Audiobooks

I mean, when that time and effort is someone's chosen profession, then there's only so many ways it can go.

The authors are free to not release an audiobook with some soulless, robotic voice behind it and stick to print/ebook. Amazon is also free to use the AI voices as enhanced TTS for regular books, and I would be fine with that (no one expects those to sound human, and they're not sold as audiobooks).

For me, the narrator makes the audiobook experience. As an example, pretty much all of the Revelation Space series was narrated by John Lee. One of the later books was narrated by someone else (forget their name, but they were definitely forgettable), and it just didn't do it for me. It was an actual person, but they read it so robotically I lost interest halfway through the prologue and just read it on e-reader.

Let me rephrase the issue for you and see if you have a different emotional reaction.

A person's job was replaced with a capitalist's robot, and now the capitalist earns all the money.

That sucks. Just know I'm doing my very tiny, infinitesimally small part to not support that practice.

I agree on the technological advancement, but automating human creativity and emotion (yes, there's definitely a degree of creativity in voice acting) is a bridge too far for me. An AI-narrated audiobook automatically loses 3 stars on the review lol.

Lol, there is no sweetening the deal. Every one of those is a lost job opportunity for an actual voice actor.

You seen the Black Mirror episode where she makes a robot of her dead husband?

People need to process their grief and move on. It's important. You use AI to create a world where people never grieve, you'll create a world that never moves on. Never improves. Stuck in the past, trying endlessly to recapture something that doesn't exist in the present and cannot grow in the future.

There's an AI tool that lets you talk to your ex. You put in your chats, it creates an AI of your ex, and you can talk to them, even date them. Thing is, it's a business. They want your money. They're going to exploit you sooner or later. Imagine how much bigger the market is with lost loved ones. Capitalists should NOT be selling love. It's dangerous.

Username checks out. Reread the thread when the shrooms wear off.

You're looking at an audiobook as if it's only a method of distributing the contents of a book, but a human conveying a story is a performance. Those performances have artistic merit. Sometimes more, sometimes less, different take aways for different listeners, however it's an inherent symptom of a human being sharing something.

This is where it gets important to remember that Machine Learning isn't actually AI. It cannot make decisions or have accidents outside of mistakes made by the developers. It is not intelligent, it is a computer program.