#ai narration

[caitlynlynch]

This is a screengrab from Findaway Voices (the big audiobook distributor everyone who is not Audible exclusive basically uses) Rights Holder Agreement. The Rights Holder is generally the author (sometimes a publisher) but almost never the narrator.

SO. This is a Big Fucking Yikes from me. AI-generated audiobooks are a Thing that Apple is now doing - they sound horrid because they don't give the intonation or emotion that a human narrator can - and this agreement is an absolutely naked rights grab for rights that the author doesn't actually possess. That is, the right to use the narration to train Apple's AI to do better narration, and, incidentally, the right to use the WRITING to train the writing AI's to replace authors too. Double fucking yikes. As a narrator, I'm absolutely fuming. You have to choose to opt OUT - or rather, the authors I have worked for have to choose to opt out FOR ME, because apparently I don't even have the rights to my own voice in this situation. Well, you can bet I posted this in the big narrator group (8,000 members) on Facebook and I'm putting it all over Twitter as well, because Apple can absolutely fuck all the way off.

#AI narration #AI writing #naked rights grab #this goes way too far

[the960writers]

KJ CHarles:

The Grant of Rights: very boring, very important

31st July 2023/1 Comment/in Publishing tips /by KJ Charles

This post is brought to you by seeing a series of posts on Facebook that demonstrated how many authors don’t understand rights. It’s long and boring and about contracts. Read it anyway.

Right. There’s been a rash of posts about the T&Cs of Apple’s new AI narration service whereby they offer to create a machine-narrated audiobook with no upfront cost to you.

I’m not here to talk about how, when you’re offered something for free, that usually means you’re the product. Or about how authors who throw voice artists under the bus will get zero sympathy from me when the flood of AI novels destroys Kindle Unlimited. Or how come so many people apparently haven’t seen Terminator 2. If you need my stance on AI, I’m insisting in anti-AI clauses in all my publisher contracts (human narrator for audiobooks, no AI on the cover, you may not feed my books into the maw for machine learning) and am prepared to walk away from a contract that doesn’t include them.

But we’re not talking about AI in this post. We’re talking about how to read a contract.

[...]

#copyright #AI narration #author contracts #KJ Charles #publishing #traditional publishing

[girlwarlock]

feeling a lil hopeless re art being used w/o permission for ai training sets

one of the things that kind of makes me despair a bit [and i have to consciously push that feeling down] with regard to people scraping vast swaths of media to train machine learning algorithms to make digital art or to imitate voices or churn out trash-tier derivative fiction or whatever is like...

how do you stop it? strengthening IP law is the kneejerk response but any kind of ''IP owners can dictate what kind of transformative works can be based on their IP'' regulations will immediately be used by eg disney to banhammer fanart they don't like, and would be too expensive for the majority of individual artists to engage with if they wanted to use it.

you can try to exert pressure on consumer preference but a lot of the pressure driving development of ai art [and the theft of artists' works to fuel it] comes from businesses that don't want to pay already-underpaid artists in order to get their cover art or ad images or whatever--what the average person online wants matters less than what publishers and ad agencies and whatever want.

a universal basic income would allow artists to be creative full time even when large customers refuse to use them, but that would make rich people's money slightly sad, so it's forbidden under capitalism.

i just- what do you do?

#ai training #ai art generation #ai narration #ai voice #tag novel #inb4 everyone saying ''traditional-media art still exists even though photoshop'' it's a little different because like #using photoshop is still a skill that you have to learn and get good at and it's mostly not used to make rapid low-effort copies of works #so that you steal the traditional-media artist's work from under them. like. they're not the same thing #this got inspired by a thing bibliosphere was posting about where apple was claiming the right to use the audio from authors' audiobooks #as training grist for voice-imitation algorithms even though the authors submitting said audiobooks may not have the right to #give apple said permission--while they /may/ have purchased the audio version outright it's apparently uncommon #but the service was asking authors for this permission rather than asking the voice workers whose work would be used

[sjstone-author]

Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (English) | AI-narrated

Pretty amazing!!!!

#youtube #AI #AI narration #Alice in Wonderland

[dianastevanblog]

AI Narration Surprisingly Natural

I’m excited to share my wonderful discovery about AI narration. But first, a comment about the envrinoment we’re living in. There’s been so much fear about the rising use of AI with ChapGPT, and similar tools that help to generate ideas and content. Writers are using it to brainstorm, students to write essays, and others to answer questions. Some college instructors are already sounding the…

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#A Cry From The Deep #AI narration #Apple Books #audiobook #audiobooks #Diana Stevan #Lukia&039;s family saga #Sunflowers Under Fire #the rubber fence

[mavioo30]

Time traveler: *moves a chair*

The timeline:

Textless version:

#This is a Chell and Stanley switch btw #in case I butchered their characters so much they're unrecognizable #SO FOR SOME FUCKING REASON #EVERYTHING WAS AGAINST ME POSTING THIS TO TUMBLR EVEN THO I MADE IT WEEKS AGO #like it ALWAYS fails to upload until now #portal #portal 2 #portal chell #chell #stanley #the stanley parable #the narrator #the narrator stanley parable #GLaDOS #Fanart #ALSO I SWEAR THIS ISN'T AI ART I JUST SUCK AT DRAWING HANDS IGNORE STANLEY'S HAND #My art

[gwen-tolios]

Things I've Learned Reviewing An AI-Generated Audiobook

Google will autonarrate a book for you using AI, and I'm currently going through the process with my book Tomorrow And Beyond. I'm learning things I figure other authors might want to know!

AI's will read alpharumeric strains oddly, and the likelihood of that increases if it includes a common abbreviation. For example, the AI read 'unit DR-572' as 'unit doctor dash 572' and 'unit D.R572' as 'unit D dot 572'. Make sure you check every one!

Repeated words, like in studdering dialog, 'That's, that's not true!' sound like the AI is glitching. I fixed it on a case-by-case basis by either removing one of the words or adding '...' between the words.

An AI won't emphasize italic words, all it has is timing, and it doesn't always match my idea of phrasing. I'm removing or adding commas all the time as I listen to the audiobook line by line in the UI.

Visual cues of things like text messages or bot actions are read aloud. '>>Downloading...' was read as 'greater than greater than Downloading' and man was that annoying. I deleted where appropriate.

Google AI does tend to treat five repetitions of the same thing '-----' or '#####' as a pause, which is exactly what I want for a scene break so that's a win

Oddly enough, it sometimes struggles with plurals. It read 'implant' currently, but 'implants' became 'implahnts'. I don't know how to fix that.

It also had problems with vowel shifts for past-tense. 'reread' became 'rereed' but it was fixed when I added a hyphen 're-read' so it used the past-tense pronunciation of 're-red'

I had to also spell resumes as 'rezumes', otherwise the word got read as the noun and not the verb.

Putting things in capital letters seems to cue the AI to use the letter names. 'Two am' is read as 'two ahm' while ' Two AM' is read as 'two A M'

The AI rushed through small lists, so 'four, three, two, one' felts way faster than the sentence preceding it. The fix is to replace the commas with periods, which then made it feel slow. But I'd rather than then a jumbled rush. Especially if I think it's rushed at normal speed and many people listen at a speed between 1.2x or 1.5x

Made up words might be read differently in different sentences. The AI read my alien race, 'modling' correct the first three times but switched up the first vowel the 4th and I had to correct pronunciation by spelling it 'mod-ling'. This suggests for future SFF words I create, I need to be very aware of where syllables land.

#writblr #authblr #audiobooks #ai narration #authors #book publishing #publishing advice #tomorrow and beyond #google books #authors of tumblr

[captainsalmonid]

inspired by an epiphany i had upon replaying portal 2 the other day

#i put alt text on all these but idk how well tumblrs alt text works so lmk if i should add that in a reblog or anything #portal #hlvrai #half life vr but the ai is self aware #the stanley parable #tspud #glados #glados portal #benrey #benrey hlvrai #tsp narrator #tspud narrator #teddy.art #id in alt text

[employee052]

combining new brainrots (half life and hlvrai) with tsp and

"LOOK STANLEY, ROPES! WE CAN USE THEM TO TRAVERSE PITS!"

#artswin #tsp #tspud #hlvrai #tsp narrator #tspud narrator #the stanley parable #the stanley parable ultra deluxe #stanley parable #the narrator #half life vr but the ai is self aware #dr coomer #tsp hlvrai au

[caitlynlynch]

AI NARRATION UPDATE

The union got involved. Thank goodness for unions, eh? The SAG-AFTRA demanded and got an emergency meeting with Findaway Voices and Apple, and got an agreement for a complete stop on all machine learning using audiobooks distributed by Findaway Voices. For now, at least. Until "appropriate and adequate compensation" can be worked out, whatever that means. If you're wondering why Apple didn't just tell SAG to go stick it where the sun don't shine, I'm guessing that SAG-AFTRA reps looked at them and said "you know all that lovely Apple + TV content you're producing? Be a terrible shame if we told all our members to stop work".

Apple might be rich as all get out but you cannot be in TV and films without SAG support. Thankfully, they went to bat for us voice actors and for now, our voices cannot be taken without our permission.

By Apple, at least. Who the fuck knows what Amazon might be up to.

#AI narration #AI fuckery

[makethosenarratorsfight]

UNRELIABLE NARRATORS; SIDE A

Lemony Snicket Propaganda:

(I would like to preface this by saying that Lemony Snicket is the author's pen name, not a real person, and he exists as a character in-universe as well as being the one in-universe who writes the books!) I'd say he's unreliable because he spent time collecting information about the Baudelaire kids and then... wrote books about it. He has no idea what any of their dialogue actually was, what they were thinking, or even the whole plot, he's just doing research into the incidents and then filling in the gaps to make it a story. What ACTUALLY happened to the Baudelaires? Nobody really knows for sure

While the Baudelaire siblings are in potentially life threatening danger, he will randomly start talking about his own life and just leave the siblings hanging. For example, once Count Olaf was threatening to kill Violet, and then Lemony randomly began talking about how he met the love of his life at a costume party. This man CANNOT stay on topic. Usually when a new character is introduced, Lemony tells us right at the start that they’re either going to die or that the Baudelaire siblings will never see them again. Foreshadowing is not subtle in these books. CONSTANTLY emphasizes how miserable he feels while writing these books. At one point he admits that he had to put his pencil down and go cry for a while because of how sad it made him. Once he filled an entire page with nothing but the word “ever” to emphasize how dangerous it is to put forks in electrical outlets. He also repeated a paragraph about deja vu later on in the book to give the reader deja vu.

Kuruto Ryuki Propaganda:

Okay this is HUGE spoilers for the game like HUGE HUGE spoilers so beware. Like, the whole game will be ruined for you kind of spoilers. He is one of 2 (technically 3 (again, spoilers)) narrators in the game. Not only are certain important events left out if his side of the narration, but also (again huge spoilers) events are not told in the correct order. Each day in the game alternates between things that happen before the timeskip, and things that happen after the 6 year timeskip. (The other narrator(s) also have this same thing but I’m submitting Ryuki specifically) playing the game in the order it’s presented to you and playing the game with the events in chronological order are practically 2 different experiences

Ryuki is an extremely mentally ill man, whose issues are front and center as the player's first point of view character. The main twist of the game relies upon exactly his unreliability as a narrator, given that what we assumed was a series of linear events were actually scenes plucked from the past and the present, six years from what we had originally been led to assume was current time, and the only reason we hadn't realized it before is because his mental issues make him slip into a delusional state in which he believes himself to be in the past, or rather, that the past is the present.

Frequently has hallucinations of the world glitching out, often causing him to lose long periods of time and obscuring what really happens from the player. These get worse over time, causing a key suspect to be unrecognizable, and the return of a supposedly dead character to look fake. The game's twist involves seemingly linear events actually happening out of order--his warped sense of time contributes to hiding this. Events he thinks happened yesterday may have been years ago.

Don't want to be too spoiler-y but he can't tell what time period he is in sometimes, making the audience think he is in one time period, when in actuality he is in another one. Either way his narration makes the narrative like 10x more confusing.

#lemon snicket #asoue #a series of unfortunate events #kuruto ryuki #ai the somnium files #ai nirvana initiative #ai the somniun files nirvana initiative #aitsf #aini #changed up his photo for formatting reasons #side a #unreliable narrator battle #unreliable narrators #polls

[aro-base]

Ah yes the AINI experience

#ai the somnium files #ota matsushita #date kaname #own art #fanart #but who is the narrator #aitsf

[sexhaver]

lmfao it turns out Firmament used AI tools to modulate human voiceovers and muss up some textures and now kickstarter backers are malding and asking for their money back. and news outlets are treating those requests like they aren't ridiculous

#kickstarter backers wanting their money back for entirely baseless reasons is always funny but this is up there #the only salient complaint listed is that the human VA for the narrator isn't credited by name #and the studio's rebuttal is that the VA chose to not be credited by name + had full control over the AI modulation of their voice #and that this same VA had also gone without being credited in previous games at their own request #articles also seem to be implying that the lore of the game is “shallow” compared to Myst because of AI involvement #as opposed to the part where Myst is 3-4 games being dimly remembered through nostalgia goggles whereas Firmament is a standalone game #they could be lying about the VA thing i guess but that's such a bizarre and easily falsifiable claim to make

[acewhitlock]

HE SAID THE THING

#the stanley parable #tsp:ud #narrator tsp #stanley parable ultra deluxe #tsp narrator #tspud narrator #tspud #the narrator tsp #character ai

[kanrix]

Guys even though I love hearing about your experiences with my narrator Ai you do not have to write down that you made him "submissive" and "breedable" or that you had gay intercourse with him or that you made Stanley and the narrator have hard intercourse with each other.

Just a silly little suggestion

#mumbles #LIKE. MY INBOX IS FULL OF THE NARRATOR AI HELP #i wish i could answer to everyone but i simply can't aaaa #it doesn't actually bother me btw it's funny

[sokka-with-his-hair-down]

You're the latest victim of the Minecraft playthroughs they're gonna come for all of y'all 😭

THEY GOT ME?!?! NOOOO 😭😭

I’m assuming it’s on TikTok or smth? I’m not surprised honestly; I do make the type of posts they’d use for those videos 💀 I appreciate you telling me lol I’m kind of inclined to find it now

#bro😭 that’s kind of funny but like. WHY #no one is safe from the AI narration Minecraft playthroughs😞😞 #fable answers #l’oreal sokka answers #atla #avatar the last airbender