses their job, because we no longer want to mine coal? How can we get that person a good new job? How can we make it so that that person gets the necessary qualifications?

We are still (I think in most countries around the world and at the very least where I live.) throwing away enormous amount of human potential.

[RichEO]

> Those two are actually the same thing.

How exactly are they the same thing? It seems that the savings are made by the employer here at the expense of the employee.

There’s no guarantee that the savings will be passed on as price cuts.

[WalterBright]

> There’s no guarantee that the savings will be passed on as price cuts.

Profit margins tend to be consistent across industries, meaning savings wind up as price cuts sooner or later.

(Unless the government interferes with the price setting incentives.)

[Towaway69]

It will probably all fall apart when there is no one left to purchase this stuff, no job, no money, no purchasing power.

Once purchasing power has evaporated, then and only then will the system change.

Alternatively AI will also replace the jobless.

[civilitty]

We'll invent a third World War long before that happens - to thin the herd and remind everyone using rationing and austerity about how great consumerism is, while creating plenty of jobs rebuilding the industrialized world.

[artur_makly]

it's simple and it works.. every time. /s

[toomuchtodo]

I wouldn't blame folks wanting to work on fast takeoff AI with no human alignment concerns. Heads, the world ends because you've bootstrapped something unsympathetic and more powerful than humanity. Tails, you've bootstrapped something that might be able to overpower entrenched interests, providing a chance at a better societal outcome.

[WalterBright]

> I'd love to do voice over work

Voice over work and screen actors put stage actors and burlesque workers and traveling minstrels out of business.

[m463]

> Every advance in AI is "how can we replace people and save money?"

I think what happens is that the repeat jobs are automated, and the (remaining) people get the hard corner cases.

[mvdtnz]

I think the thing that has surprised everyone in this revolution is that the opposite has happened. Musk wasted billions trying to automate vehicle manufacturing while AI is threatening to take the jobs of novelists and graphic designers.

[brigandish]

On the other hand, I am reminded of a quote by Christopher Hitchens (from memory), “They say that everyone has a book in them. For most of them, it would be better if it stayed there".

Some of the films and TV programmes I've watched recently have made me wonder, as I gaze across at the writers on strike who have some legitimate concerns but who have also provided some bloody awful writing, if I wouldn't prefer AI to take over the production of art - it certainly wouldn't be able to produce a messy bed, would it? That'd be a win too.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Bed

[MrVandemar]

> I gaze across at the writers on strike who have some legitimate concerns but who have also provided some bloody awful writing

Too often the writing of film and TV is dictated by the producers/studio -- people who have an interest in financial returns, not quality. Those writers would probably love to write their own show, their way, unhindered, and would probably produce something watchable.

Of course, writers subvert their instructions sometimes to great effect. On BSG I believe they were told their show was "too dark" and someone insisted someone have "a birthday party". Which they duly put in, and then had them all die in some kind of terror/bomb incident.

[WalterBright]

90% of books and movies are not worth the time to read or watch.

[satvikpendem]

It hasn't been a surprise to anyone in the field. Turns out it's much easier to read digital content in the form of bits then to read real world data. Hardware is harder than software.

[sundarurfriend]

These kinds of responses are so easy to write after the fact. Show us a quote from ten years ago then, please, that says that creative writing and art will be among the first things to be automated at a mass scale. Since this

> hasn't been a surprise to anyone in the field

apparently, it should be pretty easy to find such a quote.

[OfSanguineFire]

> it will never replace sitting next to someone and them showing you photos

It definitely does replace that. It sucks so much to be trapped next to someone showing you their photo album or vacation slides, when you don’t really care, that this became a stock scene in 20th-century comedy TV series and films. Nowadays when people are sharing their photos online, that gives their peers the choice of whether to look or whether to ignore, and that is immensely freeing.

[ecshafer]

The photo slide show of someone's vacation was a stock scene in comedies. But have you never sat down with family and went through old photos? Having conversations about where was that? who was this? who was this as a baby? Its a very different and much more personal experience than flipping through facebook.

[TedDoesntTalk]

He cherry-picked one of the three examples in your post and attacked it. He won't choose the other two because he has no argument for them. Ignore.

[c0pium]

Sure have, it’s hellacious. I don’t give a fuck about who that baby was, why would I? Relations who my parents only vaguely remember going somewhere boring that I would never go, or someone’s 12th trip to the same lake, is a great use for Facebook. Most people are crazy boring, if I care I can always ask.

[lolinder]

To quote a GP comment:

> But most tech advancements I think have been harmful to society in the last 30 years or so.

I thought this was overly cynical until I read your comment. Now I'm not so sure. Has our attention span really become so shot that just being with family has become a chore, and we'd rather our parents just post their life stories into the void that is Facebook?

[c0pium]

Sounds like I struck a nerve. Next time you’re telling someone a detailed story about what route you took to dinner, stop and ask yourself if it’s actually that interesting.

Seriously though, technology has nothing to do with this. People have been bored out of their mind by other people for centuries, the only difference is there’s no excuse for having nothing interesting to say now.

[mathgeek]

You’re talking about _being shown_ photos you don’t care about, while GP is talking about showing your own photos to someone. I agree with the example you’re discussing, though.

[c0pium]

Ah, you’re talking about main character syndrome. Showing pictures to someone is one of the cruelest things you can do; you’re probably boring and a terrible storyteller (most people are) but they’re going to feel obligated to not tell you that.

It’s always amazing to me that people almost universally hate other people’s slideshows, and then don’t have the self awareness to realize that they do the exact same thing.

[edgarvaldes]

>Showing pictures to someone is one of the cruelest things you can do

So you are saying that friends, family and significant others better no share old photos and memories with you? Because that is one of the cruelest things to do?

[OfSanguineFire]

They can share those old photos and memories on social media, where their friends, families, and significant others can choose whether to look or ignore it.

[mathgeek]

That’s not what I’m talking about, just for clarity.

[karmelapple]

I'd suggest reading How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell [1]. I think it addresses some of the concerns you have.

1. https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/42771901

[tcmb]

Please don't dissect an aphorism by a standup comedian like it was a Ph.D. thesis.

[janekm]

Elevenlabs is a lot closer to compelling audiobook narration (needs a better way to deal with multiple characters in a story without manual use of multiple voices): https://pub-a24da573c61f4b2d905bdebb2d0ecf88.r2.dev/ElevenLa... (an H.G.Wells example I just asked it to read).

[petemir]

ftfy

https://pub-a24da573c61f4b2d905bdebb2d0ecf88.r2.dev/ElevenLa...

[janekm]

thanks!

[tkgally]

I was going to mention ElevenLabs, too. Their samples are very impressive in how the intonation and word stress are varied based on the text’s meaning. Their pricing is a bit high for personal use, though.

(The link you posted seems to have been truncated. Can you try posting it again?)

[janekm]

Yeah, sadly it'd cost about $100 to get a book per month... Not quite competitive with Audible yet, but give it a year perhaps, or a few iterations of the open source models... (fixed the link)

[shaky-carrousel]

100 dollars per book, right, but that book is public and can be shared between millions of people.

[satvikpendem]

Any open source alternatives?

[janekm]

None of the open source models I've seen are as "well-rounded", production ready as Eleven Labs. Though for example bark is really great at prosody: https://suno-ai.notion.site/Bark-Examples-5edae8b02a604b54a4... And piper isn't bad at speech quality: https://rhasspy.github.io/piper-samples/

We might only be a few papers away from a good open source Elevenlabs competitor.

[lynx23]

Now you have a pretty good idea how blind people must feel. Yes, a good audiobook should be read by a human. But if you dont have that, speech synthesis is the best or even only thing you can get. And then, many years later, you read a post like yours. And you realize that man is spoiled.

Signed, a blind man

[prepend]

> But, we should ask if you would want to hang out with the voice actor at a party.

I think the question is really “Will I be able to enjoy great books I otherwise would not have experienced?”

For me, it’s not that these are superior or equivalent books to parents reading to their kid or voice actors; it’s whether I’ll listen to a book for free that I wouldn’t be able to afford $10-30.

[therealdrag0]

Plus lots of books don’t have audiobooks. I’ve a few sitting on my to read list for years on end just cuz there’s no audio. Being able to make one myself with AI would be awesome.

[prepend]

This precisely.

Also, I’ve bought ebooks and want to listen to the book but don’t want to pay again for the voice acting. So I’ve bought a license to the IP and would like to listen rather than read.

[low_tech_love]

Audible is $7.95 a month and you can listen to whatever book you want (like Spotify). If you’re not willing to go even with that in order to listen to an actual human, then maybe yeah, you can try AI.

[philomath_mn]

> Audible is $7.95 a month and you can listen to whatever book you want (like Spotify)

Not true at all. Audible Plus gives you access to a tiny subset of the full library, the rest (which includes all the best titles) need to be purchased separately.

[bodge5000]

Unless things have changed since I was a subscriber, you get a token every month which can be used to purchase any book from the full library. So its effectively 1 book a month + a few extras bonuses for $7.95

[izzydata]

You don't get a token without paying for the premium plan at $15 a month. Also, don't tell anyone but if you subscribe and then cancel and give the reason that it is too expensive you can often get a reduced price the next few months.

[servercobra]

It's not at all like Spotify. The library you get for $7.95/mo is very limited. If it was like Spotify I'd happily pay a hell of a lot more than that.

[prepend]

Audible is $15/month and you get to choose one title.

I think you’re confusing audible today with audible of 20 years ago.

[thinkmassive]

I typically buy at least two titles per month, and the best deal ended up being:

Audible Premium Plus - 1 Credit Every Other Month for $17 ($8.50/mo)

You can buy 3 more credits for $37.99 (12.66/ea). It’s also worth checking individual titles because quite a few cost less than the credits.

Correction: I guess I actually buy slightly fewer than 2/mo because there’s a plan for that ($22.95/mo) that’s cheaper than the 27.50/mo from my numbers above. I had that one for a while but ended up feeling pressured to use them before they expire.

[swores]

You probably won't be interested since it's even more pressure to use them before they expire, but there's also annual plans which are even cheaper if you can be happy using 12 (or 24) tokens within 12 months (you get them at the start and they expire at the end of the year):

Audible Premium Plus Annual - 12 Credits $149.50/year (way cheaper in UK: £69.99/year)

Audible Premium Plus Annual - 24 Credits $229.50/year (£109.99/year)

US: https://www.audible.com/ep/memberbenefits UK: https://help.audible.co.uk/s/article/what-are-the-different-...

Although, as soon as I'm logged in with my account (UK) which had subscribed in the past but isn't currently, it doesn't seem to be giving me any options except to start a 1 month free trial for 1 token/month, not sure if other options aren't available or just extremely well hidden...

edit: no it is available for my account, though I'm going to remain a non-subscriber and keep using my local digital library :)

[thinkmassive]

Hah thank you, the optionality is worth $0.20/mo to me.

I wish there were better options for listening 20-25 hours/mo. Like Amazon in general, the selection + convenience is tough to beat.

[barrenko]

We're living through the Great Enshitification.

[fuzztester]

And it is living through us, or on us.

[gnutrino]

Seth Godin did a whole Akimbo podcast that was written by ChatGPT, and the audio was AI generated. The voice was spot on, the content and delivery was dead. I almost fell asleep listening to it, which is NEVER the case for any other episode of Akimbo I've listened to.

[Pxtl]

> H.G. Wells was read with a pause in between each period because it "thinks" that each letter boundary is a sentence change

This is why I'm a firm "two spaces after the period" guy. Makes it unambiguous the difference between the abbrevs. period and the sentence-end period. Otherwise you get sentences like "Let's not forget that Dr. Principal does not care about this." which can be read in two valid ways.

[bloak]

Of course some style guides would tell you not to put a dot after "Dr" because "r" is the last letter of "Doctor". Similarly, the abbreviation of "Saint" would be "St", while the abbreviation of "Street" would be "St.", according to those style guides.

Meanwhile the GB military style guide says never to use a dot after any abbreviation, I think.

Also, the style guides I'm familiar with prescribe "H. G. Wells", rather than "H.G. Wells", but "H.G.W." if you're abbreviating all of the words.

None of this is of much interest to anyone who isn't an editor but I thought I'd mention it anyway.

[Pxtl]

> "H. G. Wells",

Right. That's probably the most common historical form, and is a good example of how the punctuation for sentence-ends and abbreviations is often the same - period and then single-space.

[cxr]

This trick doesn't work across linebreaks (unless you adopt a rule like "treat the spaces in the nouns as non-breaking and do not permit a linebreak for anything that isn't a sentence boundary").

[bloak]

Emacs does (or did) exactly that, perhaps by default: I think I had to disable it once because it was annoying me ... (setq sentence-end-double-space nil)?

[cxr]

Not the same thing.

[ta988]

Sidenote, I asked ChatGPT about where to put the comma and how it would change the meaning of the sentence. It got it right.

[Pxtl]

Fair point, the sentence I invented off the top of my head isn't perfectly grammatically correct but it's close-enough that it shows the ambiguity problem. It's a lot to ask text-to-speech and typesetting programs to figure out contextually which periods are abbreviations and which periods are end-of-sentence, and so having a hard text cue like double-space would help. Then typesetters would have a hard cue of when to replace the space with a thin-space (which is supposed to happen in the case of something like "H. G. Wells").

[jtbayly]

How does it feel to have websites and books and newspapers and practically every other place silently ignore your double spaces and treat them as a single space?