> On the other, some of my favorite audio books all stood out because the narrator was interpreting the text really well
This (and everything else with AI) isn't saying "you don't need good actors any more". It's saying "if you don't have an audiobook, you can make a mediocre one automatically".
AI (text, images, videos, whatever) doesn't replace the top end, it replaces the entire bottom-to-middle end.
Just like printing presses killed the profession of copying books by hand, eliminating the training pathway for illuminated manuscripts. Death of civilization itself I say, damn those printing presses.
That seems like a highly dubitable statement. Many hand illuminated manuscripts are masterpieces of art. The advantage of the printing press was chiefly economical making the cost of a copy dramatically less, not an increase in quality (especially so by the aesthetical standards of the time).
Indeed. Even Gutenberg had his Bibles touched up by artists after they were printed (illuminated capital letters and so on) because even he believed his printed copies were inferior to the hand-made ones.
I love audiobooks but at this point, most of what I want to listen to is stuff that would not sell enough to bother having someone read.
There are also many voice actors who I simply don't like the way they read.
A future that I can pick a voice that I like for any PDF is a huge upgrade.
I think a problem people have is if on the young side, maybe didn't expect the future to change like this.
No one I knew went on the internet when I graduated high school. Change like this is all par for the course. The only advice I got in high school from a guidance counselor was that I had a nice voice for radio. Books on tape was not exactly a career option at the time. The culture will survive the death of a career path that didn't even really exist when I was a senior in high school.
If the mistake happened in the typesetting stage, printed books could spread errors much more efficiently, as in the infamous "wicked bible" of 1631, where a typesetting error made the ten commandments contain the amusing phrase "Thou shalt commit adultery". Surviving copies are quite the collectors' item as most were destroyed.
What percentage of books get a second print run on a printing press? And what's the process for that? Do they have to reset each word for the second run? I genuinely don't know how a physical process like typesetting can result in increased accuracy on each print.
Some people will learn to use these AIs to make top-quality audiobooks (and books, movies, TV shows, comics...). It will be a more manual process than pressing a button, but still orders of magnitude less than what it took before. As a result there will be a tsunami or high-quality content.
There will be curation and specialization. Previously ignored niches now will be economically profitable. It will be a Renaissance of creativity, and millions of jobs will be created.
If you see podcasts as useless in modern society as illuminated manuscripts, no big loss I suppose, but I do enjoy the human made ones and would be sad to see them go extinct as the manuscripts did. And the same thing is happening to other entry-level creative roles, some of which you may personally regret the loss of too.
Actually I think illuminated manuscripts had more value, insofar as they were art, than podcasts (99% of which are vapid timewasters and/or friend simulators.) The good podcasts are those view which involve interviewing interesting people, and AI isn't replacing those.
There's a lot more to be said for the value of audio books, but the accessibility gains of proliferated auto-generated audiobooks outweigh the downside of losing a small number of expertly produced audio books.
For context, I listen to audio books a lot, and for years I have listened to traditional TTS readings of books too. Better voice generation for books without audiobooks is a great win for society.
Given that the printing press was the root cause for the century of religious wars that soaked Europe with blood, and was key in the revolutions that overthrown absolute monarchies all over Europe, I don't think it's as good as an example as you think it is.
Death of a civilization doesn't mean disappearance of mankind or even overall regression on the long term.
Have you heard of the Protestant Reformation and the following 120 years of war? The entire Protestant <> Catholic blow up that consumed Europe was pretty directly attributable to the printing press.
(To be clear, nothing is solely and exclusively caused by any one thing. Causality is a very fuzzy concept. But sans printing press, those wars certainly wouldn’t have happened when/where/how they did, if they ever happened at all).
Easy access to the Bible text instead of being only read to, hence high literacy of the faithful, was one of the core tenets of some branches of Protestantism.
An interesting one I read was public schools and their creation of a national identity. Before public schools there weren't really standardized languages forced upon an entire nation, etc. The countryside was more one country/people/language morphing into the next, not clean delineated lines where country/language switched instantly. It was also said borders were much more open/abstract before the resultant shift as well.
While they didn't have trains, the Napoleanic wars did feature the first use of canned food to aid in logistical supply of armies. You could argue that the lack of trains (and can openers) probably meant that they jumped the gun on starting giant wars. We Americans fixed that in the Civil War, to great and deadly effect.
Appertization was invented in 1804 but Appert did not sell his technology to the French army before 1810 so it's fair to say that most of the Napoleonic wars were run before canned food was even a thing. Maybe it has seen mainstream use in the Grande Armée in the end of his reign, but it was definitely not a deciding factor in Napoleon's logistics for most of his campaigns.
Without trains, the logistics of canned food isn't much better than the logistics of any bread-based food you give to your soldiers. It doesn't solve the weight problem which is the key problem with preindustrial army logistical issue.
It's kind of wild to me that the future will look like the 80s imagined it all because AI killed the creative seed corn when retro-future 80s was the aesthetic.
We'll be ok lol, while it is a significant transition, it IS just a transition in the media landscape.
AI is big and significant, but we'll be ok. There is also no such "one" thing as "our civilisation". We're deeply interconnected extremely vast and complex interconnected networks of ever-changing relationships.
AI does indeed represent the commoditisation of things we used to really value like "craftsmanship in book narration" and "intelligence". But we've had commoditisations of similar media in the past.
Paper used to be extremely expensive, but as time went on, it became more and more commoditised.
Memory used to be extremely expensive (2000-3000 years ago, we needed to encode memory in _dance_, _stories_ and _plays_. Holy shit). Now you can purchase enough memory to store a billion books for maybe two hours of labor.
Most of these things don't really matter. What is happening is that the media landscape is significantly shifting, and that is a tale as old as history.
I do think the intellectual class will be affected the most. People who understand this shift stand to benefit enormously, while those who don't _might_ end up in a super awful super low class.
And yet, all of that doesn't really matter if you just move to, I dunno, Paramaribo or whatever. The people there are pragmatic and friendly. They don't care about AI too much. Or maybe New Zealand, or Iceland, or Peru, or Nepal or I don't know.
The world isn't ending. Civilisation isn't being destroyed at our core.
The media landscape is changing, classes are shifting, power-relationships are changing. I suggest you think deeply about where you want to live, what you stand for and what is most important to you in life.
I don't need money or tech to be happy. I am fine with just my cats, my closest friends and family and healthy food.
If it happens to be the case that I need to leave tech or that extremely high-end narrated audiobooks cease to exist? Then all I have to say is "oh no, anyway".
> RIP to future top-enders that would normally have started out on the bottom to middle end.
This stance always reminds me of the Profession, a 1957 novella by Isaac Asimov that depicts pretty much the future where there are only top performers and the ignorant crowd.
Virtually every book I want this for has been around for 70+ years and still no high or low quality audiobook has been produced. How long do I have to wait for those aspiring top-enders before an audiobook can be made available?
That has nothing to do with audiobook voice actors and everything to do with copyright and who owns the rights to the book (and whether they believe there's any money to be made selling an audiobook version).
I'm super opposed to AI, but I see this as a rare positive. As someone already said, the win here is to have a audiobook where one doesn't yet exist. hell, maybe the tables will turn and the scrubs will do the hard work of discovering which titles are popular with an audience, then the ebook industry can capitalize on AI by hiring voice actors to produce proper titles?
It's common for shows to use big name actors as voices because they draw an audience, nothing will change. Just means a smaller pool of voice actors and they'll mostly be good looking.
The "top-enders" are the privileged who need to have some of their gains for their intelligence redistributed to others. The alternative is "survival of the smartest", which is de-facto what we have today and what Young was trying to warn us about.
By that time, AI will beat the toppest of the top enders. Remember the time Deep Blue barely beat Kasparov? Now no human, or group of humans can beat a chess engine, even one that runs on an iPhone.
I don’t think chess is a good example of AI destroying the path to the top. Chess is more popular now and humans keep advancing even though it is futile effort against computers.
And people are better at chess now in part because of practicing with/against machines. But chess has never been something you can make a living off of unless you were at the very top.
AI TTS has been available for quite some time. Tacotron V1 is about 8 years old. I don't think we saw much bottom end replacement.
IMGO(gut opinion), generative AI is a consumption aid, like a strong antacid. It lets us be done with $content quicker, for content = {book, art, noisy_email, coding_task}. There's obvious preconceptions forming among us all from "generative" nomenclature, but lots of surviving usages are rather reductive in relevant useful manners.
This (and everything else with AI) isn't saying "you don't need good actors any more". It's saying "if you don't have an audiobook, you can make a mediocre one automatically".
AI (text, images, videos, whatever) doesn't replace the top end, it replaces the entire bottom-to-middle end.