I just listened to this AI generated audiobook and if it didn’t say it was AI, I’d have thought it was human-made. It has different voices, dramatization, sound effects… The last I’d heard about this tech was a post saying Stephen Fry’s voice was stolen and replicated by AI. But since then, nothing, even though it’s clearly advanced incredibly fast. You’d expect more buzz for something that went from detectable as AI to indistinguishable from humans so quickly. How is it that no one is talking about AI generated audiobooks and their rapid improvement? This seems like a huge deal to me.
A lot of people just aren’t aware of how fast AI is moving. AI voices were pretty meh earlier this year. A lot of people working on the audiobook/voice acting scene have been talking about this though.
I recommend everyone to check the YouTube channel “two minute papers” who have being doing videos about papers on AI for the last 10 years on so to see the accelerated progress AI have. Like 5 years ago those images generating AI looked like LSD infused dreams and now they look almost perfect.
I’m only shocked that video isn’t better. Diffusion models work like denoising - so you’d figure all the wiggly nonsense between frames would be the first thing to filter out.
I expect the data size to be a problem. Stable diffusion defaults to 512x512px, because it simply requires a lot of resources to generate an image. Even more so to train one. Now do that times 30 to generate even one second of video. I think we need something that scales better.
I fully expect this to work decently in a few years though, no matter how hard the challenge is, ai is moving really fast.
I give it a year, maybe two, for a fully synthetic video that couldn’t not be easily distinguish from reality. There’s already some very good AI that complete or replace backgrounds on videos that work really good, and completely synthetic videos that looks like nightmares for now.
I expected it to be here six months ago, but its continued absence hasn’t changed my estimate from “any day now, and suddenly.” All of this is so weirdly democratized (and pornography-motivated) that we’re seeing the cool stuff before all the scary disinformation concerns.
And the underlying mechanisms are straight-up “the missile knows where it is, because it knows where it is not.” Stable Diffusion compares the noise estimate with and without a particular term, takes the difference, and then leaps outward along that vector.
I wish I could watch his videos but the way he talks is awful. It’s like some exaggerated evolution of YouTube talk.
Ah yes, Audio AI. I can’t wait for this rapidly-approaching future where you literally won’t be able to trust the validity of anything your senses tell you anymore
“Text was never trustworthy.”
– Abraham Lincoln
Lincoln was a smart man
Ahead of his time too:
Nobody lies on the internet
-Abraham Lincoln
Truly one of the wisest men to ever live
Imagine the day when people post videos of the president saying literally anything with pitch perfect audio voice synth
Imagine going to prison for a generated clip of you confessing to a crime.
Once the tech is that good, a recording of your confession will be useless as evidence in court.
…but it is already that good? The fact that celebrities are having to come out and say it wasn’t them in an ad is proof enough that it can fool people
You only need to fool a jury
Then we’ll have to take more care with how jury trials are conducted. It’s always been possible to fool juries, that’s often a lawyer’s entire strategy.
Everything will be useless in court. Audio evidence? Worthless. Video evidence? Worthless. Physical evidence? Prove that it wasnt planted. That kind of AI is a fucking nightmare and no one really understands the danger that kind of AI poses.
AI can’t tamper with physical evidence. It can’t fake financial records or witness testimony. Many kinds of audio and visual recordings will still have sufficient authentication and chain of custody to be worthwhile.
The main kind of evidence that these AI generators makes untenable are the ones where someone just shows up and says “look at this video of X confessing to Y that I happen to have,” which was never a particularly good sort of evidence to base a court case on to begin with.
Witness testimony is already a very unreliable source of evidence. And again, evidence can be planted. Hell there was doubt about the chain of custody before AI could just make up audio and video. The validity of the chain of custody boils down to the cops and government in general being trusted enough to not falsify it when it suits them.
Sufficiently advanced AI can, and eventually will, be capable of creating deepfakes that cant reliably be proven to be false. Every test that can be done to authenticate that media can be used by the AI to select generated media that would pass scrutiny in principle.
I love the optimism and I hope you’re right but I don’t think you are. I think that deepfake AI should scare people a whole lot more than it does.
That got me thinking about when we’ll hear the first case of AI generated security camera footage used to frame someone. Which leads me to wonder when it will be standard procedure for cameras to digitally sign their footage.
Or imagine politicians like Trump saying the most heinous stuff and then denying it saying it’s fake or AI. How will people know? You won’t even be able to trust your eyes or ears anymore.
Guss we’ll have to resort to digital watermarking with personal certificates then.
Soon the schizophrenics will become neuro-typical
Oh no, don’t make me become skeptical and critical of my environment. Please anything but that
Have you watched a movie, ever? There have always been special effects trickery.
Yes, but you could tell they weren’t real. They still needed real voice actors, real sound design, studios and stages and resources. Anyone with a halfway decent rig can fake shit to a very believable degree. Even with CGI you swear is fantastic, you see its fakeness once the novelty wears off
As someone who only consumes books in audiobook form this is great news for me, I tried to listen to some automatically generated audio books around 2 years ago and I found them horrible to listen to just because they sounded so off.
I’d love to be able to copy in the text of a book and get actually listenable (is that a proper word?) audiobook out of the other side for some books that will just simply never be recorded by actual people due to being too old / obscure.
I’ve been wanting to be able to listen to the Pelucidar books for years but they just don’t exist in audio format, is there somewhere publically available that I can do this?
I would guess there is a LOT of work going into each voice. Playing with different parameters and prompts. I don’t think it’s as simple as just copying the text into a box. Not yet at least :)
That’s a good thought there though. Audiobooks could have each character voiced uniquely.
This is literally the only upside I see from this.
One of the Dune audio books started off as multiple voices and then part way through it was finished by just one guy. Really impressed with it at first, and then really kind of debuffed by it. I had already read the book years before so it wasn’t a big deal, but like wtf?
Lol what a troll audio book.
I can hope! With the speed things are developing it may not be too long.
I haven’t played around with or looked into much to do with AI at all but would be willing to put in some time into playing with prompts / parameters if it meant I could eventually create a reliable work flow to create things such as what I mentioned.
I think I’ll have to do some research, I need some more old school hollow earth stories in my life xD
Just curious, but how come you only consume books in audio format? (Please forgive me if this was rude to ask.)
I can’t speak for OP but I do this as well. For me it’s because I listen to them on the drive to/from dropping my kids off at school and I’ll have it playing while I’m working or playing a game.
As someone who would like to do this, how well do you actually pay attention to what is going on? I’d do so much more reading if I didn’t have to go back and reread paragraphs several times over because I simply can’t pay attention, let alone if I’m doing something else entirely
It depends. It definitely is easy to get distracted and need to rewind but I found that happens much less often than with sitting down and reading in text form.
Its a solid solution and I recommend you give it a try.
AudiobookBay and youtube have tons of books
Might legit work for me, as I do sometimes do that with things that aren’t plot-focused. Mostly audio youtube videos, podcasts, the like
Myanonamouse ftw! :D
If you’re interested further, check if your local library has a partnership with Libby. It’s an app that you can check out audiobooks from.
I think your success with these apps depends heavily on your country. I always hear good things about Libby in the US but the equivalent here in the UK I think is absolute dog shit.
The selection is woefully small not even including really popular books like say lord of the rings for example, you can request books are added but they have a finite amount of books they can add in a month and of all the things I requested they never added any of them.
On top of that often I would have to join a virtual queue because someone already "checked out " the audio book I wanted to listen to and so you have to wait for them to finish. Often as well they wouldn’t “return” it when they had finished so I’d have to wait until the standard amount of time was up and the system forced them to return it before I was able to listen to it.
It cost a tenner a month to get access to this service but in the state it was in last I tried it I wouldn’t even say it was worth that.
I listen to audiobooks when driving as well and am PRETTY sure i have ADHD (haven’t gotten officially diagnosed yet). For me, it… “distracts” the part of my brain that wants to get frustrated at all the bad drivers/traffic slowdowns. Unless things get particularly hectic, like trying to make it to an exit in time in dense traffic, it usually works great, and if I find myself not taking in certain parts, I tap a button on my audiobook app that goes back 30 seconds so I can properly understand it.
It’s a great combo, because like you, if I’m just sitting at home listening to an audiobook, I get “partially bored” and start looking at random stuff online. But when driving, well, that part of my brain is focused on driving, so I don’t get bored like that.
I’m really reconsidering that, because I legit hate other drivers. I wanna be less annoyed by driving
To weigh in on the concentrating part I find if I have something to do like when I am setting machines at work which does involve thinking about what I am doing then I actually concentrate well and take in what I am listening to and absorb it. Once I have finished setting the machine and start running it which requires little to not thought (until something goes wrong) that is when I won’t be able to concentrate on the book and will usually switch to music as my mind wanders off.
So for things like driving, running, cleaning, cooking etc I will often put a book on and concentrate just fine on what is being said.
With driving and running it does depend on my mood though as both those activities have a certain level of your brain switching off and running on auto pilot which is when I find myself starting to not concentrate.
I’d definitely recommend giving it a try and seeing how you find it as it helps the time fly by if you can get into it :)
I hate them too… to me, they drive like they walk around stores (Especially at Costco!). They’re either very slow and in the way, with no self awareness of that fact, or right on your ass, pressuring you. Almost no inbetween these days.
That makes a lot of sense actually!
Not OP, but I almost exclusively read novels and non fiction via audiobooks. For context, I’m on pace for 70 books this year.
My main reason for audiobooks is I having a driving commute. Two hours a day round trip. Audiobooks keep me sane in a way that podcasts or music do not. I also do audiobooks when doing chores around the house.
Second, I struggle to focus on reading a book on my phone. Too many distractions and I think the reading experience is subpar. I do have an eInk reader, but I haven’t charged it in years because it’s easier to do audiobooks.
Physical books are rare in my home, but that’s a self-reinforcing cycle since I enjoy audiobooks so much.
Personally I mostly use audio books instead of reading because I get eye strain a lot easier than I used to. I go to an eye specialist for unrelated issues yearly, so it’s not an issue with a wrong lens prescription. It’s not a problem when I’m doing a low attention task where I can look away frequently, but for reading it sucks.
I like to read books before bed, but need darkness for a while before I have any chance of going to sleep, so me and my wife listen to 45min of audio book a night before going to sleep. Plus when we listen together there is no need to worry about getting ahead of each other and spoiling stuff.
I read books in other scenarios but that ritual is by the most time I have for reading and the most consistent as well.
Not rude at all, similar to the other responses people have given but it oa two fold really. Firstly I just don’t do well with sitting and reading a book, I get bored very quickly, can’t concentrate on what is happening and start re-reading sentences or pages over and over where I am not paying attention properly. Additionally after only a couple of pages it will start putting me to sleep, I guess my attention span is just not sufficient for this form of media.
As a result I never read any books until I discovered audiobooks and my love for them, I honestly just disregarded books as a form of entertainment and thought they were a waste of time until discovering this way to consumer them which wasn’t until I was in my early 30s.
On top of that I now listen to them mostly at work, I work with industrial machines and the work is repetitive as fuck and having a book to listen to makes the time go a lot faster and in a lot more interesting manner. Consequently I now love books and will listen to between 6 and 10 hours a day and now listen to them when I’m doing things like cooking, cleaning or running when I am not at work.
Well you can always pay someone to read it for you. Blind people do that.
Are any of these books public domain? If so the print version could be eligible for inclusion at Project Guttenberg. PG has very specific docs about eligibility for this. You could probably get a scan from archive.org if you don’t have one. You would have to clean up the OCR by hand.
Then it would eligible to be requested from the volunteer (human) readers who have been pumping out Libra audio books for years at LibriVox.
Recently I saw Gutenberg has a collab. They are producing and distributing Libre guidebooks generated by AI. I believe I read on one of the pages they have 4000 done. I haven’t tried it out but I guess I should.
Project Gutenberg, Microsoft, and MIT have worked together to create thousands of free and open audiobooks using new neural text-to-speech technology and Project Gutenberg’s large open-access collection of e-books. This project aims to make literature more accessible to (audio)book-lovers everywhere and democratize access to high quality audiobooks. Whether you are learning to read, looking for inclusive reading technology, or about to head out on a long drive, we hope you enjoy this audiobook collection.
I assume this is also a great benefit as fertilizer down at the old AI content farm which is otherwise totally run over with reddit shitposts.
If anyone tries it let me know how it goes.
The books I specifically mentioned are now public domain as they are old enough and librevox is where I actually started my audiobook (and books in general) journey. One of them is on there but it is only the second book of what is a 5 or more book series which is kinda frustrating.
The volunteer readers are very hit and miss however and I find that more than half are just not listenable for me due to different reasons from poor actual recordings, poor reading ability by the reader with excessive pauses added “errs and ummms” to mispronunciation of words constantly. These are pedantic reasons maybe and I throw no shade over it to the people that have volunteered their time to read these books but I just can’t listen to them personally for the same reason I could never get through any amount of time with a robotic text to speech program of the past.
I’ll look into the project Gutenberg thing however, thanks for making me aware of it and see what is up with that :)
I’m pretty sure that Amazon tried to do this with Kindle a few years ago and got sued by book publishers.
Ahh, it was audible.
It’s only a matter of time though before this sort of thing is ruled on and deals are inked. Open source is already getting pretty far too.
The books I mentioned and had in mind are old enough that they are now public domain and so this issue would not affect them. :)
This is a great use for it!
I’ve been getting into audiobooks in a big way recently. This is interesting but somehow seems off to me. Maybe I’ll try listening to one and have my mind changed. We’ll see!
Because it has the potential to become actively harmful to the audiobook industry
And great for accesibility for people who can not read well.
A lot of audiobook voices are harmful to the industry. Plenty of times I’ve listened to a book for ten minutes and said nevermind because the voice actor was terrible, making wet mouth sounds or their voice was just annoying or the audio quality was terrible.
I love the multi book series where they hire a different narrator for certain books and they end up pronouncing names and places differently than the first narrator.
why should i care about the audio book industry? The biggest player is Amazon, it doesn’t add value to the art form, its just another way to become informed, and the more people who have that ability the better.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
There are also a few AI sung songs out there that are pretty good. Most of them sound pretty Autotuny, but to some extent, that can be a style. Aura, by Ghost, is a good example. If I didn’t know it was ai, I would just think it was autotune.
There was a fairly big 40K lore channel on YouTube with a rather good AI impersonation of David Attenborough’s voice and narration style/scripting. However, I just went to check it, yet it must have recently gotten hit with a DMCA and taken down. A shame really. Though I never got into 40K lore before, or the 40K franchise in general, I am a big fan of David Attenborough, and so that ended up really drawing me in to a new literary universe. However, it was a big mistake by the YouTube creator to use the name and photo likeness of Attenborough in the branding, video titles, and thumbnail art on the channel. I think without pushing that line, the AI voice with a clear disclosure could have kept the channel under the legal radar.
- https://old.reddit.com/r/40kLore/comments/17b4t1v/attenborough_lore_shut_down/
- https://youtube.com/@AttenboroughLore
From the pinned comments made here, this looks to be the same creators new channel, now using a different voice, no longer based on any one real person:
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/@AttenboroughLore
https://piped.video/@Scholarslore
https://piped.video/watch?v=JnbGL8Z6KYg
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Related commentary on the take down:
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/1-PIhsD987I
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Because it’s not a new product.
Audiobooks are offputting to me and I strongly prefer to read text, but this seems like a great thing overall for making books more accessible to people. More people experiencing a wider range of books is good.
It sounds like a generative model to me, but it’s probably the best one I’ve ever heard. Also, thanks for the link! I added it to my listen list!
Because they’re shit and shouldn’t exist.
I’m sympathetic to the view that artists should be paid for their work. Collectively, artists have produced so much, and these tech companies are funnelling all their work into a machine and recycling it into new works, and profiting off that, without any compensation for the people partially responsible for this new reality. I’m also not interested in people who argue “but actually it’s not copying that’s not how the technology works it’s actually a really complic-” yeah I don’t care. Without the artists you would have nothing.
BUT
Don’t confuse the business practices that make this technology a reality with the technology itself. These tools are incredible, and will result in things that could have never existed previously. I just believe we need to have serious conversations about what they mean for our future.
Exactly! I would do unspeakable things for a tool that would let me pop an epub file in and let me tune the voices and audio effects to my liking. I always have some problem or another with the voice actors.
