Comment on Audible unveils plans to use AI voices to narrate audiobooks

• utopiah@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  This is me just speculating here but if they follow the path of this CEO who fired his human staff to replace it by AI… then rollback admit it’s shit gizmodo.com/klarna-hiring-back-human-help-after-g… then my bet is that it’s not done to improve quality but rather margins.

  If AI is done alongside professionals, and done so ethically (not stolen training data, not ignoring ecological cost by pumping water in dry areas to cool down GPUs, etc) and economically (i.e. not having it “cheap” now but once a monopoly position is obtain, raise prices for a captive set of consumers) then yes it can be potentially empowering. This though is pretty much never the case.

  That being said, if one “just” want read aloud, there are plenty of FLOSS alternatives and I believe Mozilla even a TTS/STT system based solely on voluntary voices.

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  • Kusimulkku@lemm.ee ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    It’s a company, of course it’s done to increase profits. I’m just saying it being AI doesn’t automatically mean it’s shit, it could be done just fine. AI is a tool, the end result depends on how that tool is used.

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    • utopiah@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Like I try to highlight, in most cases it’s a shitty tool, doing a bad job, trained on stolen data, requiring a TON of energy and often used to put people out of business.

      So… sure, it’s “just” a tool and in theory, it can be made the right way and used in a good context.

      It is rarely the case though. Here specifically we are talking about Amazon, a company that has from its inception been built to be a monopoly, relying on AWS a service that is basically destroying the Internet by removing its decentralized nature.

      So… again even if the tool would in theory itself be used the right way, build the right way, the company using that tool is problematic.

      TL;DR: in theory, yes, in practice here, no.

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