40,000 AI-narrated audiobooks flood Audible, dividing authors and listeners

I listened to one of the Audible samples, labeled Virtual Voice. Apple had one labeled as "Madison," so who knows whether they're all going to be labeled so clearly.

It sounded like a TikTok narrator, passable but at the quality level I would expect from a Netflix second-screen show. The book was at the same quality level, too. (The author does "life and business coaching with innovative and adaptable strategies, transcending traditional boundaries.")

I consider these kinds of books and narration to be slop, so I'm definitely not the target market. My worry is that publishers will use AI narrators as virtual scabs to lowball actual creators.

Yeah, I don't think I would like them at all. I had the audiobooks for a whole series by one author, and they were all read by the same narrator except the latest book. I couldn't handle it; it was a real person, not AI, but they were just terrible (but still better than an AI-generated voice).

Did it do distinct voices for the characters? I could maybe see biographies being tolerable read my a machine (though ironic), but books with multiple characters interacting would be a mess. That's one of the things I appreciate about John Lee (who narrated almost that entire series). He even used the same voices for the same characters across books.
- I don't know about distinct voices. The sample didn't cover dialogue. It's possible with AI, but I wouldn't expect it from low-effort AI-generation.

One blogger cited in the report claimed converting an ebook to audio using the AI narration took just 52 minutes

This does not inspire confidence. The technology is there to do this very well, but it takes skill and effort. The technology to automate it end to end with high quality does not yet exist.

52 minutes. That's maybe 1/10th the time it would take to listen to it. I wonder how much of these 40,000 books were even proof-listened once.

Honestly, I don't really care if the LLM can spit out a perfect replica of Stephen Fry with every inflection and intonation possible and in the correct spots.

Tools like these can and will be used to take jobs from actual voice actors. I want no part of it.
- I get where you're coming from, but it doesn't sit quite right with me. The whole point of technology is to save human time and effort. That should be a good thing. The problem is the capitalist hellscape that is the status quo. I don't think we should put the onus of propping up that capitalist hellscape onto book authors. I mean, maybe that's the easiest way to maintain the status quo, but the status quo was never sustainable in the first place.
  
  I don't know. This is not a fully fleshed out philosophy. At some level I'm sure it's the same old idealism-vs-pragmatism debate.
- That's how automation works. It's just a fact of technological advancement.
  
  If people will happily listen to it and it's way cheaper it's going to happen I'm afraid.
- And most importantly it will never be creative, only recreate. Just that if you mix many many people it sounds new.
- Yep, it's already happening. I did freelance voice work for a client for awhile but was replaced by a voice model because it's vastly cheaper, even if the output is also proportionally worse.
- I agree with the job loss part, but it seems like a really weak argument. What about the increase deals for the author? Many steps in progress lead to job losses, because the world changes. What's important is to do it in a responsible manner, and I think that's where Amazon is failing.
- This is the same thing that happened to scribes when the printing press was invented. It's not going away.

If this moves forward they should cost 10% the average price of human narration.

They won't and they'll be 10% the quality. 👎

Have y’all ever tried listening to an audiobook but had to give up because you didn’t like the reader? Imagine being able to choose the voice, the accent, the rhythm, the speed.

Imagine a future where you could train a model to read it in your own voice so that you could read to your loved ones even after you’ve passed.

I’m ready for AI to take over all the jobs.

You can record yourself reading a book today boss
- Yeah but I’m talkin’ any book. Not just the ones I could take the time to record myself reading. Imagine anyone being able to have any book read to them in any voice, including my deceased grandmother’s. We have some recordings of her voice that would be enough to train AI so I could have her read me any book. That’s what I’m talkin’ about.
- You listen to audiobooks of yourself narrating? That's kinda fuckin weird. lol
Yes, I have. And I don't want to choose every detail of a performance no matter how simple.

I want to hear a performance independent of my own experience. I want to hear something that I didn't know I wanted.

AI can only show you an elaborate mixture of the data it was trained on and a set of instructions. It cannot make decisions, iterate on experiences, or have creatively beneficial mistakes like a human does.
- Considering how good the technology is now and how it will continue to improve, I think we’ll soon have a hard time telling the difference. I can’t see the value in having a human spend hours reading and recording and editing when a program will be able to do it almost instantly in the near future.
I plan to make a "me" and integrate with Home Assistant so I can be the voice of my house.

If they are as shitty as the obviously ai powered closed captioning we are seeing now, they will hopefully be easy to recognize.

Yeah, and you can still look at the "Narrated by" to see if it's a real voice actor. You just can't filter by "not AI".

I very much understand the misgivings about this, and certain parts make me uncomfortable with it, too. But this could be revolutionary for media accessibility, and in my mind could easily be worth it for the ability to make new media immediately accessible to folks with vision challenges, deaf and hard of hearing individuals, and a lot of other folks for whom most media is not easily interactive/accessible. For many people in this situation, you wait months after a traditional version of something is published before an accessible version is released, if it ever is. Often, it's just not seen as worth a publisher's time to make their content accessible to an audience they don't see as significantly profitable.

Like the printing press took jobs from scribes, but had far more significant impacts democratizing information and education, so might AI in the long run.

But this could be revolutionary for media accessibility, and in my mind could easily be worth it for the ability to make new media immediately accessible to folks with vision challenges, deaf and hard of hearing individuals, and a lot of other folks for whom most media is not easily interactive/accessible

As an accessibility add-on / upgrade to standard TTS, sure. Sounds great, even. But I will not accept soulless, robotic, AI-generated voices for something being sold as an audiobook. I just won't.
- What about if we sweeten the deal and allow you to choose the voice actor on the fly? Want Star wars novels read by James Earl Jones, or Tolkien read by Arnold Schwarzenegger? You can have that with AI voices.
- "I will not accept soulless robotic machine-generated typescript being sold as a book. I just won't." -Some hipster arguing against the printing press
  
  Not denying audiobook performers don't have real valuable talent (and should be fairly paid for it), but when was the last time you paid a premium for a handwritten novel?