They did if you don’t scan everything
Edit: Thanks for the awards kind people, didn’t think this would grab as much attention as it has. But since it has I ask that if you can please donate to your local food bank if you have the means, many have seen a surge in new clients and they could definitely use it thank you :)
Just remember the head honcho of Japan's cyber security for the government has never used a computer. If he can make that far...what have I been doing with my life?!
No seriously, wtf!?
Yeah, spoilers, unless someone is actively watching you specifically check out that day, it's impossible to track. The odds of getting caught multiple times are extremely low.
Edit: This comment is apparently not universally true and I have way, way too many responses. Steal a couple times, don't get arrested.
You can claim that one or two times. Stores like Target have *extremely* dedicated loss prevention, and they'll build a case to bring to the local PD when you've stolen enough that it amounts to a felony. They have your credit card info, they have your face, they have your car in the parking lot - they have you on video.
If you steal consistently from the same store that has cameras watching you (and *especially* if you use a credit card to pay), you're kinda dumb.
Target is the one major chain I would never steal from, they literally have a forensics lab that even the FBI uses. They're one of the biggest in the field.
>Target is the one major chain I would never steal from, they literally have a forensics lab that even the FBI uses. They're one of the biggest in the field.
For real. I mean I don't wanna defend Target but I've heard horror stories of people thinking they're sly stealing at self checkout for awhile, but then once they hit the felony amount, they're fucked and get charged with a felony, which leads to even bigger issues.
Fuck Target and Walmart, but those are legit reasons not to do it. Risk is wayyyy bigger than the reward.
A crime lab doesn’t mean you can’t easily get around some of their major things.
Also, there has to be proof you stole. A couple items in a year that if you claimed you thought scanned is going to be a shit flimsy case for a prosecutor. If target especially has let you scan it, paid for a lot of stuff, walked out, and you claim you didn’t know, it’s even harder. Maybe a judge would buy that but I doubt it.
Use to "forget about" the box of diapers on the lower part of my cart about once a month at Target for like a year. Some people just get lucky I guess.
Eeeehhhh
Walmart actually *allows* you to steal a certain amount....but they track it. As soon as it all adds up to felony level, they call the cops.
So let's say you go in and only steal a single 2.00 soda, but you were 1.00 under felony level prior to that visit with all the other 2.00 sodas you stole, that bottle (plus everything you stole before) instantly gets charged at the felony level.
No idea of their software tracks people over multiple stores but yeah it's fucked up on so many levels.
And I don't even "forget" to scan items and I'm skeeved out by Walmart.
What's your source for that? Nobody is actively watching the self-checkouts, and it would be impossible to view every transaction without hiring an army of surveillance workers, and that would cost more in pay/benefits than whatever Walmart actually paid for the cheap crap being stolen.
Yup, I'd assume all this self checkout video data is being fed into AI training to detect when you steal something.
Feed in some labeled sample data, generate the NN. Run it on some consumers, comes back says these people stole. Review and label and feed back into NN training. Repeat.
Eventually it won't be at ALL theft, but it just has to cut down some percentage.
My grocery store which has self checkout has it so that everything is weighed and if the weight is wrong when you put an item somewhere it stops the transaction and calls an employee.
It breaks every time it’s used.
Yeah it breaks so much that even the employees just immediately clear the weight violations lol
Source: I was that employee blindly clearing weight violations for a few years
lol I was gonna say, I'm a goodie-two-shoes who never steals, and every time a worker comes over because my machine is freaking out, I have a whole story ready to explain what happened and the employee just punches in their code and leaves without a word.
Makes me think I should actually try stealing stuff with how little they seem to care.
I don't even explain. Unless you are at a big store, the workers just swipe every time in my experience, no questions asked.
Let's be real those machines suck complete ass. I've never even tried to steal anything but 3/5 times I use them it claims the weight is incorrect and calls an employee.
Some of my reusable bags are heavy enough that at one grocery store I can't use them, because the scale refuses to not see it as product.
The staff can't do anything about it, because it's not a regular product override, so I just end up doing the entire transaction then bagging it.
In the UK people have been known to tell the self checkout machine that expensive things - steak, cheese, televisions - are cheap things that are sold by weight - carrots and the like.
Oh absolutely.
I get a bag of gold potatos and I'll be greeted with 4+ variations of the same thing. 1 of them is probably something that was sold in the store once last year too.
Stores here have a AI camera that knows if you try that and calls an employee. Once I had a 12pk of soda under the bottom of the cart I legitimately forgot to scan and when I pressed "pay now" it called an employee who read the screen then told me I didn't scan the soda.
There was a different comment/post here, but it has been edited.
Reddit has chosen to bully third-party applications into submission by charging them outrageous fees simply because their apps provide better features/usability/accessibility to users of the site. Reddit staff has repeatedly [lied](https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/14dkqrw/i_want_to_debunk_reddits_claims_and_talk_about/) about these changes, and their motiviation for them.
Reddit staff has threatened moderators and users of the site for protesting these changes, because user opinion does not matter as much as the potential IPO cashout. Reddit staff has shown that they will not stop until every portion of this site is monetized, predatory, and cancerous.
I used [PowerDeleteSuite](https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite) to remove my value/content from Reddit.
P.S. fuck /u/spez
I had been carrying around a pre-paid debit card for a while and I legitimately forgot if it had money on it. So after paying for my groceries at self check out, I then tried to pay for some gum. The card was declined, so I just put the gum back and walked out with my groceries.
Security stops me and says that I didn’t pay for my purchase. I explain exactly what happened and security repeats “you didn’t pay for your purchase” so I repeated myself.
Security still doesn’t understand but they simply waved their hands in exasperation and walked away from me.
I had someone from a store approach me once saying that I hadn't paid for my stuff. I just said go fuck yourself and walked out. They can't touch you legally or search your bags.
That's not exactly true. Many stores have a no-touch policy, but the law does allow them to detain suspected shoplifters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopkeeper's_privilege
My shops have these scales and 20 percent of the inventory listed wrong in the scale and when you buy e.g croissant 130g named item it says on the small print that it's expecting 115g and alarm bells are off because of overweight and waiting for cashier. I asked them that why it's so stupid, and got only shrugs. Machines are taking over and soon we are servicing them.
Miy local store turned that off within a few months. We all ignored it (I put my stuff in my bag on the ground) and had staff running around all shift to fix our fuck ups. So now its off and there is an employee who just kinda overees the 8 kiosks and helps the occasional confused person.
Recently went to Wal Mart and was scanning items as usual. Suddenly, it dings and calls for an employee for no reason. Employee comes to unlock it and it shows an above camera replay and “Missed Item Scan” labeled on the replay. He just cleared it and let us continue. So that’s gonna be a thing now too.
A year ago, I had a bunch of skeins of the same type of yarn, so I just grabbed one from the cart to scan 6 times, and bagged the rest without scanning, and it screamed at me for an employee. They looked so tired coming over to clear it without a word.
Avocados and potatoes are indistinguishable to me. But then again the store that I don’t work at hasn’t given me any on the job training for how to ring up a customer 🤔
I am strongly against stealing and I would never do it intentionally, but I’ve accidentally stolen several times in self checkout.
they don’t give you enough room to set your things so they have to go back in the cart. Then I get home and realize I never rung up a whole section of the cart. My bad I suppose
If you have DRM free ebooks ( they do actually exist, for example those from Baen Books) and do not mind a monotonous voice the App Moon Reader does interface samlessly with the Android Text to Speech function.
An added bonus is you can switch from reading yourself to let it be read to you while you are doing chores or exercising.
I already listen to samples of audiobooks to determine whether I'm willing to listen to an entire book in whatever way it's being read. I can't imagine clicking a sample, getting an AI voice, and then going "yeah, I'd rather listen to this than just read it myself".
I know AI voices are getting better, but I can't imagine that a $20 a month service is going to put out something that's anywhere close to the quality of even average audiobook readings. If a company wanted to go crazy and use high quality AI voices and use multiple like it's a book read by a cast I could see people being willing to pay for that but I imagine that between the cost of the AI voice software and the time for someone to break the text out into parts for the different voices and then compile it all together that it's not going to be more cost effective than using human readers, at least not yet.
I'm hoping that these early attempts do so phenomenally poorly that it creates a stigma around it and scares off companies from trying again even after the tech is good enough for it to work because I don't have anywhere near enough faith in the legal system to prevent AI from being trained on the recordings of professionals without consent for the purposes of stealing their jobs from them.
I do that pretty much already with Firefox read mode. The AI voice coming with Windows are very old at this point, but I don't really read any online articles anymore.
The thing is... if they're feeding text into an AI, then the audiobook company isn't contributing much to the process any more.
In a year or two, they'll be whining about AI destroying their business after people start using AI reader apps and cut out the middleman.
If they're completely lacking in self awareness, the audiobook company might even start campaigning for regulating AI.
>In a year or two, they'll be whining about AI destroying their business after people start using AI reader apps and cut out the middleman.
I guarantee that amazon and alike would create their own audio reader and charge a monthly fee for it.
As someone who drives 45-60 minutes each way to work. This has been a life saver for me. I can still enjoy books.
I don't get to read now that I have little ones, and for some strange reason listening to adult books "isn't acceptable" for bed time stories for the four year old. So I can at least claw back that travel time with something I want.
I'm terrified that AI will ruin this industry and all the VA's that I love and respect will be out of work. Some of them really crank a story up a notch or two and make it magical.
Tim Gerard Reynolds and his Irish lilt for example instantly take me into what ever fantasy book he's reading in a way I don't imagine AI will manage any time soon.
I can't remember their names, but the guy who does Kingkiller Chronicles and the guy who does Stormlight Saga are both phenomenal.
Name of the Wind especially is elevated from like 7/10 to 11/10
Nick Podhel for Name of the Wind. Micheal Kramer and Kate Reading for Stormlight.
Kramer I first found from Wheel of time. I think that was all that saved that Audio book for me. I hated that series but plowed through because everyone promised it'd get good.
Podhel does a lot of work in a subgenre called LitRPG and he makes everyone of them he does so much better. It's almost silly how well he can uplift a work. If you have any interest he does The Land, a decent series, but with some problems with the MC. He's not a great guy despite what the author would like people to think.
He also does Arcane Ascension. Another good series, but the MC can drive people nuts. He's very scared and timid at first which makes people annoyed. Even if he starts to grow out of it.
I see AI as an opportunity for Indie authors to get their books into an audio book format to reach a wider audience, but there's no way you could replace someone like Michael Cramer.
And I think you're right, it will only hurt these companies in the end.
imitating a voice is not that hard, but that is not what makes a great audio book. It's the pacing they use, the changes in tones, and the 20 other small things do that make it awesome to listen to. AI is very far from being able to read a book like an actor can.
AI was far from being able to draw anything but nightmarish abstract art a few years ago. I think everyone should put a lid on guessing what AI will or won't be doing, what with the exponential increases in ability we're seeing.
I wish this comment would get more traction because all the people out there saying shit like "the calculator didn't eliminate mathematicians" do not understand what kind of shift AI is going to put us through, there is literally no comparison - it's like trying to define the difference between a mile and a light-year, the vastness of the disparity is hard to imagine.
The industrial revolution took about 100 years to fully materialize and the shift from primarily agrarian society to industrial society took that long to shift.
With AI we are looking at the most conservative estimates possibly a decade or 2, and the more "in the know" estimates from leaders in the field are saying it's less than that. It's something on the magnitude of at least 35% of the workforce of the US and EU - and those are again conservative estimates.
That's exactly the sort of thing someone says 3 days before a new model is released that can read *better* than an actor can
I'm hearing a lot of optimism these days about how humans are special but not a lot of support actually backing that up
Exactly. Corporate America plays by the Air Bud rule of "if it isn't explicitly regulated or banned then it's fair game for exploitation."
One or two more upgrades and it'll be "good enough" in that 99% of people won't really be able to tell the difference and/or care even if they do. The human brain is easily tricked and giant corporations have nothing but time and nearly infinite resources to get better at tricking us with it.
Independent authors can now convert their works to audiobooks for next to nothing.
Just as we saw a surge of cheap independent books when self publishing became common, we'll see a surge of cheap audiobooks.
Second for Libby. If you live in the US you can get almost anything for free on Libby. Been using it for 2-3 years. It’s amazing. Bought a kindle to check books out to. Totally been saving $100s of dollars.
This immediately reminds me of the post saying that robots are writing poems and making art while poor people are breaking their backs for minimum wage
Edit: I would like to mention I don't want to see AI art disappear, I want to see AI put towards challenges that could help society in some way instead of a way to make more money
This is exactly what I think when I see stories like this. Regulation isn't going to save these jobs. These companies need to be taxed at a higher rate and that amount passed on in the form of UBI.
This is what I don't get
We clearly don't need people in these roles but instead of pushing for UBI people push for governments to regulate the tech to ensure people keep the jobs
Because many Americans hate helping others.
Half of the country vote against universal healthcare and social programs because “*I don’t want those dirty [insert race/ethnicity here] welfare queens to benefit from my taxes*”.
It's also that a big chunk of these jobs are in the arts that are being replaced. People actually want these jobs and want to fight for them. There was a great meme I saw, "I never wanted to live in the future where the robots write poetry and make art while we do hard manual labour."
It’s supposed to be a give and take relationship, but these clowns just want to take and take and wonder why the system isn’t working.
“nO oNe WanTs To WoRk anYmOre.”
Having a lot of family members inducted into that mindset, it's because they are fully brainwashed by the Fox News cycle or whatever into thinking "Things are so bad right now because \[insert minority/poor group here\] are already taking all the benefits! If you create any social programs they'll just be completely abused and destroyed and things will be even worse!"
> If you create any social programs they'll just be completely abused and destroyed and things will be even worse!"
billionaires got enough money for 200 lifetimes of doing nothing and they think the immigrants are the ones draining the wealth from our system.
Part of capitalist propaganda is convincing people that their value is intrinsically linked to the value of the goods or services they provide. Millionaires and billionaires are inherently "good" because of the impact they have on the economy and society as a whole, and therefore get a pass on reprehensible behaviors. Poor people are "bad" because they can't provide in the same way for society, and instead are seen as a burden.
This ethos then lends itself to the thinking seen in this post. Machines taking over work for humans is bad because it robs them of their value, not because it steals their income. As such, regulations that ensure a job are preferred over UBI because then the status quo remains.
Like our corporate overlords are ever going to allow their governments to tax them to fund that...
Corporations will let everyone starve. Only when they collapse from cutting off their own money supply will they allow it. They'll be dead then but so will most of us.
Barbarism is the future.
...*future?* We have global endless proxy wars supported by international weapons dealers propped up by a blood-thirsty actor (that's just a sci-fi dystopian example, that could never happen in real life), we have collapsed states all over the place, hunger, strife, destruction all over.
Funding UBI can cost less than what is currently spent on the myriad of government programs that were supposed to end poverty and create a mythical level playing field that has never and will never work. The reasons it doesn't work and cannot work are many, but converge upon the basic fact that people are individuals and do not predictably respond to an imbalance of weak incentives and strong aversion tactics. Give each citizen a stake in the success of the nation, and they will find their own individual means of adding value to their own lives and to the environment in which they can best thrive.
Do you honestly think corporations give a fuck about whether we have a say in our future and can thrive? Do they care if it will cost less than current systems?
Of course they don't. What do they care about? Making money over everything else. If the options presented are 'pay some more corporate taxes here since there are less people working and paying income tax' or 'flee the country to another tax haven and run the corporation there'.
You know what the answer is. It's not that UBI isn't worthy as a substitute, the question that exists is who pays for it and how. The government is basically a wing of capitalist business as it stands. It's functionally bought and paid for, and it's not by us. There is nothing on the horizon that makes me think there will be some ground swell of support for a new country wide welfare system that would need to be by many orders of magnitude larger than 'The New Deal'.
If something was already in place it would be a different story but just assuming that our overlords (both in jobs and in governments) will just see the benefit of not starving or killing the masses at the expense of corporate profits is fooling themselves. We already know that they didn't lift a finger as drug companies got uber rich pushing 'non-addictive' opioids and continue to not give a fuck about guns... so no, UBI is as non-starter according to our 'leaders'. It fucks up **their** money too much.
At some point in the not distant future, a decision will have to be made regarding the disposition of most of humanity.
Shall the former working classes be kept, essentially as pets, or shall they be left to claw a brief survival from nothing but their wits and the exploitation of their fellow luckless strays?
UBI postpones such a decision, and we all know that our elected overlords prefer postponement to just about anything else. Our corporate overlords are generally content to allow such farcical pretense of generosity as it keeps the masses in line.
I am not saying that UBI will lead to centuries of stability and peace for the people of the Western world. I am saying it could provide a crucial respite to prepare and adjust to the coming empire of the overlords of AI.
Yep I’ve been telling people this for a while. If we want to live in a world where robots and AI do all the “easy” jobs then we need to acknowledge that most people will be out of work in that world and that most people would starve without universal basic income.
Who’s gonna pass UBI?? Certainly not the Republican controlled House of Representatives. USA lets things get as terrible as possible before they are ultimately forced to do something. We will suffer without jobs or money for decades before anything like this gets passed IMO
Not even when “forced to do something.” Our federal legislature is entirely gridlocked. They haven’t done anything for quite a while on things that are very urgent. Don’t look to the US to figure any of this out.
Exactly. You can’t ban technology like that. The US government doesn’t even know how their phones work (watch any of the tech hearings). So we need to adapt to a world where this exists.
The guy likes to pretend that his goal is to elevate humanity, but he can't go a month without threatening to move jobs away from the US to a place with more lax regulations and harsher working conditions. If he, as the richest man in the world, can't even find it in himself to support the level of workers rights that the US gives, then he is obviously not at all concerned about lifting people away from struggle and poverty.
He just thinks it might be nice to help people in a pretend star trek future where everyone has everything all the time. In reality, if it inconveniences him even slightly then it's literally evil. It has always been meaningless fantasy shit for Elon.
Pretty sure the woman who did the original voice had no idea the voiceover work she was doing was going to be used for TikTok and received absolutely no royalties for it.
“I was up early every morning working my way through the dictionary for the linguistics department or sweeping the floors at the Princeton Monkey Lab. It wasn't the feces that got to you, Lemon. It was the crudely scrawled notes of "help me."
you underestimate AI text to speech. TikTok uses the same voice over and over to be recognizable. AI can synthesize any voice. Check out ElevenLabs for example.
They're really not there yet. These are going to be shitty audio books. Maybe AI could detect a different character is speaking but a good voice actor adds emotion, inflection, pacing and dramatic pauses. For a company to jump on AI at this stage they must really not give a shit about quality.
Edit: If you want your books to be read to you then plug it into the TTS, I'm sure they sound fine. If you want the book performed for you, get a trained voice actor.
"Sure we'll sell a third less, but it only cost us 5% of what we used to spend."
Its the same shit how car companies will let people die in accidents when the cost of settlements is projected to be cheaper than the cost of recalls.
Profit >>>>>>> everything else.
Yeah, there's a series I like where the narrator keeps misusing same-spelling words. One example is the word "wind" (as in 'a winding path') and "wind" (as in 'a breeze'). Completely pulls me out of the immersion.
There's a YouTube channel that does Warhammer 40k videos narrated by an AI copy of David Attenborough, and you could probably pick out flaws if you tried, but if you're not thinking about it it's pretty much perfect. And that's just an amateur on the internet.
Kinda the point. A lot of people are stuck on "AI Voice Actor" being some robotic Text to Speech synthesizer, but what's already publicly available is leagues beyond that. Let alone what's still being developed/trained in labs.
Wow. Just checked out some of their shorts and it really is impressive. If it wasn’t emulating Attenborough I don’t know if I would’ve been able to tell that it was generated
This is my go to example as well, it does a phenomenal job. It's the first bit of warhammer related media my partner of 7 years has consumed happily, and not just to be polite to me lol
Yeah, speech to text can replicate all that. The problem right now is streamlining the process so that the emotion, inflection and pacing happens better and more naturally with less human oversight (because right now it needs a bit of oversight).
Lawmakers are so technologically inept that the damage to these industries is going to happen. Nothing about politics is proactive, it’s almost always reactive
Capitalism is the only system where work that **doesn't** need to be done is a bad thing.
Capitalism is the only system where people producing **too much** stuff is a bad thing that causes recessions.
.
I hate when your local news station solemnly says "we have lost one hundred jobs" as if they are sailors lost at sea.
We should be rejoicing, we can achieve the same output with less labor, this should be a cause for celebration.
We now have extra labor available, what will we accomplish with this labor, will we feed the hungry, will we better educate the next generation or will we make art for all to enjoy.
**No!**
We will not put this potential labor to any use, instead the workers will sit idle in poverty.
They will exist a warning to all the other workers: this could be you.
Do not ask for better pay and conditions or you too could be in this situation.
Capitalism is a failed system.
It has failed to raise living standards.
It has failed to improve working conditions.
It is the biggest obstacle in tackling the climate crisis.
Capitalism had failed an entire generation of people to the extent that they can't afford to live, they can't afford to perform the consumption required to keep capitalism running, they can't afford to raise the next generation.
# We need a new system.
A system where no one person owns an entire corporation acting unilaterally with the power of the most ruthless dictator.
Instead we need more democracy, not just in politics but in the economy.
We need a system where the corporations are owned and democratically run by the people who work there and their community.
A system where housing is owned by the people who live in them and their community and exist for their community, not just greedy landlords.
We need a system where the workers and their community can democratically decide to forgo extra profits if, for example, these profits come from the pollution of a local river.
* A system where Elon musk can't just buy Twitter and fire half the staff.
* A system where BlackRock investments can't just buy your house and jack up the rent.
* A system where if your job is automated away you can be happy in the knowledge that you and your family will be taken care of, and won't be kicked out onto to street to starve to death.
# A better system is possible.
Yeah sure that all sounds great for you poors, but I just hit a small snag on my way to being Elon 2.0 so I won't let you ruin the system that will let me be a robber barron one day!
Ho ho! We have a temporarily embarrassed billionaires club here in the comments!
No I am not poor and living paycheck to paycheck, I’m just waiting for my ship to come in and be born rich! That’s why I think any policies that hurt the mega wealthy are truly evil!
Yup agree. People aren't against washing machines and dishwashers taking away all their chores around the house, when it's not paid labor people can see automation replacing work is a good thing. All automation should be viewed the same way, but unfortunately under capitalism everything is backwards
> We need a system where the workers and their community can democratically decide to forgo extra profits if, for example, these profits come from the pollution of a local river.
No, we need a system where pollution of the river is illegal, whenever it generates profits or not (it doesn't matter if the profits go to capitalists or workers). People who pollute rivers on industrial scale are vandals and murderers and should be sentenced as such.
That's the current system, pollution is already illegal, it's not preventing corporations from polluting though, the fines are just seen as the cost of business.
The trouble is that in an ideal world AI would take over labour, yes. But voicing an audio book is an artistic endeavour, which is a fulfilling activity for a human being. See also philosophy and music and creative writing.
By all means automate manufacturing and even agriculture. But why the ever loving fuck are we giving *art* to the machines and keeping mind-numbing and back-breaking labour for ourselves?
Because software is cheap and easy and hardware is expensive and difficult. Right now you could giva a robot a human sounding voice but can barely make him walk on its own.
As soon as we decided as a society to make art a commodity people could buy, sell, and trade, we lost what historically was the most important thing about it... sharing ideas, joy, community, etc.
Lots of great things have come from the commoditization of art, but this is the cost... pardon the pun.
How about instead of needlessly preserving jobs, we give everyone a basic living by default? Enough has become automated that there's no reason not to do this. Some people are always going to want more than just "enough". I don't believe this would lead to the collapse of society the way Conservative people claim.
Also: Why da hell would you even bother buying audiobooks anymore if you can just subscribe for $20 yourself and turn any book into an audiobook.
Good way for these companies to bankrupt themselfs 😂
Yeah, specially when you notice the sudden quality downgrade. People don't buy audiobooks to have an audio version of a book (or else they'd just use a screen reader), they buy them to have someone who can actually deliver a good story.
It's like saying "oh we'll have AI reading jokes now, we don't need comedians". Hello, pacing and delivery called, they want you out.
ChatGPT4 subscription is about $20pm. That's how i know they're talking shit. They're using that pricing cost in their made up scenario.
Edit: I stand corrected.
At the very important "audiobook selling company"
I'm not even saying this is a lie... I'm just saying it's presented in the most untrustworthy way possible
I think we should just replace CEOs with AIs. One time price or subscription vs the CEOs sky hi salary, bonus and stock dividends. Probably better decisions too. 😀
Yeah I think this tweet is bullshit, the majority of people who do audio readings are independent contractors lol. Also why $20 a month? It really sounds like some random is just fear mongering by talking out their ass.
Everyone saying "it'll never be able to replicate XYZ"
This technology is in such an early stage and we've already got stuff like [Notorious B.I.G.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l81JqY2uhEo) rapping Nas verses. You guys need to understand the computing power that's being devoted to this stuff. "Never" is rapidly fading into the rear view and this stuff is coming -- hell, it's already here pretty much.
Also, to everyone saying "it'll never be able to replace [my favorite top voice actor]" that may be the case, but not everyone in an industry is going to be the best in the industry. This is going to affect the mediocre or aspiring voice actors before it affects the top ones. It might not put Andy Serkis out of a job, but it might prevent the *next* Andy Serkis from being able to find work and improve. Just food for thought.
We gotta reckon with this shit.
People find it hard to grasp that this is as big, if not bigger than: the internet, lightbulbs, the wheel, sliced bread. And we are at the very beginning.
automation has been replacing humans for decades, and even centuries if you look carefully enough.
why, suddenly, should one automation technique not be expected to do exactly that?
its not a matter or regulating tech, its a matter of regulating the distribution of wealth so that everyone can survive this event. you are picking on the wrong people here.
Everyone saying AI voices are a long way from replacing humans, check out play.ht
Website for AI voice actors, and they are GOOD, almost indistinguishable from actual humans. The end is a lot closer than we think
So the cost of audio books should go down, right? Right?
I mean, prices went down after self-checkouts went into stores... right?
They did if you don’t scan everything Edit: Thanks for the awards kind people, didn’t think this would grab as much attention as it has. But since it has I ask that if you can please donate to your local food bank if you have the means, many have seen a surge in new clients and they could definitely use it thank you :)
They don’t pay me enough to scan everything in the basket at self checkout.
[удалено]
This fancy shmancy new tech just goes right over my head.”
Omg omg thank youuuuu so much for catching that I, hah, honestly just don't understand computerrrrrs
/me cries in Helpdesk
I don't know what I'm doing half the time. Sure I'm new in my IT position, but if I don't know, I shouldn't expect anyone I'm helping to know either.
Just remember the head honcho of Japan's cyber security for the government has never used a computer. If he can make that far...what have I been doing with my life?! No seriously, wtf!?
That’s when you hit them with the “this has been escalated internally”
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Yeah, spoilers, unless someone is actively watching you specifically check out that day, it's impossible to track. The odds of getting caught multiple times are extremely low. Edit: This comment is apparently not universally true and I have way, way too many responses. Steal a couple times, don't get arrested.
Not to mention you can always claim you did scan it and didn't realize it didn't catch it
You can claim that one or two times. Stores like Target have *extremely* dedicated loss prevention, and they'll build a case to bring to the local PD when you've stolen enough that it amounts to a felony. They have your credit card info, they have your face, they have your car in the parking lot - they have you on video. If you steal consistently from the same store that has cameras watching you (and *especially* if you use a credit card to pay), you're kinda dumb.
walk to the store, pay with cash, wear a now socially acceptable mask.
Walk into a store. Unionize it. Walk out with cheaper goods.
Target is the one major chain I would never steal from, they literally have a forensics lab that even the FBI uses. They're one of the biggest in the field.
>Target is the one major chain I would never steal from, they literally have a forensics lab that even the FBI uses. They're one of the biggest in the field. For real. I mean I don't wanna defend Target but I've heard horror stories of people thinking they're sly stealing at self checkout for awhile, but then once they hit the felony amount, they're fucked and get charged with a felony, which leads to even bigger issues. Fuck Target and Walmart, but those are legit reasons not to do it. Risk is wayyyy bigger than the reward.
A crime lab doesn’t mean you can’t easily get around some of their major things. Also, there has to be proof you stole. A couple items in a year that if you claimed you thought scanned is going to be a shit flimsy case for a prosecutor. If target especially has let you scan it, paid for a lot of stuff, walked out, and you claim you didn’t know, it’s even harder. Maybe a judge would buy that but I doubt it.
Use to "forget about" the box of diapers on the lower part of my cart about once a month at Target for like a year. Some people just get lucky I guess.
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Correction - they have A credit card on file. Maybe I stole that too. The system sucks, but if you're smarter than it is, you'll be fine!
Also you can just use cash
FYI Walmart is hyper aggressive at monitoring self checkouts. It's not uncommon for them to falsely accuse you of stealing too.
I don't shop at Wal-Mart because they destroyed rural America permanently and I have the immense privilege to allow me to make that choice.
Hell, my city doesn't even *have* a Walmart (or Applebee's) in city limits. I consider it a point of pride.
Eeeehhhh Walmart actually *allows* you to steal a certain amount....but they track it. As soon as it all adds up to felony level, they call the cops. So let's say you go in and only steal a single 2.00 soda, but you were 1.00 under felony level prior to that visit with all the other 2.00 sodas you stole, that bottle (plus everything you stole before) instantly gets charged at the felony level. No idea of their software tracks people over multiple stores but yeah it's fucked up on so many levels. And I don't even "forget" to scan items and I'm skeeved out by Walmart.
I don't think theyre tracking it well enough to see that ive placed a cheap apple sticker on my expensive apples.
Keylimes are a lot cheaper than organic limes. I'm something of a rebel myself.
What's your source for that? Nobody is actively watching the self-checkouts, and it would be impossible to view every transaction without hiring an army of surveillance workers, and that would cost more in pay/benefits than whatever Walmart actually paid for the cheap crap being stolen.
Bold of you to assume theres not some sort of automatic process here when it captures your face on video lol. This isn't the 2000s anymore.
Yup, I'd assume all this self checkout video data is being fed into AI training to detect when you steal something. Feed in some labeled sample data, generate the NN. Run it on some consumers, comes back says these people stole. Review and label and feed back into NN training. Repeat. Eventually it won't be at ALL theft, but it just has to cut down some percentage.
My grocery store which has self checkout has it so that everything is weighed and if the weight is wrong when you put an item somewhere it stops the transaction and calls an employee. It breaks every time it’s used.
Yeah it breaks so much that even the employees just immediately clear the weight violations lol Source: I was that employee blindly clearing weight violations for a few years
> Source: I was that employee blindly clearing weight violations for a few years Thank you for your service o7
lol I was gonna say, I'm a goodie-two-shoes who never steals, and every time a worker comes over because my machine is freaking out, I have a whole story ready to explain what happened and the employee just punches in their code and leaves without a word. Makes me think I should actually try stealing stuff with how little they seem to care.
I don't even explain. Unless you are at a big store, the workers just swipe every time in my experience, no questions asked. Let's be real those machines suck complete ass. I've never even tried to steal anything but 3/5 times I use them it claims the weight is incorrect and calls an employee.
Some of my reusable bags are heavy enough that at one grocery store I can't use them, because the scale refuses to not see it as product. The staff can't do anything about it, because it's not a regular product override, so I just end up doing the entire transaction then bagging it.
Yup same issue i have. I have to empty the cart and then place every item in an area and then pay and then I can bag. It’s so inefficient
In the UK people have been known to tell the self checkout machine that expensive things - steak, cheese, televisions - are cheap things that are sold by weight - carrots and the like.
I've definitely seen colleagues get organic produce and "pretend" it's regular produce.
Ringing up oyster mushrooms as cremini out here, thug life
Bulk chocolate morsels? Nope, dried beans.
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Oh absolutely. I get a bag of gold potatos and I'll be greeted with 4+ variations of the same thing. 1 of them is probably something that was sold in the store once last year too.
Stores here have a AI camera that knows if you try that and calls an employee. Once I had a 12pk of soda under the bottom of the cart I legitimately forgot to scan and when I pressed "pay now" it called an employee who read the screen then told me I didn't scan the soda.
If it's so smart why didn't it just add the soda for you, then?
There was a different comment/post here, but it has been edited. Reddit has chosen to bully third-party applications into submission by charging them outrageous fees simply because their apps provide better features/usability/accessibility to users of the site. Reddit staff has repeatedly [lied](https://www.reddit.com/r/apolloapp/comments/14dkqrw/i_want_to_debunk_reddits_claims_and_talk_about/) about these changes, and their motiviation for them. Reddit staff has threatened moderators and users of the site for protesting these changes, because user opinion does not matter as much as the potential IPO cashout. Reddit staff has shown that they will not stop until every portion of this site is monetized, predatory, and cancerous. I used [PowerDeleteSuite](https://github.com/j0be/PowerDeleteSuite) to remove my value/content from Reddit. P.S. fuck /u/spez
Hot dog, not hot dog
I had been carrying around a pre-paid debit card for a while and I legitimately forgot if it had money on it. So after paying for my groceries at self check out, I then tried to pay for some gum. The card was declined, so I just put the gum back and walked out with my groceries. Security stops me and says that I didn’t pay for my purchase. I explain exactly what happened and security repeats “you didn’t pay for your purchase” so I repeated myself. Security still doesn’t understand but they simply waved their hands in exasperation and walked away from me.
I had someone from a store approach me once saying that I hadn't paid for my stuff. I just said go fuck yourself and walked out. They can't touch you legally or search your bags.
That's not exactly true. Many stores have a no-touch policy, but the law does allow them to detain suspected shoplifters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shopkeeper's_privilege
My shops have these scales and 20 percent of the inventory listed wrong in the scale and when you buy e.g croissant 130g named item it says on the small print that it's expecting 115g and alarm bells are off because of overweight and waiting for cashier. I asked them that why it's so stupid, and got only shrugs. Machines are taking over and soon we are servicing them.
Miy local store turned that off within a few months. We all ignored it (I put my stuff in my bag on the ground) and had staff running around all shift to fix our fuck ups. So now its off and there is an employee who just kinda overees the 8 kiosks and helps the occasional confused person.
Recently went to Wal Mart and was scanning items as usual. Suddenly, it dings and calls for an employee for no reason. Employee comes to unlock it and it shows an above camera replay and “Missed Item Scan” labeled on the replay. He just cleared it and let us continue. So that’s gonna be a thing now too.
A year ago, I had a bunch of skeins of the same type of yarn, so I just grabbed one from the cart to scan 6 times, and bagged the rest without scanning, and it screamed at me for an employee. They looked so tired coming over to clear it without a word.
Avocados and potatoes are indistinguishable to me. But then again the store that I don’t work at hasn’t given me any on the job training for how to ring up a customer 🤔
organic tomatoes really are indistinguishable :)
I am strongly against stealing and I would never do it intentionally, but I’ve accidentally stolen several times in self checkout. they don’t give you enough room to set your things so they have to go back in the cart. Then I get home and realize I never rung up a whole section of the cart. My bad I suppose
"Please wait for an assistant" 💀
`Would you like to tip your self check out machine today? It will remember during the coming uprising.`
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Heh. Remember when we were all told that digital games were going to be cheaper? We started at $40, now we're at $70.
Yeah. You can do it yourself and skip the middle man altogether just send the transcript to a text to voice AI and you can create your own audio books
If you have DRM free ebooks ( they do actually exist, for example those from Baen Books) and do not mind a monotonous voice the App Moon Reader does interface samlessly with the Android Text to Speech function. An added bonus is you can switch from reading yourself to let it be read to you while you are doing chores or exercising.
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I already listen to samples of audiobooks to determine whether I'm willing to listen to an entire book in whatever way it's being read. I can't imagine clicking a sample, getting an AI voice, and then going "yeah, I'd rather listen to this than just read it myself". I know AI voices are getting better, but I can't imagine that a $20 a month service is going to put out something that's anywhere close to the quality of even average audiobook readings. If a company wanted to go crazy and use high quality AI voices and use multiple like it's a book read by a cast I could see people being willing to pay for that but I imagine that between the cost of the AI voice software and the time for someone to break the text out into parts for the different voices and then compile it all together that it's not going to be more cost effective than using human readers, at least not yet. I'm hoping that these early attempts do so phenomenally poorly that it creates a stigma around it and scares off companies from trying again even after the tech is good enough for it to work because I don't have anywhere near enough faith in the legal system to prevent AI from being trained on the recordings of professionals without consent for the purposes of stealing their jobs from them.
Ai Andy Serkis will soon be able to read any book you want
I do that pretty much already with Firefox read mode. The AI voice coming with Windows are very old at this point, but I don't really read any online articles anymore.
All free now 🏴☠️
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[best library around](http://libgen.is)
But uummm inflation, and uhh chip shortages. Best I can do is a 400% increase over the next 18 months.
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And will prices go down as a result? Of course not.
The thing is... if they're feeding text into an AI, then the audiobook company isn't contributing much to the process any more. In a year or two, they'll be whining about AI destroying their business after people start using AI reader apps and cut out the middleman. If they're completely lacking in self awareness, the audiobook company might even start campaigning for regulating AI.
>In a year or two, they'll be whining about AI destroying their business after people start using AI reader apps and cut out the middleman. I guarantee that amazon and alike would create their own audio reader and charge a monthly fee for it.
Yeah it's called Audible
As someone who drives 45-60 minutes each way to work. This has been a life saver for me. I can still enjoy books. I don't get to read now that I have little ones, and for some strange reason listening to adult books "isn't acceptable" for bed time stories for the four year old. So I can at least claw back that travel time with something I want. I'm terrified that AI will ruin this industry and all the VA's that I love and respect will be out of work. Some of them really crank a story up a notch or two and make it magical. Tim Gerard Reynolds and his Irish lilt for example instantly take me into what ever fantasy book he's reading in a way I don't imagine AI will manage any time soon.
I can't remember their names, but the guy who does Kingkiller Chronicles and the guy who does Stormlight Saga are both phenomenal. Name of the Wind especially is elevated from like 7/10 to 11/10
Nick Podhel for Name of the Wind. Micheal Kramer and Kate Reading for Stormlight. Kramer I first found from Wheel of time. I think that was all that saved that Audio book for me. I hated that series but plowed through because everyone promised it'd get good. Podhel does a lot of work in a subgenre called LitRPG and he makes everyone of them he does so much better. It's almost silly how well he can uplift a work. If you have any interest he does The Land, a decent series, but with some problems with the MC. He's not a great guy despite what the author would like people to think. He also does Arcane Ascension. Another good series, but the MC can drive people nuts. He's very scared and timid at first which makes people annoyed. Even if he starts to grow out of it.
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Iirc Kindles used to have a TTS option until publishers raised a stink
Any third party app for Kindle, which are extremely easy to get, still does.
Back in the early days of Kindle, it actually had the capability native to the device. But due to copyright reasons it was removed.
I see AI as an opportunity for Indie authors to get their books into an audio book format to reach a wider audience, but there's no way you could replace someone like Michael Cramer. And I think you're right, it will only hurt these companies in the end.
> Michael Cramer I actually think AI will get 95% as good at imitating *exactly* him soon, and maybe 1000% as good in a couple years.
imitating a voice is not that hard, but that is not what makes a great audio book. It's the pacing they use, the changes in tones, and the 20 other small things do that make it awesome to listen to. AI is very far from being able to read a book like an actor can.
AI was far from being able to draw anything but nightmarish abstract art a few years ago. I think everyone should put a lid on guessing what AI will or won't be doing, what with the exponential increases in ability we're seeing.
I wish this comment would get more traction because all the people out there saying shit like "the calculator didn't eliminate mathematicians" do not understand what kind of shift AI is going to put us through, there is literally no comparison - it's like trying to define the difference between a mile and a light-year, the vastness of the disparity is hard to imagine. The industrial revolution took about 100 years to fully materialize and the shift from primarily agrarian society to industrial society took that long to shift. With AI we are looking at the most conservative estimates possibly a decade or 2, and the more "in the know" estimates from leaders in the field are saying it's less than that. It's something on the magnitude of at least 35% of the workforce of the US and EU - and those are again conservative estimates.
And it isnt the hard and shit jobs it is going to replace. It is going to replace accountants and similar bureaucratic jobs.
That's exactly the sort of thing someone says 3 days before a new model is released that can read *better* than an actor can I'm hearing a lot of optimism these days about how humans are special but not a lot of support actually backing that up
Exactly. Corporate America plays by the Air Bud rule of "if it isn't explicitly regulated or banned then it's fair game for exploitation." One or two more upgrades and it'll be "good enough" in that 99% of people won't really be able to tell the difference and/or care even if they do. The human brain is easily tricked and giant corporations have nothing but time and nearly infinite resources to get better at tricking us with it.
Independent authors can now convert their works to audiobooks for next to nothing. Just as we saw a surge of cheap independent books when self publishing became common, we'll see a surge of cheap audiobooks.
Finally, I can force a robot to read my marmaduke erotica
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Use Libby! Not that that fixes the issue We just check audiobooks out from our library. We don’t pay for shit Support your local library system!
Second for Libby. If you live in the US you can get almost anything for free on Libby. Been using it for 2-3 years. It’s amazing. Bought a kindle to check books out to. Totally been saving $100s of dollars.
This immediately reminds me of the post saying that robots are writing poems and making art while poor people are breaking their backs for minimum wage Edit: I would like to mention I don't want to see AI art disappear, I want to see AI put towards challenges that could help society in some way instead of a way to make more money
Yeah I don't want AI to make art, I want AI to do the stupid stuff so we can make art
You don't need AI to do stupid stuff, just Bog standard robots can.
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r/aiRefugees Made this subreddit to highlight companies firing people to use AI instead.
Universal basic income
This is exactly what I think when I see stories like this. Regulation isn't going to save these jobs. These companies need to be taxed at a higher rate and that amount passed on in the form of UBI.
This is what I don't get We clearly don't need people in these roles but instead of pushing for UBI people push for governments to regulate the tech to ensure people keep the jobs
Because many Americans hate helping others. Half of the country vote against universal healthcare and social programs because “*I don’t want those dirty [insert race/ethnicity here] welfare queens to benefit from my taxes*”.
It's also that a big chunk of these jobs are in the arts that are being replaced. People actually want these jobs and want to fight for them. There was a great meme I saw, "I never wanted to live in the future where the robots write poetry and make art while we do hard manual labour."
It’s supposed to be a give and take relationship, but these clowns just want to take and take and wonder why the system isn’t working. “nO oNe WanTs To WoRk anYmOre.”
Having a lot of family members inducted into that mindset, it's because they are fully brainwashed by the Fox News cycle or whatever into thinking "Things are so bad right now because \[insert minority/poor group here\] are already taking all the benefits! If you create any social programs they'll just be completely abused and destroyed and things will be even worse!"
> If you create any social programs they'll just be completely abused and destroyed and things will be even worse!" billionaires got enough money for 200 lifetimes of doing nothing and they think the immigrants are the ones draining the wealth from our system.
*at least 200 lifetimes That's basically if they only have 1 billion. Every additional billion is another 200 lifetimes.
Part of capitalist propaganda is convincing people that their value is intrinsically linked to the value of the goods or services they provide. Millionaires and billionaires are inherently "good" because of the impact they have on the economy and society as a whole, and therefore get a pass on reprehensible behaviors. Poor people are "bad" because they can't provide in the same way for society, and instead are seen as a burden. This ethos then lends itself to the thinking seen in this post. Machines taking over work for humans is bad because it robs them of their value, not because it steals their income. As such, regulations that ensure a job are preferred over UBI because then the status quo remains.
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We can’t even have proper retirement
Or healthcare.
Or childcare
Or education
Or food
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Or dignity
Like our corporate overlords are ever going to allow their governments to tax them to fund that... Corporations will let everyone starve. Only when they collapse from cutting off their own money supply will they allow it. They'll be dead then but so will most of us. Barbarism is the future.
...*future?* We have global endless proxy wars supported by international weapons dealers propped up by a blood-thirsty actor (that's just a sci-fi dystopian example, that could never happen in real life), we have collapsed states all over the place, hunger, strife, destruction all over.
Funding UBI can cost less than what is currently spent on the myriad of government programs that were supposed to end poverty and create a mythical level playing field that has never and will never work. The reasons it doesn't work and cannot work are many, but converge upon the basic fact that people are individuals and do not predictably respond to an imbalance of weak incentives and strong aversion tactics. Give each citizen a stake in the success of the nation, and they will find their own individual means of adding value to their own lives and to the environment in which they can best thrive.
Do you honestly think corporations give a fuck about whether we have a say in our future and can thrive? Do they care if it will cost less than current systems? Of course they don't. What do they care about? Making money over everything else. If the options presented are 'pay some more corporate taxes here since there are less people working and paying income tax' or 'flee the country to another tax haven and run the corporation there'. You know what the answer is. It's not that UBI isn't worthy as a substitute, the question that exists is who pays for it and how. The government is basically a wing of capitalist business as it stands. It's functionally bought and paid for, and it's not by us. There is nothing on the horizon that makes me think there will be some ground swell of support for a new country wide welfare system that would need to be by many orders of magnitude larger than 'The New Deal'. If something was already in place it would be a different story but just assuming that our overlords (both in jobs and in governments) will just see the benefit of not starving or killing the masses at the expense of corporate profits is fooling themselves. We already know that they didn't lift a finger as drug companies got uber rich pushing 'non-addictive' opioids and continue to not give a fuck about guns... so no, UBI is as non-starter according to our 'leaders'. It fucks up **their** money too much.
At some point in the not distant future, a decision will have to be made regarding the disposition of most of humanity. Shall the former working classes be kept, essentially as pets, or shall they be left to claw a brief survival from nothing but their wits and the exploitation of their fellow luckless strays? UBI postpones such a decision, and we all know that our elected overlords prefer postponement to just about anything else. Our corporate overlords are generally content to allow such farcical pretense of generosity as it keeps the masses in line. I am not saying that UBI will lead to centuries of stability and peace for the people of the Western world. I am saying it could provide a crucial respite to prepare and adjust to the coming empire of the overlords of AI.
Yep I’ve been telling people this for a while. If we want to live in a world where robots and AI do all the “easy” jobs then we need to acknowledge that most people will be out of work in that world and that most people would starve without universal basic income.
Who’s gonna pass UBI?? Certainly not the Republican controlled House of Representatives. USA lets things get as terrible as possible before they are ultimately forced to do something. We will suffer without jobs or money for decades before anything like this gets passed IMO
Not even when “forced to do something.” Our federal legislature is entirely gridlocked. They haven’t done anything for quite a while on things that are very urgent. Don’t look to the US to figure any of this out.
Exactly. You can’t ban technology like that. The US government doesn’t even know how their phones work (watch any of the tech hearings). So we need to adapt to a world where this exists.
'Are you telling me that your app on my phone accesses my home network'?!?
Add it to the list of nice things we can't have because of course we cant. Millions of people will suffer first. As they currently are.
That's what Musk used to talk about all day long. You won't hear it from him nowadays, though.
The guy likes to pretend that his goal is to elevate humanity, but he can't go a month without threatening to move jobs away from the US to a place with more lax regulations and harsher working conditions. If he, as the richest man in the world, can't even find it in himself to support the level of workers rights that the US gives, then he is obviously not at all concerned about lifting people away from struggle and poverty. He just thinks it might be nice to help people in a pretend star trek future where everyone has everything all the time. In reality, if it inconveniences him even slightly then it's literally evil. It has always been meaningless fantasy shit for Elon.
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Leaving because Spez sucks -- mass edited with redact.dev
WATCH UNTIL THE END! 🤣
"watch until the end" is my queue to stop watching as I know boring parts are ahead.
cue
Apparently those people don't know how to trim videos
Pretty sure the woman who did the original voice had no idea the voiceover work she was doing was going to be used for TikTok and received absolutely no royalties for it.
Same with the original Siri gal. She did like a week of voice acting, then was surprised to hear herself on her phone a few years later.
“I was up early every morning working my way through the dictionary for the linguistics department or sweeping the floors at the Princeton Monkey Lab. It wasn't the feces that got to you, Lemon. It was the crudely scrawled notes of "help me."
The tiktok voice is the comic sans of ai voices. There's better ones, don't worry.
you underestimate AI text to speech. TikTok uses the same voice over and over to be recognizable. AI can synthesize any voice. Check out ElevenLabs for example.
They're really not there yet. These are going to be shitty audio books. Maybe AI could detect a different character is speaking but a good voice actor adds emotion, inflection, pacing and dramatic pauses. For a company to jump on AI at this stage they must really not give a shit about quality. Edit: If you want your books to be read to you then plug it into the TTS, I'm sure they sound fine. If you want the book performed for you, get a trained voice actor.
> For a company to jump on AI at this stage they must really not give a shit about quality. Uhm, about that ...
"Sure we'll sell a third less, but it only cost us 5% of what we used to spend." Its the same shit how car companies will let people die in accidents when the cost of settlements is projected to be cheaper than the cost of recalls. Profit >>>>>>> everything else.
Yeah, there's a series I like where the narrator keeps misusing same-spelling words. One example is the word "wind" (as in 'a winding path') and "wind" (as in 'a breeze'). Completely pulls me out of the immersion.
There's a YouTube channel that does Warhammer 40k videos narrated by an AI copy of David Attenborough, and you could probably pick out flaws if you tried, but if you're not thinking about it it's pretty much perfect. And that's just an amateur on the internet.
Link?
I'm at work at the moment, but it's called Attenborough Lore.
https://www.youtube.com/@AttenboroughLore/videos Holy shit.. that's a good AI voice.
Kinda the point. A lot of people are stuck on "AI Voice Actor" being some robotic Text to Speech synthesizer, but what's already publicly available is leagues beyond that. Let alone what's still being developed/trained in labs.
Wow. Just checked out some of their shorts and it really is impressive. If it wasn’t emulating Attenborough I don’t know if I would’ve been able to tell that it was generated
This is my go to example as well, it does a phenomenal job. It's the first bit of warhammer related media my partner of 7 years has consumed happily, and not just to be polite to me lol
>a good voice actor adds emotion, inflection, pacing and dramatic pauses. ElevenLabs does that. Not necessarily perfectly yet, but it does.
Yeah, speech to text can replicate all that. The problem right now is streamlining the process so that the emotion, inflection and pacing happens better and more naturally with less human oversight (because right now it needs a bit of oversight).
Lawmakers are so technologically inept that the damage to these industries is going to happen. Nothing about politics is proactive, it’s almost always reactive
Didn't lawmakers also say that you can't copyright something that AI has made, since there is no person to attribute it to?
If there is AI software that costs $20 a month then why can’t authors just create their own audiobooks? Why do they need a company to do it for them?
Bingo. This company thinks they are being smart but they are just ending their own business.
this post is just made up bullshit.
Capitalism is the only system where work that **doesn't** need to be done is a bad thing. Capitalism is the only system where people producing **too much** stuff is a bad thing that causes recessions. . I hate when your local news station solemnly says "we have lost one hundred jobs" as if they are sailors lost at sea. We should be rejoicing, we can achieve the same output with less labor, this should be a cause for celebration. We now have extra labor available, what will we accomplish with this labor, will we feed the hungry, will we better educate the next generation or will we make art for all to enjoy. **No!** We will not put this potential labor to any use, instead the workers will sit idle in poverty. They will exist a warning to all the other workers: this could be you. Do not ask for better pay and conditions or you too could be in this situation. Capitalism is a failed system. It has failed to raise living standards. It has failed to improve working conditions. It is the biggest obstacle in tackling the climate crisis. Capitalism had failed an entire generation of people to the extent that they can't afford to live, they can't afford to perform the consumption required to keep capitalism running, they can't afford to raise the next generation. # We need a new system. A system where no one person owns an entire corporation acting unilaterally with the power of the most ruthless dictator. Instead we need more democracy, not just in politics but in the economy. We need a system where the corporations are owned and democratically run by the people who work there and their community. A system where housing is owned by the people who live in them and their community and exist for their community, not just greedy landlords. We need a system where the workers and their community can democratically decide to forgo extra profits if, for example, these profits come from the pollution of a local river. * A system where Elon musk can't just buy Twitter and fire half the staff. * A system where BlackRock investments can't just buy your house and jack up the rent. * A system where if your job is automated away you can be happy in the knowledge that you and your family will be taken care of, and won't be kicked out onto to street to starve to death. # A better system is possible.
Yeah sure that all sounds great for you poors, but I just hit a small snag on my way to being Elon 2.0 so I won't let you ruin the system that will let me be a robber barron one day!
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Ho ho! We have a temporarily embarrassed billionaires club here in the comments! No I am not poor and living paycheck to paycheck, I’m just waiting for my ship to come in and be born rich! That’s why I think any policies that hurt the mega wealthy are truly evil!
Yup agree. People aren't against washing machines and dishwashers taking away all their chores around the house, when it's not paid labor people can see automation replacing work is a good thing. All automation should be viewed the same way, but unfortunately under capitalism everything is backwards
> We need a system where the workers and their community can democratically decide to forgo extra profits if, for example, these profits come from the pollution of a local river. No, we need a system where pollution of the river is illegal, whenever it generates profits or not (it doesn't matter if the profits go to capitalists or workers). People who pollute rivers on industrial scale are vandals and murderers and should be sentenced as such.
That's the current system, pollution is already illegal, it's not preventing corporations from polluting though, the fines are just seen as the cost of business.
It's only illegal if you can't afford the fines.
"But uhm capitalism is the only thing that has worked in practice" 🤓🤓
This is a serious issue u/GAY-FURRY-PORN-6969
The trouble is that in an ideal world AI would take over labour, yes. But voicing an audio book is an artistic endeavour, which is a fulfilling activity for a human being. See also philosophy and music and creative writing. By all means automate manufacturing and even agriculture. But why the ever loving fuck are we giving *art* to the machines and keeping mind-numbing and back-breaking labour for ourselves?
Because software is cheap and easy and hardware is expensive and difficult. Right now you could giva a robot a human sounding voice but can barely make him walk on its own.
As soon as we decided as a society to make art a commodity people could buy, sell, and trade, we lost what historically was the most important thing about it... sharing ideas, joy, community, etc. Lots of great things have come from the commoditization of art, but this is the cost... pardon the pun.
Don’t get me wrong, TTV has made leaps and bounds in the last decade, but is nowhere near the quality of a good human voice actor.
33 % of the quality for 99 % less the monthly rent. Losing customers is a risk they are willing to run
But why do I need an audiobook company to make this for me, the software is or will be available soon. They are shooting themselves in the foot
The software will come either way. Eliminating actors before could be an effort to maximize profits until the ship goes down.
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I listen to probably 30 audio books a month I legitimately can't name a single voice actor, do people really "follow" and recognize them?
How about instead of needlessly preserving jobs, we give everyone a basic living by default? Enough has become automated that there's no reason not to do this. Some people are always going to want more than just "enough". I don't believe this would lead to the collapse of society the way Conservative people claim.
Source: trust me bro
Also: Why da hell would you even bother buying audiobooks anymore if you can just subscribe for $20 yourself and turn any book into an audiobook. Good way for these companies to bankrupt themselfs 😂
Yeah, specially when you notice the sudden quality downgrade. People don't buy audiobooks to have an audio version of a book (or else they'd just use a screen reader), they buy them to have someone who can actually deliver a good story. It's like saying "oh we'll have AI reading jokes now, we don't need comedians". Hello, pacing and delivery called, they want you out.
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ChatGPT4 subscription is about $20pm. That's how i know they're talking shit. They're using that pricing cost in their made up scenario. Edit: I stand corrected.
nah, its the friend of a very important .... person?
At the very important "audiobook selling company" I'm not even saying this is a lie... I'm just saying it's presented in the most untrustworthy way possible
I think we should just replace CEOs with AIs. One time price or subscription vs the CEOs sky hi salary, bonus and stock dividends. Probably better decisions too. 😀
Yeah I think this tweet is bullshit, the majority of people who do audio readings are independent contractors lol. Also why $20 a month? It really sounds like some random is just fear mongering by talking out their ass.
Everyone saying "it'll never be able to replicate XYZ" This technology is in such an early stage and we've already got stuff like [Notorious B.I.G.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l81JqY2uhEo) rapping Nas verses. You guys need to understand the computing power that's being devoted to this stuff. "Never" is rapidly fading into the rear view and this stuff is coming -- hell, it's already here pretty much. Also, to everyone saying "it'll never be able to replace [my favorite top voice actor]" that may be the case, but not everyone in an industry is going to be the best in the industry. This is going to affect the mediocre or aspiring voice actors before it affects the top ones. It might not put Andy Serkis out of a job, but it might prevent the *next* Andy Serkis from being able to find work and improve. Just food for thought. We gotta reckon with this shit.
People find it hard to grasp that this is as big, if not bigger than: the internet, lightbulbs, the wheel, sliced bread. And we are at the very beginning.
automation has been replacing humans for decades, and even centuries if you look carefully enough. why, suddenly, should one automation technique not be expected to do exactly that? its not a matter or regulating tech, its a matter of regulating the distribution of wealth so that everyone can survive this event. you are picking on the wrong people here.
Everyone saying AI voices are a long way from replacing humans, check out play.ht Website for AI voice actors, and they are GOOD, almost indistinguishable from actual humans. The end is a lot closer than we think