Said Robin Miles, quoted in "How a Great Audiobook Narrator Finds Her Voices/Robin Miles was looking for stage and screen roles when she began reading books for the blind. She’s become one of the country’s most celebrated narrators" (The New Yorker).
One of the things discussed in the article is the likelihood that AI voices will take over the work. I don't think AI can convey the right expression — not that human readers always get the narration right. I listen to a lot of audiobooks (and articles) and I can, from time to time, tell that the reader has misunderstood the text. But AI obviously does not understand. There is no mind to understand. And the human ear repels the voice that has no mind behind the words. The AI cannot "have sex with itself" and experience pleasure in the reading of the words. There is no pleasure to be had.
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I record narration for family because I enjoy reading aloud and doing voices. I would say the most important talent is to read/scan fast enough to see what's coming before I get to it. Who's talking? What's their intent? How does a sentence play out, and where does the emphasis need to fall? I would imagine an AI would excel at that. If someone programmed it to understand certain character traits, it might do a good job.
And the human ear repels the voice that has no mind behind the words.
Meanwhile, in the vowels of the pentagon, a secret AI is flagging Althouse for a possible domestic threat against the president ;)
I've tried only one audiobook and thought it was over acted. I'd love to hear books read by the authors, however understated. Philip Roth was great reading his own stuff but he never did a whole book.
Oh, also I let Alexa read to me but she's terrible. A preview of AI yes?
I appreciate hearing different perspectives on which tasks AI will and won't be able to adequately do. Usually my feeling is that skeptics are falling into the trap that if they can't imagine how the challenge can be solved, then it won't be. Just as an example, it might only take feedback from one listener to get the AI narrator to convey the right expression. And integrating the correction into the original recording would be much smoother for an AI narrator than most humans can do.
Look at any e-book produced by scanning a printed copy to digital using OCR (optical character recognition). Often it's obvious the producer didn't even bother to read the result before publishing it. They do it that way because it's cheap. And so are they. AI-read audio books will be the same because it's the same people.
At the other end are the authors on the New Yorker Fiction podcast who read their favorites among the other authors in the New Yorker archives, bringing their interpretation to the exercise. I like hearing other writers react to and carefully present stories that mean something to them.
Great comments and I tend to agree that AI reading fails because it is too flat and in the wrong places. Maybe future AI reading will overcome this but I hope to hell it does not.
Very much agree that “reading ahead” (rehearsal?) is important for those who read aloud to listeners. You are helping the listener create a scene in his or her own head. To do that, you must first create it in your *own* head. How can you do that without some interval, however brief, to “read” the scene that the writer wrote?
When it comes to writing, wit, and masturbation AI will never top Mark Twain's "Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism".
I bought an audiobook of Tender is the Night, and I would prefer a robot voice to the “voice actress” who read it as if she were reading Cinderella to a group of five year olds. Let the language stand on its own, spare me your moronic take on every scene!
I guess that I am going to have to finish it on dead tree.
Karl Rove made the mistake of reading his very good biography of McKinley. I listen to audio books when driving. The reader is important.
"And the human ear repels the voice that has no mind behind the words."
Not to go OT, but it depends on the meaning of mind: strictly speaking, many Alzheimer's patients have no mind in the ordinary sense, yet the ear does not repel their voices.
In a way, I hope Althouse is right, but AI has made great strides in many areas. The ear infers the mind-behind-the-words from the physical characteristics of voices. Mimicking those characteristics effectively, so that an AI reader could pass a Turing listening test, does not seem an inherently unsolvable problem.
Is it tons o' fun to masturbate while listening to an audio book?
@Sebastian
It’s not just the idea that there is no mind. It’s the reading itself, constantly betraying the lack of understanding.
I looked over a list of books she's read and realized I haven't read (heard) any of those. And there's really not anything I would want to read - except for Harriet Tubman.
The single best reading I have heard was by Ruby Dee. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston is a magnificent book, but I couldn't read it - I could never get the cadence right. It was a book made to be read aloud.
My favorite reader is Jim (Georgy Girl) Dale. He did over 200 voices for the Harry Potter series (alas, in the later books he conformed to the movie pronunciation of "VoldemorT"), but it's not just those (although most are children's books).
For now, I agree - AI can't handle this.
It's a bit like having sex with yourself. If you do, you're extraterrestrial.
As for AI, science cannot discern origin and expression.
I drove between Phoenix and Los Angeles twice a week for about 10 years and the only things that saved me were audio books and sunflower seeds. Things that bugged me: authors who read their own works in a sing song voice, male narrators who read female dialogue in a high pitched voice, narrators who whispered, attempts at acting out dialogue with accents. I like clear narrations that help me concentrate on the words the author wrote. I have 4 audio books narrated by Robin Miles. She’s very good. Now that I can listen on my phone, I love being able to speed up the narration when the reader is too slow for me. There’s a feature in Kindle that reads the text in a robotic voice (at least there used to be) and that was fine as well. I prefer flat, clear readings to the highly dramatic readings that seemed to have gained in popularity recently.
I was going to say I'm not sure if I've heard her on audible, but then saw she reads Jubilee. Have you all read or listened to Jubilee? It is fantastic.
One thing that creeps me out, but I think is getting better, is when male authors read female characters and end up sounding like molesters. Women sometimes just make men sound like stoners. All the accents they can do, but switching genders is the trickiest it seems!
tim in vermont said...
I agree with you on some books for sure! There was a switch from "read by" to "performed by", and sometimes a performance is not what I'm looking for!
Risk Management? "I guess it's on my resume."
It's a little bit like having sex with yourself.
(Watch the video long enough to hear the eventual voice on tape.)
It’s not that AI is getting better, humans are getting worse.
Althouse: "It’s the reading itself, constantly betraying the lack of understanding."
OK. Of course, none of us likes that kind of reading. The lack as such cannot be remedied, at least not in human terms. But the jury is out on whether AI can overcome the appearance of constantly betraying the lack.
Another question is whether human beings are equally sensitive to the constant betrayal, or even demand "understanding," leaving many much more open to AI "reading."
… and punctuation matters. Too often, AI rushes sentences or ignores the punctuation tonal inflection.
It can be humorous if listening w/out needing to actually understand the story.
Masturbation is a sexual relation. That's not how humans have sex. That is not Her choice. Sex and "our Posterity", anthropogenic emulations, and ethical mutations, notwithstanding.
David Foster Wallace reading his own essays is sublime. Alan Watts is a marvelous narrator of his philosophical rants. When Watts laughs, you can hear the deep rumble of a lifetime of smoking Lucky's-reminds me of my parents generation.
I've never listened to an audio book. My daughter and I are hams and love reading books aloud. Kate and Owen are right, you have to know what's coming up to get the emphasis, inflections and cadence right.
Audiobooks give me the experience of reading I had in my youth when I didn't worry about what this or that was supposed to mean or how many pages I had left to read. Like going to see a movie on a big screen without the ability to stop or rewind, the experience is, for me at least, more immediate and fulfilling.
In the early days, when audiobooks came on cassette tapes, they tended to follow the traditional literary canon. If you wanted to hear Jane Austen or Henry James or Edith Wharton it wasn't hard to find them. Today the classics are far outweighed by the best sellers, genre fiction, and non-fiction, so it's harder to pick up the education you might have missed out on.
Also, in those days, the readers were familiar -- Flo Gibson, George Guidall, Grover Gardner, Stefan Rudnicki. Some of them were quite awful, actually, but familiar voices did manage to create a comfort zone for listeners. If there are still familiar names and voices in the field, I don't know them.
Whether or not AI will or won't replace human readers, doesn't it feel like automation nowadays is as much about misanthropy as about economics? I do worry about Paul Auster, though. Without his fake tough guy voice on the audiobooks is there really that much to his novels?
A famous local political reporter permanently lost his voice, and using AI, the station was able to create a system that organized vocabulary from his previous decades of reporting and now produces his new reports in his own voice from the mechanized data. It is uncanny how much the emphases, tones, and import of his words are finessed and transmitted using this new technology.
There are a lot of books to record, and news, etc.
"sometimes a performance is not what I'm looking for!"
Right? I don't want anyone in between me and the writer. Especially if the reader hams it up. Ugh.
People have weird ideas about what AI is capable of. It cannot be repeated enough: AI isn't a mind! And any AI that *is* a mind is a long, long, if ever way off.
She’s okay for B+ fiction but she managed to make Cleopatra boring.
Just wait. Within a short time they will read better than whoever you think reads well.
It's a hobby, criticizing AIs while in their infancy before they mature. You don't get to play the hobby long on a particular activity. Then you need to move on and criticize a different activity.
I’m currently working on a project with the press at my university to begin bringing their backlist to audio by using AI voices. Many of the voices are quite good out of the box, and errors in intonation or pronunciation can easily be corrected in SSML (speech synthesis markup language). Graduate students can make quite serviceable AI audiobooks in a fraction of the time it takes to record a conventional audiobook, and for pennies on the dollar. Custom voices are easy to create with an hour’s worth of recordings of any individual’s voice. Many books that would never have gotten an audio version now will. Particularly for scholarly and history texts with a limited audience, it’s a value proposition that will soon, I suspect, be insuperable for all but very wealthy university presses. FWIW you might well have listened to an AI-voiced audiobook without having been aware.
So someone has finally found something AI might be good for? Seems unlikely.
Remember the "Internet of Things"? Very big deal, back in 2016 or so. Not so big now. AI is big now. Like Japan, back in the 90's.
Any book read by George Guidall is probably a keeper. The guy's great.
The jump from the kind of things AIs are doing now to being actual minds is not a matter of linear improvement. It would be a gigantic, possibly impossible, leap. It would be having AI do a completely different thing. It'a odd that we would even have to call both things "AI" because they would be such different things.
"It’s a bit like having sex with yourself. If you don’t have fun, it’s your own damn fault."
The anti-masturbation crowd is so ridiculous that it can cause many people to miss what's wrong with masturbation.
It's like C+ sex at best.
Sex is way, way, way more fun with two passionate lovers. Orgasms are way more intense.
We live in a culture that teaches young people to be afraid of love and afraid of sex. And a culture that has a lot of free porn on the internet.
1960's = Free Love
And people started noticing how unpleasant that was, so in 1970's it was renamed
1970's = Me Decade
And now with the internet, sex has morphed yet again to the era of Joyless Masturbation.
I don't know if it's a sin to miss out on a union with another human being. But it's a subpar life. Intimate sex is way, way better than masturbation. Way more fun, and way better orgasms.
One of the things discussed in the article is the likelihood that AI voices will take over the work. I don't think AI can convey the right expression — not that human readers always get the narration right. I listen to a lot of audiobooks (and articles) and I can, from time to time, tell that the reader has misunderstood the text. But AI obviously does not understand. There is no mind to understand. And the human ear repels the voice that has no mind behind the words. The AI cannot "have sex with itself" and experience pleasure in the reading of the words. There is no pleasure to be had.
I would make the same argument with Miles' masturbation metaphor. Adding A.I. to a sex robot isn't going to improve the masturbation experience. It's still masturbation. You're still by yourself. And it's still an inferior experience.
AI obviously does not understand.
I'm constantly amazed at how humans think AI can drive cars when they can't even fuck right.
Fucking is easier than driving a car! Way easier.
The other thing is how infuriating technology can be when it's not working right.
And damn if I blame myself!
"It’s a bit like having sex with yourself. If you don’t have fun, it’s your own damn fault."
No, it's the fucking robot's fault. I wonder how many unhappy men have bought a sex doll and then strangled her to death.
Or I guess you could dial that 800 number and talk to a machine as you complain about how the Lucy 9000 doesn't taste like cunnilingus, doesn't smell like cunnilingus, and that orgasm voice is fake, fake, fake!
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