I promise this comment will circle back to Elevenlabs:
When my cat died after a few months of cancer treatment, the staff of the animal hospital sent me a condolence card with comments by staff members.
On the one hand, this was a very touching, very human thing to do. On the other hand, this was presumably a work assignment that had to be passed around and completed for staff members to meet their employer's goals, while juggling the other medical and administrative duties at the animal hospital.
So whether this was a good thing or bad thing might depend on how taxing you view it from the staff member's POV.
With the audio book market: it's kind of a similar dichotomy. There's undoubtedly more human touch in the style an audio book is read by an actual human. (Though if that human touch is "stuttering awkwardly because I'm very self aware as I read, you probably wouldn't want to buy my audio book...)
However, for a human to make an audio book, you are asking someone to sit in a room for many hours, being careful not to stutter as they work through a book. If there's joy in that, maybe you see Elevenlabs as an evil company eliminating the human touch in audiobooks. If it's soulless labor, why not replace it with a machine?
I have spent three weeks of my life recording my latest book as an audiobook. (125,000 words)
It was the most difficult experience of my life, ranking way above the pain of writing the book itself, and on par with month 1 of becoming a father. (I'm not joking.)
It was also an experience I'm incredibly proud of, and do not regret for one second.
AI audiobooks are the soulless experience.
I see a use case of using AI for translating the audiobook, but generating it like that in the first place is a bit sad.
I don't really care whether this chat goes to Elevenlabs or not.
This may shock you, but people who are doing reading for audiobooks, enjoy doing it! I'm not sure you've ever listened to professionally recorded audiobooks, but there are actors who are absolutely amazing at this, and clearly doing it with passion and love. E.g. Andy Serkis doing the Lord of the Rings books on Audible.
This clearly isn't a person chained to a room, just trying to read a book without stuttering. See also some of the Discworld novels on Audible which have fantastic narration and voices. These people are both amazing and passionate.
It's not and never been soulless labour. Do you think Shakespeare was doing soulless empty labor when he was writing Hamlet? Oh no, he had to spend weeks in a dark room writing a book, we should replace him with a machine.
Artists enjoy doing their art, whether it's writing, reading out loud, playing music. Artists don't want to stop doing their art so AI can do it, and then what do they do?
>Artists enjoy doing their art, whether it's writing, reading out loud, playing music.
I guess this is probably generally true. It's really not always true, though. Neil Gaiman told an anecdote on his blog about knowing some writers who hate writing and are miserable.
The fictional TV show The Larry Sanders Show does a good job of finding comedy in the misery of showbusiness: the main character is a neurotic talk show host who is desperate for top rating, jealous of his rivals, and gets no joy from the process of making a hit tv show. I'm not saying most stars are like that, but there's probably some truth there.
When my cat died after a few months of cancer treatment, the staff of the animal hospital sent me a condolence card with comments by staff members.
On the one hand, this was a very touching, very human thing to do. On the other hand, this was presumably a work assignment that had to be passed around and completed for staff members to meet their employer's goals, while juggling the other medical and administrative duties at the animal hospital.
So whether this was a good thing or bad thing might depend on how taxing you view it from the staff member's POV.
With the audio book market: it's kind of a similar dichotomy. There's undoubtedly more human touch in the style an audio book is read by an actual human. (Though if that human touch is "stuttering awkwardly because I'm very self aware as I read, you probably wouldn't want to buy my audio book...)
However, for a human to make an audio book, you are asking someone to sit in a room for many hours, being careful not to stutter as they work through a book. If there's joy in that, maybe you see Elevenlabs as an evil company eliminating the human touch in audiobooks. If it's soulless labor, why not replace it with a machine?