When Amazon tells you they're replacing actual human narrators at Audible with AI for the glorious cause of accessibility, remember that those assholes regularly rope authors into Audible Exclusive deals, which not only means you can only hear them on Audible, it also means those audiobooks then become inaccessible to PUBLIC LIBRARIES.
It's not about accessibility, it's about the profits.
Muting this thread because it is completely destroying my cherished illusion that only the same 17 people ever read my posts, thus I am in a tiny bubble of social safety and I can just be myself and not editorialize everything I say so that I appear normal.
It's stressful out there. It's important we maintain cherished illusions.
I cherish the illusion I am one of those seventeen people, yet I completely missed this (original) post! š²
@hollie and it deprives actors, most of whom struggle to get by anyway, of another source of income.
@gretared @alcinnz They're saying that with AI audio, you can provide narration for more books, and more audiobooks equals more options for folks for whom audiobooks is about accessibility rather than preference.
This sounds well-meaning but ignores the fact that the company is fully able to pay human narrators, and that if accessibility were really the reason and not their bottom line, then they'd stop making their Exclusives inaccessible, and pay narrators and authors more in general.
@alcinnz @gretared @hollie In Sweden we have a distinction between āspoken booksā and audiobooks. āSpoken booksā have been provided for ages to people that canāt read paper books. You need a special permit to access those books, however, and there is a special government agency providing these books using a special exception in the copyright law.
Does this distinction exist in any English speaking jurisdictions? They are very different things.
@alcinnz @gretared @hollie I seem to remember kindles having text to speech built in over a decade ago but it was quickly disabled due to some copyright cartel suing over transformative use.
I thought the whole point of audio books was to hear a performance, AI audio may be better than text to speech - although I personally find it grating - but I struggle to believe it will be a performance worth paying for.
@hollie I use an open source, locally-processed AI voice to read articles to me for uni that would otherwise be inaccessible. It is fine for that purpose.
But I have ZERO interest in having books read to me that way. An AI voice can never replace the personality and performance of a real, human actor. They are what make audiobooks good.
@fullfathomfive Same, reading articles is such a great way to use it!
But storytelling? It's an incredible way to thumb a nose at thousands of years of human culture, the art of storytelling is something that makes us people. I can't comprehend the greed that goes into denying us that, when it is so unnecessary. There's plenty of money enough to support actual actors and narrators.
@hollie Yeah, storytelling is an intrinsic part of being human.
What really pisses me off is that they keep using disabled people as a shield for their civilisation-destroying technology. "It will make it more accessible!" But as @WeirdWriter pointed out, it actually makes things ~less~ accessible. DRM locks us out from using TTS. Algorithmically generated picture captions don't tell us why a picture is important or why someone posted it. AI narration gives us artificial emotion instead of real human connection. And organisations don't bother with things like building accessible websites or making accessible texts when "an AI can fix it".
So what these technologies that are supposedly good for us actually do is push disabled people further to the fringes of society, further away from human connection. We're being employed as a rhetorical device to further disintegrate society in pursuit of profit and corporate control.
Fuck that.
@hollie There were always problems with Audible. Cory Doctorow frequently talks about Amazon Audible's business practices and DRM.
https://doctorow.medium.com/why-none-of-my-books-are-available-on-audible-83cb182f2f91
@hollie if they generate audiobooks with "AI"
Why even use their service?
Right because they are doing Spotify for books and for some authors it ends up as actually profitable. Bleh.
@hollie yeah itās frustrating. The tech is not without value: could be useful for languages where there is not enough of a market to cover the cost of audiobook production- for example despite having tens of millions of speakers thereās very few audiobooks in Indonesian. But to do it in a situation where a human narrator is viable is lazy and greedy.
A lot of virtual voice narrated stuff on Amazon appears to be AI written to (some even openly admits to it)
Jesus, I can't even stand a 5 minute AI narrated YT video, I'd probably shoot myself if I had to listen to an entire novel of a flat, spiritless voice-husk recite words.
@hollie also, AI is severely lacking in correct pronunciation too.
I have negligible trust in AI and feel it is too "big brotheresque"
And well Bezos and Amazon are not places I'd spend on.
Libraries and small businesses are way better in my honest opinion. Even better if they are owned by those claiming marginalized identities (including disabled people especially when it comes to accessibility)
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