This is these people 's choice. You can still watch foreign TV and movies, still read traditional books, refuse to buy car, etc. or refuse to date people with plastic sirgeries. If being challenged makes you happier, then go for it, but shaming people for taking advantage of science and progess that makes our lives more comfortable strikes me as slightly arrogant.
"Who is shamed? You? [...] If people are shamed by my opinion, then they are fragile, indeed. And fragility is another feature of the Age of Isolation due to technology." That's nitpicking, but OK. Just because you're shaming somebody, doesn't mean you're succeeding doing that. If anything, it seems more like you're psychologically harming yourself by being sad and unnecessarily angry, trying to hold back the ocean with a broom.
"It is not a choice if your choices are limited by the market,"
The market ARE PEOPLE. It's always people's choice, unless the governments limit it.
"sometimes limits them."
Yeah, if so few people demand certaing good or service, this good or service can even absolutely disappear. But the entire society shouldn't revolve around a few wackos whose hobbys are less popular than horse carriages. Actually, I can't even imagine how few people would have to give up sth in order for it to ABSOLUTELY disappear from the market. Even your example of art theatres, thousands of the spectacles from which you can watch for free on YouTube, do exist in the US. [You might be far away from them, but you can always drive there, unles you're against even such technology like cars].
"To ignore adverse impacts of technology is anti-intellectual and foolish."
Even more anti-intellectual and foolish is to ignore the cost benefit analysis, which is clearly on techonology's side.
"The stay-at-home techno lifestyle has demolished social life in the West."
Please, look around. Say whether you see dumpsters on fire and orphans begging for food. If not, then please avoid hyperboly. [And of course if you see such things, you probably can't blame the technology, can you; on the contrary, if anything]. Am I saying that there are no problems with staying home techno lyfestyle? Of course no. But you are still allowed to walk outside and relax, which I often do and advise to do. [BTW, post physique, let's see whether you're just paying lip service or live up to your standards 😉] Just because many people don't decide to do it, it shouldn't affect you and, as I said, it's their choice. Not to mention that you're against the technology of audiobooks, which makes it even more conveniant to go for a walk outside home, while being productive.
"The isolation and social ineptitude of the technological age do not make for a more comfortable life, they are breeding paranoia and hostility."
The burden of proof is on You, it seems. People don't seem to be "paranoid" or "hostile." Maybe it's just your experience. But why are you blaming Bryan's AI audiobooks [I know it's kinda strawman, but it at least sounds funny], and not things that seem to be prima facie more connected to this, like racial tensions, forced lockdowns, politicians antagonizing people on purpose for their personal advantage or, you guessed it, anti-technological fear-mongering. [Yes, there exists something like self-fullfilling prophecy]. All of which has existed always, and even more so in the past.
I found it very confusing too. I think what is meant is the text file is quite small -- under a megabyte. The voice file generated from it is in the gigabytes.
I had always presumed that their policy against this was because they wanted to offer some in house on the fly narration with Amazon Polly. For instance from inside the Kindle app, but they haven't launched it. And now Polly is way behind these others.
And honestly that's too bad because the regularity of Polly I find is an aid to reading comprehension Human narrators and human like AI narrators are simply Distracting
> Preparation involves converting PDF to Word, then converting Word to text document. Removing references, footnotes, references to footnotes, and page numbers. Each paragraph has to be a line. Mark the beginning of new chapter, as it would give the AI a way to distinguish chapters and new paragraphs.
I am pretty sure the AI can do all this for you ... GPT-4 will be even be able to do it from an image.
Interesting. But I found even getting the short video here https://www.losingmyreligions.net/ to sound right took a fair amount of editing. And even one chapter sounded like it would take too much work.
Currently listening to Labor Econ Versus the World. I'm about halfway through and the narration is... not good. There are minor issues, like the voice doesn't know how to pronounce "Keynesian," but there are bigger issues like the voice constantly sounds stressed out and whiny for long sections of text, plus it occasionally switches from a male to female voice (I think when doing some block quotes, but hard to say without the text in front of me to compare it). It also at one point so far switched to a British accent for a couple paragraphs.
It's better than nothing if you want to "read" the book, but only if you know it's an AI voice and do your best to ignore the idiosyncrasies rather than assuming that a narrator is trying to convey emphasis present in the text.
I just went and bought the one about evil politicians. Audible reduced the price between showing me the item and purchasing it. I would have been much more enthusiastic about buying it if I had known the actual price I would pay. That is strange marketing.
"Eleven labs charges $99 for about 1MB, so creating one audiobook, which is about 300-400GB would cost around $30-40 without editing"
There are at least two things wrong wih this statement
An obvious typo. Should be KB instead.
Dont hate gpt3.5 was default and summarized instead of gpt4
That sounds awful. I’m sad audible allows this.
What exactly is wrong with that?
This is these people 's choice. You can still watch foreign TV and movies, still read traditional books, refuse to buy car, etc. or refuse to date people with plastic sirgeries. If being challenged makes you happier, then go for it, but shaming people for taking advantage of science and progess that makes our lives more comfortable strikes me as slightly arrogant.
"Who is shamed? You? [...] If people are shamed by my opinion, then they are fragile, indeed. And fragility is another feature of the Age of Isolation due to technology." That's nitpicking, but OK. Just because you're shaming somebody, doesn't mean you're succeeding doing that. If anything, it seems more like you're psychologically harming yourself by being sad and unnecessarily angry, trying to hold back the ocean with a broom.
"It is not a choice if your choices are limited by the market,"
The market ARE PEOPLE. It's always people's choice, unless the governments limit it.
"sometimes limits them."
Yeah, if so few people demand certaing good or service, this good or service can even absolutely disappear. But the entire society shouldn't revolve around a few wackos whose hobbys are less popular than horse carriages. Actually, I can't even imagine how few people would have to give up sth in order for it to ABSOLUTELY disappear from the market. Even your example of art theatres, thousands of the spectacles from which you can watch for free on YouTube, do exist in the US. [You might be far away from them, but you can always drive there, unles you're against even such technology like cars].
"To ignore adverse impacts of technology is anti-intellectual and foolish."
Even more anti-intellectual and foolish is to ignore the cost benefit analysis, which is clearly on techonology's side.
"The stay-at-home techno lifestyle has demolished social life in the West."
Please, look around. Say whether you see dumpsters on fire and orphans begging for food. If not, then please avoid hyperboly. [And of course if you see such things, you probably can't blame the technology, can you; on the contrary, if anything]. Am I saying that there are no problems with staying home techno lyfestyle? Of course no. But you are still allowed to walk outside and relax, which I often do and advise to do. [BTW, post physique, let's see whether you're just paying lip service or live up to your standards 😉] Just because many people don't decide to do it, it shouldn't affect you and, as I said, it's their choice. Not to mention that you're against the technology of audiobooks, which makes it even more conveniant to go for a walk outside home, while being productive.
"The isolation and social ineptitude of the technological age do not make for a more comfortable life, they are breeding paranoia and hostility."
The burden of proof is on You, it seems. People don't seem to be "paranoid" or "hostile." Maybe it's just your experience. But why are you blaming Bryan's AI audiobooks [I know it's kinda strawman, but it at least sounds funny], and not things that seem to be prima facie more connected to this, like racial tensions, forced lockdowns, politicians antagonizing people on purpose for their personal advantage or, you guessed it, anti-technological fear-mongering. [Yes, there exists something like self-fullfilling prophecy]. All of which has existed always, and even more so in the past.
Audible doesn't allow text-to-speech for audiobooks. It's against their terms. These will likely be taken down at some point.
“Eleven labs charges $99 for about 1MB, so creating one audiobook, which is about 300-400GB would cost around $30-40”
That doesn’t seem right.
I found it very confusing too. I think what is meant is the text file is quite small -- under a megabyte. The voice file generated from it is in the gigabytes.
That has to be 99 cents per megabyte, and audiobooks being 300-400 MB. That's at least in order-of-magnitude territory, and the math then works out.
FYI, unless they've quietly changed policy on this, these are likely to be removed by Audible as they have a policy against non-human narration.
I had always presumed that their policy against this was because they wanted to offer some in house on the fly narration with Amazon Polly. For instance from inside the Kindle app, but they haven't launched it. And now Polly is way behind these others.
And honestly that's too bad because the regularity of Polly I find is an aid to reading comprehension Human narrators and human like AI narrators are simply Distracting
Sir - perhaps share sample: an mp3 of a sentence or two so we don't have to use/setup/subscribe Audible/Amazon
You can listen to a sample by following any of the three links at the top.
> Preparation involves converting PDF to Word, then converting Word to text document. Removing references, footnotes, references to footnotes, and page numbers. Each paragraph has to be a line. Mark the beginning of new chapter, as it would give the AI a way to distinguish chapters and new paragraphs.
I am pretty sure the AI can do all this for you ... GPT-4 will be even be able to do it from an image.
Interesting. But I found even getting the short video here https://www.losingmyreligions.net/ to sound right took a fair amount of editing. And even one chapter sounded like it would take too much work.
Currently listening to Labor Econ Versus the World. I'm about halfway through and the narration is... not good. There are minor issues, like the voice doesn't know how to pronounce "Keynesian," but there are bigger issues like the voice constantly sounds stressed out and whiny for long sections of text, plus it occasionally switches from a male to female voice (I think when doing some block quotes, but hard to say without the text in front of me to compare it). It also at one point so far switched to a British accent for a couple paragraphs.
It's better than nothing if you want to "read" the book, but only if you know it's an AI voice and do your best to ignore the idiosyncrasies rather than assuming that a narrator is trying to convey emphasis present in the text.
I just went and bought the one about evil politicians. Audible reduced the price between showing me the item and purchasing it. I would have been much more enthusiastic about buying it if I had known the actual price I would pay. That is strange marketing.
And the narrator gives himself a credit. Maybe I bought the wrong one?
Holy cannoli.
Elevenlabs already does this. Go to VoiceLab > + Add Voice and upload Mencken's mp3s