A partnership with OpenAI will let podcasters replicate their voices to automatically create foreign-language versions of their shows.
Honestly, as long as the person whose voice it is gives full permission it’s probably one great use for AI.
That being said, you could just hire people who actually know the language to translate.
I am for hiring people who know the language and the target audience. Mainly to avoid AI taking away possible jobs and to avoid something literally translated that either doesn’t make sense or ends up being offensive by accident.
You will never ever in any case be able to stop technology from progressing. Instead of fearing the loss of jobs, how about making sure that we can properly handle and integrate AI into our society with everyone benefitting from it?
Stop the defeatist attitude, get politically active and help kick conservatives and fascists into the ditch where they belong.
As long as money’s involved, there’s no way AI tech benefits society.
That kinda shit will only benefit the wealthy and the owning classes.
So, like… a claim so broad as “As long as money’s involved, there’s no way AI tech benefits society” is obviously untrue, right? Even if we accept a premise like “On the whole, AI will hurt society more than it helps”, it’s basically just dogma to blanket deny any practical usefulness. Take firearms, for example: they’re often strictly controlled, but rarely if ever completely purged – almost all societies accept that some situations exist where the utility sufficiently justifies the harm.
To be honest, I feel really weird pushing back against this because we seem rather ideologically aligned. I think we both feel that technologies which promote economic development will – by default – disproportionately empower those rich and powerful few. With that being said, from an ideological perspective, technological developments are not in fundamental opposition to Marxist philosophy (yes, even technological developments which render some skilled labor obsolete).
On the contrary; if we are to believe that the next step of economic development lies in casting aside class division, then we must necessarily concede that the only way forward is to recruit novel technological developments toward that purpose. It is self-undermining and shortsighted to argue that simply allowing a development will inherently undermine anti-capital interests, because how then could such a system so apparently incompatible with future technologies also claim to itself be the future?
Might as well go back to the fields the with all the other Luddites then.
We live in a capitalist society, every bit of progress benefits the rich first. It’s always been like that, it has nothing to do with the AI part.
Unless, you know, it’s properly regulated and stuff. Regulation works through laws. Laws are passed by the government. The government is elected by the people.
So get the proper people into government.
The government is elected by the people.
And controlled by the wealthy. You don’t really think your local representative cares what you think, do you? Because that would be laughably naive.
They care what their lobbyists and major donors think.
First of all that is a very simplistic and therefore incomplete view of the things. Second of all, that’s why you work on getting people there who do care and want to fix that.
That’s naive and delusional. At least in the USA, there’s no chance of such regulations coming about, regardless of who is put in power. The RNC and DNC both are far more swayed by the money of those eliminating their work force than the plight of the worker. That isn’t changing any time soon.
I’ll eat my hat if they pass a law that actually protects workers and bans use of AI to replace human jobs.
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And now refer back to my first comment, let that defeatist attitude go, and work on getting those things changed. If you were right, we’d still be living under kings and owning classical slaves ;)
I’m not saying it’s easy or quick, I’m saying that your thinking makes it reality because you just accept getting assfucked… Which is exactly “their” goal.
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Uh, no. You are not all powerful and abusive technology is not an inevitability we have to submit to. We’ll never submit to garbage that steals shit from people.
The AI doesn’t steal anything, the people creating it do. This is something that can and should and must be regulated.
To add my personal opinion to that, I don’t think there is a problem with models being trained on all possible data, but it must not be used by a single company to profit some few people. It must be available to anyone and everyone, since it learned from anyone and everyone. We all learn from others and AI is no different - the problem is in the centralization and further abuse of its power.
If it was feasible to do that we would’ve been doing it already.
An AI makes to cost effective to translate audio for an audience of just a few people.
In cases where it has been cost effective to pay a translator in the past I expect it will continue to be so. I’m aware that AI generated audio is pretty good, but translations are often pretty poor.
Just throwing this in here because it reminded me of it.
Or instead of hiring people you could use AI and then pocket that money because you’re a greedy CEO/shareholder and fuck everyone but yourself.
I mean.
Would you not like to hear the OG voice but in your language? Movies dubbed in Spanish sound straight up awful to me because the voice actors sound wonky compared to the original.
Not everything has to be about a greedy CEO, sometimes the proposal could actually be good if done right. We seriously need to chill with this narrative in every fucking thread.
Assume billionaire is greedy unless proven otherwise.
It sounds like you have a problem with tax rates more than the technology. Are we also fed up with being able to translate web pages with a browser extension?
It can be both at the same time - getting a professional voice actor to translate the script, then apply AI magic to have the voices match the original as exactly as possible.
Yeah this must be opt-in only.
If it isn’t the amount of backlash will be insane
I hate how many ads they push for podcasts and singles on the premium tier. Full screen. IDGAF, I just wanna listen to my music. Bracing for a wave of new duo ads, podcasts about a woman who sat on a fork or some BS like that, and artists I dislike. Now with AI translations :|
You pay for premium and they’re still serving you ads?
Every day I feel better about never having used Spotify.
There is a recommended for you section on the main page, but you can ignore it. They aren’t inserting ads into the listening part.
This pseudoAI is a new kind of plastic: sometimes useful, misused to infest everything with it. As it rolls, there would be less and less genuine content in a sea of garbage. That few, it’d become a luxury.
Technological advance is in hands of those who own the means of production.
I have a strong feeling the terms of usage for this opt-in will include something along the lines of “we can use your voice for our future projects” and then in a few years they will just create podcasts using podcasters’ voices without their true consent and make a ton off their backs while increasing their competition.
That is of course the danger… as it is it’s pretty benign, allowing more people to consume podcasts in their own language. But the terms need to be clear.
And I am certain the terms will be clear and concise, definitely less than 50 pages and no vague and contradicting statements all over.
Nope. I don’t support blatantly public facing AI’s that take creative jobs away from people. I don’t care if it’s opt-in. I don’t care if the podcast creator themselves activates it. Exploiting the technology will only make it normalized, meaning we’ll care less about allowing humans to be creative in the future.
It seems easy to take this position as a native English speaker, but what if you aren’t proficient in English, perhaps only in a smaller regional language that doesn’t have the same nearly infinite pool of content? This is a potential game changer for that, allowing you to listen to thousands of podcasts you never could before. No jobs were lost because there was never anyone doing the translations in the first place. When viewed this way, it’s an accessibility feature.
Bing bang boom.
I think people are totally steeped in capitalist rhetoric and are completely used to living it. I 100% support creative work and I will die paying humans cold hard cash for their artistic output. But everything else should 100% be automated where it can be with the expectation that humans no longer HAVE to work to be comfortable.
This is the same thing to me as worrying about accountants and HR when a bunch of them got displaced with computers. It disproportionately takes away jobs without equivalent replacements from people that are trained and educated with this specialization in mind, but it also moves us toward a world where we don’t have to sell our waking moments to someone else.
It absolutely sucks ass that we aren’t already preparing for a post-capitalist or semi-post-capitalist world and people are stressed, hungry, and unsheltered. But every time I see something like this, it feels like we’re making some kind of progress toward that because not only does it remove a space for humans to be exploited for labor, but it enables previously-unfathomable levels of accessibility that has been locked behind economic barriers (e.g. hiring people to translate Ologies into Pidgin languages would be totally unprofitable and therefore would almost never happen).
/rant
It makes sense and is good from a technological standpoint, humans have always wanted to advance. But that means we must be even more politically active to save ourselves from exploitation in the future.
I agree but it’s inevitable.
What?
Ronald would like me to tell you that Seamus told him that Dean was told by Parvati that Hagrid’s looking for you.
“A partnership with OpenAI”. I stopped reading. Probably shouldn’t but god damn.
Does this mean I can listen to my podcasts in Klingon?
Time to get Duolingo out again
I saw nothing in the article about if the podcasters will be getting any pay or anything of the sorts for this kind of stuff, but so long as they’re getting paid for opting in (assuming it’s opt in) when this comes available for everyone I don’t mind this as much. This is a use of AI I can get behind, at least if the podcasters get paid while using it.
Sounds like a terrible idea
Why?
I have mix feeling about this, I have many English podcasts that I would love to recommend to my non-english speaking friends, so I feel very excited about this idea. But again, I felt the podcasters are being abused in someway with this.
Are the podcasters getting paid for these translated versions? If so, and at the same rate, then I don’t personally see an issue. If not, then yes, it’s exploitation.
Edit: and as long as the AI voice isn’t reused for other content without consent from the owner of said voice.
The problem with this is the same problem news websites has when they started switching out their foreign language writers with AI.
Just because you can translate what is literally being said word by word, doesn’t mean you’re translating the intent of what was being said.
Idioms, phrases, jokes, pleasantries, etc. won’t translate into foreign languages no matter how well you can translate the literal words being said.
If you want good quality translation, you should get someone who knows the language and the culture to do it, as they can translate what’s between the lines.
Shows with the budget/intent to create good quality translations will have them reviewed/refined by humans before they put it back in the voice of the host, I don’t see why they couldn’t do that.
Shows without the budget or that just don’t care will use full-auto and I’m sure it will indeed suck.
I honestly think this a non-issue with the new llms coming out. Gpt 4 definitely understands idioms.
Hardest part with be getting the tone down and adding proper emotion to it.
If it does a good job and people get paid fairly then this seems like a great thing to me.
If the podcast creator consents, what’s the problem? I don’t understand why anti-AI sentiment is so prevalent among some people.
Its between the “it might take away jobs” to “spotify might use podcasters voices without consent”. I’m more on the latter but thats as if Spotify would end up being the “only” podcast streaming platform.
I’m about to hear a lot more of José “hongos mágicos” Rogan outside of the internet now.
just use spotube
