Project Gutenberg has implemented one of the worst AI fears of striking actors

https://qz.com/project-gutenberg-ai-to-ebooks-audiobooks-1850856297

by jsemrau • 3 years ago

43 74 3 years ago

Listening to an audiobook narrated by an AI voice can get old after a few hours. There is absolutely still hope for traditional voice narration, especially if different voice actors want to voice different characters in the story.

jokethrowaway• 3 years ago

This is step 1. Bark already has some models which try to match the tone to what's written.

We'll get there.

lacrimacida• 3 years ago

Why do we need to get there? What’s the end goal?

ramesh31• 3 years ago

I imagine this will sit where the LibriVox recordings did before. "Good enough" to cover the vast amount of works that never received studio treatment, but not anything that will ever replace a human at the high end. Even if the likeness is absolutely perfect, people will still prefer to know they are actually listening to their favorite actor.

bombcar2• 3 years ago

AI audiobooks also seem they’re ripe for “perfection over time” where parts are indicated where it’s not pronounced right or needs additional inflection, etc, and that can be rerendered.

onecommentman• 3 years ago

You should listen to these Project Gutenberg audiotexts…they are really pretty good. I would have no problem listening to them for an extended period. The real challenge Project Gutenberg faced was automating the removal of the random metadata noise from the original plain text versions of the content. And it will continually improve from acceptably good to excellent in short order with perhaps a tiny amount of hand tuning.

It isn’t just the blind who benefit. As you age, eyesight degrades and the mind dulls. At some point, audiobooks are a real boon, especially with PD texts where you can read until you get tired, then listen. Also the growing demographic of live-alone elderly like the background sounds of people talking in their residence, explaining part of the popularity of talk radio. They feel a little less lonely. These audiotexts provide an intellectually varied and overall healthier option. It seems like an Absolute Good to me.

camdenreslink• 3 years ago

There will still be a market for premium audiobooks with an engaging narrator.

This will help fill the gap for books that would never have an audiobook, or for people that never would have paid anyway (so they aren’t lost customers).

iwonthecase• 3 years ago

Possibly a misleading title, the paper [1] is mostly of Microsoft affiliated authors, with one member of PG.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.03926.pdf

edit: I'm not sure what's particularly exciting about this paper otherwise, it just seems like they parsed the PG html format and then applied some previously developed speech model to them.

andrewstuart• 3 years ago

A well read audiobook by a professional is a joy.

AI read audiobooks are unlistenable.

I’d argue that no one should be getting AI to read audiobooks it’s a terrible experience.

RecycledEle• 3 years ago

Have You tried listening to the new Microsoft / Project Gutenberg audio books?

I find 2 faults with them:

1% of the time I can tell it's a robovoice narrating the MS/PG audiobooks, and

When the book switches back and forth between multiple speakers in a conversation, the MS/PG audio book fail to change voices enough.

I have spent a week downloading most of them, and will continue to leech until I have to whole 1.25 TB collection with a back-up copy.

contravariant2• 3 years ago

This article is disparaging Project Gutenberg so badly that to me it almost seems to be trying to hurt the cause of the actors currently on strike.

Spreading FUD about text-to-speech technology that is not completely lifeless is a bit like blaming google translate or OCR programs from taking away jobs. Making stuff that takes a lot of effort virtually effortless is a massive gain to humanity, especially for people who depend on technology like this to access media (especially so for media in the public domain).

It's such a weird argument that honestly it feels like a trap designed to hurt the striking actors. I hope none them are stupid enough to latch onto this article to support their argument because as an actor saying you're afraid a robot might be better at understanding and conveying the emotion in a book is not a good look. Even more so when you're aiming at accessibility software.

cf141q53253• 3 years ago

it almost seems to be trying to hurt the cause of the actors currently on strike.

Thats a lot less strange then it sounds. Sabotage is a real strategy and it has become incredibly easy with increasing tribalism and the inability to call peoples stupidity out. The rational goes the more i can make your side look and act stupid, the better chances for my side. It becomes increasingly easy if there arent any checks and balances in your ingroup. It of course leaves everyone in a worse situation but a lot of people dont seem to care.

abracadaniel• 3 years ago

This gets compounded because there is a blind spot to bad behavior of ingroup people. You know plenty of people on your side who aren’t crazy, so you dismiss the extremists as crazy people on the periphery, while those outside the group see them as examples of the norm of your group.

paradox460• 3 years ago

You'll see this happen whenever the tech becomes slightly widespread. When DALL-E was the only kid on the block, and stable diffusion and midjourney and such barely existed, the media was breathless with excitement over how cool these tools were. Then as soon as sd came out, and made image generation available to a ton more people, without corporate censorship and control, you started to hear about how bad it was, how it was undermining artists, and so forth

duskwuff2• 3 years ago

(especially so for media in the public domain)

And doubly so for older, long-tail content which would otherwise be unlikely to get an audiobook produced of it. There's more to public-domain English fiction than Shakespeare and Dickens, but no one's stepping up to voice-act audiobooks for obscure authors from the 1800s.

GaggiX• 3 years ago

Well, I have seen some translators blame translation models for stealing their jobs, especially nowadays that these services like Google Translate, Deepl are based on AI, people are creating parallelism with the ongoing controversy around AI art etc... And attract a lot of attention on Twitter.

But since I'm not a native English speaker and these models were incredible for learning the language, also speech-to-text models, all these accessibility models are used in the vast majority of cases where there would be no human alternative, for example transcribing all Youtube videos, or correcting the grammar of this HN comment, so I really agree with you.

giantg2• 3 years ago

"Making stuff that takes a lot of effort virtually effortless is a massive gain to humanity"

Sure, and having AI generated movies and stuff would reduce the physical and human resources needed to make movies. In either case, the people who lose those jobs won't be happy about it, despite the gain to humanity.

cf141q53253• 3 years ago

That problem is as old as automation itself. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power-loom_riots

It should not be overlooked that this is less of a problem of automation but one of how we organize society. What do we do once large parts of society become redundant? With many of them already having had bullshit jobs doing busywork? The effect of substantial numbers of high paying jobs vanishing alone will be disastrous for the economy. Technological progress is just highly deflationary.

contravariant2• 3 years ago

Well they don't have to be happy about it, heck I think it's more than fair they protest when technology impacts their livelihoods. There's even some valid concerns about the way some of these models are trained or exploited.

But this instance is a terrible fight to pick. You'll be pitting a fight against a non-profit, accessibility software, a public domain library, on the basis that a computer is doing too good a job reading a book out loud.

dieselgate2• 3 years ago

I believe the human voice-actors are justified within this context. No comment on anything else but how does a “free market” come into play with this? It seems consumers should be able to choose between an AI narrated and human narrated audio book - given equal access to both.

I personally am not a big fan of AI but playing devil’s advocate to a degree it seems AI narrated books may be useful for translating works into less common languages.

I hope we can widely implement “generated by AI” labeling for works/items to notify consumers.

Edit: fwiw I have a difficult time listening to audio books read by humans in the first place. But that’s largely irrelevant

avereveard• 3 years ago

It's important to note that no artist would have done that because the economics for it weren't there, or some would already have picked up the work.

This isn't a zero sum game.

idopmstuff2• 3 years ago

It seems consumers should be able to choose between an AI narrated and human narrated audio book - given equal access to both.

If humans want human narrated books, they'll get access to both. Human narration will only disappear if people aren't willing to pay for it. I'm pretty sure that ultimately AI narration will be so much better that human reading will be a niche thing, but I view that as a positive overall. More books get read with high quality narration, and consumers don't have to cover the cost of a human narrator.

Obviously unfortunate for the human narrators, but that's why we should be pushing for UBI - AI and robots are going to eliminate a lot of professions, and I think it's wrong to keep jobs around for no other reason than to keep people employed, especially when doing so ultimately leads consumer costs to be higher. You see this in lots of places now - a big one is the teamsters using their union power to keep automation out of our ports. Literally everyone in the US could benefit from goods moving more quickly, efficiently and cheaply through our transportation infrastructure, but instead everyone has to pay a bit more so humans can keep unnecessary jobs.

dieselgate2• 3 years ago

I'm pretty sure that ultimately AI narration will be so much better that human reading will be a niche thing, but I view that as a positive overall.

Respect your opinion but hope that's not the case.

pard68• 3 years ago

Why are people (or maybe it's AI, ha!) writing hit pieces about a non-profit who attempts to make classical works widely and freely available? Not sure who/what "quartz" is but it's giving off major writing-for-hire vibes. Likely there is not a single member of SAG who cares what Project Gutenberg does.

Maybe this is another union ploy, similar to the Netflix hit pieces a month ago about the ML job.

SpicyLemonZest• 3 years ago

It's bad on purpose to make you click. If they had wanted to be informative they would have written something more like the Techcrunch article on it (https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/19/project-gutenberg-puts-500...).

Tao33002• 3 years ago

major writing-for-hire vibes

It was probably even written by AI!

endisneigh2• 3 years ago

By the end of the decade, end of next decade tops, text to speech will be a solved problem, anyone who thinks otherwise hasn’t been paying attention.

It suck for voice actors. If they’re lucky the top percent of them might retain a job due to the novelty or branding of their voice, but most will be unemployed.

edit: erroneously said dictation (which also will be solved :p)

NoZebra120vClip• 3 years ago

Dictation is where you speak some words, and someone else types them out, like voice recognition.

This created jobs from Biblical times, nearly to the present.

endisneigh2• 3 years ago

ha - yes you're right. TTS is more accurate. Though, sadly what you're describing will also be a solved problem.

ComputerGuru• 3 years ago

It’s a non-profit, open source venture with negligible revenue doing the best it can to open up reading to people of all colors and stripes. What a stupid fight to pick.

If you want to complain, complain about the Bezos-owned WaPo adding machine-generated audio versions of all their stories (linked prominently under the headline) and pushing them for a podcast-like experience (terrible quality generated audio, might I add, having clicked on it yesterday by accident while scrolling and couldn’t figure out how to stop it until I just killed the app).

Unlike Project Gutenberg, WaPo and NYT used to hire narrators for their popular stories or bleeding headlines. That is revenue and jobs that might actually be erased.

littlestymaar2• 3 years ago

What the reading does lack is the versatility and depth that human actors bring to the same work. It’s a far cry from, say, Stephen Fry, who created a unique voice for dozens of characters while reading the Harry Potter audiobooks. But Project Gutenberg’s audiobooks are free, the process is quick, and the text-to-speech system used is scalable.

You loved cheap tasteless hydroponic tomatoes? You'll love cheap bland voice-acting.

Dr4kn• 3 years ago

You might not be good at reading, blind, do not have the time to read and the money to buy audiobooks. It's far from perfect, but it's better than what these people had before.

Making these works available to most people is the goal of Project Gutenberg and this is another step in that direction.

They do not have the money to hire voice actors to record audiobooks even for their most popular titles

littlestymaar2• 3 years ago

You're missing the forest for the tree here: my point isn't about this particular case or project Gutenberg, it's just that this example shows us the future, this is a future that looks very much like everything automation touched before, where we end-up with mass-produced cheap crap instead of simply better things at the same price or more affordable stuff with the same quality.

In a competitive market, bad product drives out good.

StopTheWorld• 3 years ago

I just listened to the beginning of one of these books.

The book text starts out "I." as in, roman numeral for chapter 1. The audio book read this as "eye" (or "I", but not 1).

Then the third sentence in the text says "1793-05". The audio was "1793 to 2005". Actually it was 1793 to 1805.

I listened to a few more sentences and had an idea of the state of it currently. The tech has advanced in the past few years, still has a way to go. Insofar as striking actors, they probably should be worried about what the big companies are up to.

tredre32• 3 years ago

Then the third sentence in the text says "1793-05". The audio was "1793 to 2005". Actually it was 1793 to 1805.

Bit of a tangent here but did you get 1805 from context or is YYYY-YY a common year range notation that I'm not aware of? Because I would never guess 1793-05 meant 1793-1805 either.

fnordpiglet2• 3 years ago

It’s not but it’s obvious from the context, which I think is the point. A GPT-4 LLM could probably figure it out from context, but most text to speech models probably don’t have as much semantic training.

saulpw• 3 years ago

Sure, it's awkward, but how about "1793 to oh-five"? Instead of inserting incorrect content.

d3w4s92• 3 years ago

Because I would never guess 1793-05 meant 1793-1805 either.

Read more books.

hadlock• 3 years ago

1898-02 or 1998-02 would be the years someone attended high school or college. The context of when it was written, either in 1905 or 2023 can be important. Seems to be pretty common notation when spanning centuries, particularly +/- 10 years. I grew up during the turn of the century and seemed to be quite common.

WalterBright4• 3 years ago

Eye sea a lot of otto-generated subtitles with homonym miss takes.

msp262• 3 years ago

Wouldn't that be caused by an OCR issue? No matter how primitive I doubt a TTS model would mistake I for 1. The book was probably poorly scanned, OCRed, and then had automated audiogen.

duskwuff2• 3 years ago

No matter how primitive I doubt a TTS model would mistake I for 1.

"I" is the correct text, but it's intended as a Roman numeral and should be read as "one". (And, a few chapters later, "IV" should be read as "four", not "intravenous".)

squarefoot2• 3 years ago

This is called progress. Maybe not today or tomorrow, but in a few years the trend is to have all readers replaced by AI once technology will make their voice credible, then all singers will face the same fate. I'm sorry, but in a few decades, possibly years, all movies and music will contain more and more AI generated content with fake actors and artists who never existed whose fame has been carefully planned on social media. Few will complain: "so what? We can still act or make music for fun"; then one day we'll see virtual politicians controlled by the same small oligarchy of very wealthy people, with the difference that a virtual politician could be taken out and swapped to another one constructed to appeal the right target just by filling a prompt.

namaria5• 3 years ago

Ah yes. Canned mash up of an average of past human creation. Progress over actually creating.

squarefoot2• 3 years ago

Sadly, a big percentage of recent movies or music hits is already a mashup of old original ideas, automating the "creation" process to increase profits is just going one step further. Indie or niche movies or bands won't be touched simply because that's not where the money is.

danShumway2• 3 years ago

Missing from this article: any quotes from striking actors or union organizers actually saying that they oppose Project Gutenberg's efforts specifically.

AI is one part of why actors are striking, and their fears are pretty directed at studios and employers. In particular they're worried about contract clauses that grant studios perpetual rights to use their likenesses and voices to train AIs that studios hope will replace them. It is a convenient narrative to phrase that as if they are opposed to AI entirely or that they are opposed to accessibility or voice-over technology. In reality even if actors were fully embracing AI-generated content, the terms being proposed by studios for ownership over training data and unlimited monopolization of actor voices and performances would still be egregious.

There have been conflicts about text-to-speech efforts in ebooks before, but it's not clear to me that the majority of actors have any problem with stilted, lifeless text-to-speech designed by a nonprofit to increase ebook accessibility.

And maybe actors will be furious at Gutenberg, I don't know. But that's the point, a good way of figuring out whether or not striking actors are mad at Gutenberg would be to talk to them directly, which this article doesn't do. What I'm saying is, in the middle of a highly public strike, be careful of uncritically accepting the word of writers who are not part of that strike when they tell you what the strike is about and what the people striking believe and want.

WalterBright4• 3 years ago

Screen and voice actors have already put out of business legions of live performers, such as burlesque shows, stage shows, minstrels, etc.

danShumway2• 3 years ago

You're making the same mistake the article is making.

There is a huge effort going on to frame striking actors as if they're anti-technology and to turn what should be a conversation about clearly unacceptable studio terms around IP rights into a philosophical debate about the nature of progress. If the union organizers all come out and start condemning Project Gutenberg then fine, we can have a conversation about Gutenberg then. But as far as I can tell online, that hasn't happened yet.

And even if we do end up having that conversation, it's not at all clear that striking actors are going to feel the same way about nonprofit accessibility tools as they would feel about purely profit-motivated projects for Amazon books or (more relevant to the actual strike going on) movie studios. These conversations oversimplify what actor demands actually are.

Before you get into a giant argument, check to make sure that the argument is actually happening and isn't just the result of a single Internet article by a single writer. Made-up conflicts online started with "people on Twitter say" junk pieces that would quote single-digit follower Twitter accounts as if they represented a consensus, and have now moved past that into pieces just kind of confidently stating what demographics believe with literally no sources at all. If union organizers have a problem with Project Gutenberg, they will say something about it at some point.

And maybe they will! But I can't find a source on that yet; as far as I can tell from some quick searches we have one isolated article online framing this as a major conflict with unions even though there are zero actual union organizers in the article saying that it's a conflict.

qingcharles• 3 years ago

Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale

Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus

https://twitter.com/AlexBlechman/status/1457842724128833538?...

sprayk• 3 years ago

I was under the impression that striking actors concerns with AI were over AI reproducing their likenesses, but this article is claiming that the fears would also consider non-specific (non-imitation, non-likeness, ?) generated voices a threat. The former is at least what I've read as far as union demands go.

Actors demanding a cut of revenue generated with their likeness I can understand, but trying to stop all AI-gen content, even that which does not imitate a real person and was trained on ethically sourced, non-SAG data, smells like business-model protectionism or even luddism.

VanTheBrand• 3 years ago

The article is just wrong. SAG is trying to prevent the specific companies that hire their members from recreating a performers actual visual or vocal likeness without compensation or for very little compensation. To the extent they oppose a “generic” AI voice it would be in the context of that voice being trained on material that was originaly created by SAG performers or under SAG contracts and used for training with little or no compensation.

michaelmrose3• 3 years ago

This ship has sailed and worrying about AI copying a particular actor or voice of a professional actor is virtually meaningless long term.

AI will enable the creation of voices and people who never were and even the corpus of people used to train the AI wont need to include actors.

If you read books out loud or are an extra you don't and honestly shouldn't expect an income from it and this problem stands to get worse not better.

These is little political will to implement UBI so best get to learning a new profession whilst audio books transition to tools produce dozens of professional virtual voice actors for 19.99 or free if you dont mind user unfriendly open source you have to set up yourself.

namaria5• 3 years ago

If you read books out loud or are an extra you don't and honestly shouldn't expect an income from it

It's the other way around. If people cannot expect an income from doing work, the work will be left undone. Or it will be done poorly by cut rate profiteers.

WalterBright4• 3 years ago

Maybe we should all go back to hand making our own soap, too, instead of having cut-rate profiteering industry do it.

https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/home/cleaning/a20705805/how...

We should also go back to making our own thread, weaving our own cloth, and sewing our own clothes.

Naaah.

michaelmrose3• 3 years ago

There wont be much space for people doing this for work for money in 10 years. There is no reason to believe the quality of automation will continue to be poor any more than we would have been reasonable to believe that chess engines would continue to perform poorly.

Tao33002• 3 years ago

Ok, show me the actor who is afraid of losing a meal ticket by not getting to bring their talent to an audiobook reading of Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius.

Do the author and the imaginary picketline behind them take issue with Librivox recordings of public domain works?

GeekyBear• 3 years ago

I can support Stephen Fry's right not to have an Ai version of his voice created without his permission.

Speaking at the tech-based CogX festival in London, he played a clip of a history documentary that faked his voice, without his knowledge. It appears as though the actor is narrating the show but the AI-generated voice was actually created by technology learning from Fry reading all seven of the Harry Potter audiobooks.

https://www.standard.co.uk/tech/stephen-fry-voice-ai-cloned-...

However, the notion that it's somehow nefarious to create a new voice to read audiobooks (with the permission of the person supplying the training data) is ridiculous.

d3w4s92• 3 years ago

Free audiobooks narrated by amateurs (who are real humans) already exist. Just go to YouTube and search for classic book name + "audiobook". Yet people go to Audible for those books because there is a difference between amateur work and professional work. Same as why people buy Shakespeare books with annotations instead of just using some random online version.

fnordpiglet2• 3 years ago

I listened to Call of the Wild and it was excellent. I think some of the intonation and contextual emphasis, tone etc could be improved. I suspect this is definitely the nail in the coffin for artisanal narration. Some of the recent SOTA models (below) do very well in these areas, so I’ll wager in 5 years all ebooks will be narratable via a local or cloud model as part of the reader.

https://ai.meta.com/blog/voicebox-generative-ai-model-speech...

https://news.play.ht/post/introducing-playht2-0-the-state-of...

ashildr• 3 years ago

Blech. The TTS in my iOS devices gets better every generation, and it can read text from project Gutenberg pretty well. This is the same “problem”.

fmajid• 3 years ago

Check the Audible bestsellers list:

https://www.audible.com/adblbestsellers

All copyrighted books, fairly recently published ones, not the mostly older public-domain ones Gutenberg does.

Project Gutenberg has implemented one of the worst AI fears of striking actors

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