[falcolas]

As a former audiobook narrator, may your cereal always be soggy and your socks too.

On a more serious note, this is a cool application of the technological advancement in AI voice models, and inevitable in today's society. It just really sucks to watch this race to the bottom actively put people out of work.

But hey, at least we can save a few bucks on an audiobook, right?

[fsckboy]

>It just really sucks to watch this race to the bottom actively put people out of work

the entire progress of civilization has depended on putting people out of work by increasing productivity and efficiency. Subsistence hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers were put out of work by cheaper agriculture systems, and some of those unemployed realized they could support themselves by reading books to other people, a task they enjoyed much more.

[falcolas]

> Subsistence hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers were put out of work by cheaper agriculture systems, and some of those unemployed realized they could support themselves by reading books to other people,

The replacement of hunter-gatherers by farming is a change that took centuries to take hold. Nobody lost their ability to feed their family because their ability to hunt and gather was automated away. Ironically, the move away from hunter/gatherer subsistence took free time away (for things like storytelling) instead of adding to it, in exchange for greater reliability in their sustenance.

The loss of entire swaths of employment is a fairly new development. As is the lack of safety nets (US Centric for obvious reasons) for those who become injured or otherwise unable to sustain themselves.

[mistrial9]

this broad-brush take seems so persuasive.. for about one minute of thinking.. systems of humans are built for humans first.. which work of which humans are being replaced and why? Is anyone actually driving? If the modern answer is "money answers all questions" then, who makes money simply by moving money? Anyone who is not moving money right now is fair game because money is the only decider ?

this superficial thinking is full of holes from the first examination, and, actively harms others.. and is an excuse to ignore the statements of a audio book narrator here.

[zerotolerance]

The premise of this argument is false. Pre-agriculture people were food supply constrained. Nobody is audiobook or other entertainment supply constrained today. And worse, modern farm produce is effectively worth zero. In many cases farmers are paid NOT to produce specific goods. And those who do MUST produce at purely artificial levels as to require the use of unsustainable, patented, and specialized chemicals or GMOs to break even. This entire line of research leads to spam and waste.

[zerotolerance]

I'll go further and say that audiobook production is not cost constrained unless the marketable value of the work is extremely low. What we get is cheap audiobooks for which there is no / low demand, and what it costs us is the decimation of the limited audiobook economy. That's happening at the same time as a billion new / fully generated works hit the market and overwhelm our ability to curate the supply and provide meaningful discovery. Again, more spam. Then AI spam to promote these valueless works. Awesome.

[fsckboy]

>The premise of this argument is false. Pre-agriculture people were food supply constrained. Nobody is audiobook or other entertainment supply constrained today.

your premise is not false, but your conclusions are. see "indifference curves" in econ 101, and Pareto optimality.

We take consumer preferences as a given, because I don't know why you choose not to spend all of your money on the best and most pure essentials for life, but instead take some amount of your money and buy alcohol or skateboards or any of a number of other downright dangerous inessential things that you enjoy. You even pay money to GP to listen to his audio books when you could read them yourself and make money selling your own recordings. We don't know why you behave the way you do, but that's your choice. Given that you pay money for GP's audiobooks, if computer generated audiobooks drove the price down to zero, that would give you more money for alcohol; and it would give the rest of the economy a worker, GP, who could now participate in creating other products you'd probably want to buy (maybe dangerous jet-suits?) with the extra money you've saved on audiobooks.

We don't need to figure out how everybody wants to spend their time or their money, people figure that out for themselves and markets emerge to accomodate them.

We do need to figure out where the negative externalities lie, which you are attempting to do but knowing what qualities mark them as externalities will help you effectuate change by working with the market instead of failing against the market.

[prennert]

It really depends on what you use this for. For recreational use on novels, high-quality human narrated audiobooks are surely still worth the money. Good pod-casts and radio-shows are overwhelmingly research, curation and writing combined with an engaging narration.

This will only do narration, and the engagement is probably still not 100% there yet (sorry cant try it right now).

This kind of thing is very useful to consume high-level information on the side, while driving, cooking, gardening or doing exercise. So it can be useful to make previously curated and written content more accessible. Including content people have curated themselves, or got a bot to curate for them.

For example, I listened to the entire FT weekend edition while cycling on the weekend, using their text-to-audio function. This allowed me to take in even parts of the paper I normally do not have time to read. Before the advent of the text-to-speed function, I would have to chose between health and information. Now I can have both.

[hyperG]

I consume many audiobooks and I usually love an audiobook narrator to the point they are a value add itself or I hate the way they speak and I literally can't read the book. The former is very rare though and the later much more common.

The ability to change voices to one that suites a person's taste is hardly a race to the bottom. It is a HUGE value add.

I am sure lamplighters were not happy about the light bulb either.

c'est la vie.

Breaking the audible monopoly sounds like a nice side effect too.

[C-Loftus]

For what it is worth, I still listen to and love human-read audiobooks! However, it is particularly useful to have an AI option for books that are too niche for there to be an incentive for an individual to narrate them. Lots of academic and personal texts fall into those categories.

[evereverever]

Yeah, I'm painstakingly reading out a novel I wrote and recording is hard. We had to scrap last nights recording because there was a hum at the place we are recording and even turning off all breakers we couldn't figure out where it was. Turns out it was a bathroom fan that was hooked to a different breaker in the house.

I'll be writing some music for the intros of chapters and some special sections for suspense.

[falcolas]

Hums are the worst. And the quieter your space, the more hums you seem to hear. Good luck!

There's a few good folks on youtube that discuss some of the more nitty gritty details, if you're interested.