Great! I can't wait some assholes telling that this is progress and if you don't like it go fuck yourself
this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2024
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IIRC this is because Spotify wants to generate translations for these audiobooks in the original voices. At least, that's what I think I remember from a long time ago.
I remember reading about voice actors being asked to sell their voice for something aimed related. Could be this.
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Yeah I think they're trying to slip one on us to train AI but we'll see how rightsholders respond.
Are they already doing this for podcasters?
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What’s Spotify?
WINK
i think it's like TIDAL, but for right-wing dickbags and Rogan-bro's.
This is why you upload the most absurd shit that makes no sense, if you're a well known audiobook author. Just remove all your stuff and replace them with nonsense so that way if they try to train off you, they get a little nonsense.
Yet another example of why if you can't download DRM-free files of your media, it's not worth having. Spotify is absolute trash and I have no idea why it's as popular as it is. Get you some damn MP3s/Ogg Vorbis/FLAC/whatever DRMless copies of your audiobooks and music and to hell with this streaming shit.
So...in the future you might want to consider actually reading the article before commenting.
DRM has absolutely nothing do to with this.
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And so the enshittification continues. This time not for the consumers. Not yet.
So, they want to create AI written and narrated audiobooks that use the voices of well known voice actors without paying them for the privilege? How is that supposed to stand in court?
Voices can't be protected by copyright but there may be a legal avenue for someone like Morgan Freeman to sue if a voice is clearly a knock off of his voice AND he can make a case for it damaging his "brand".
I'd be impressed though if AI can write a novel without directly referencing a fictional person, place or thing that someone else made up. Stable Diffusion, for example, can make a picture of dog wearing a tracksuit running on the side of a skyscraper made of pudding in the middle of a noodle hurricane. But it didn't invent any of those individual components, it just combined them.
What about when a talented comedian speaks in the voice of someone else? Should we just write a law that humans are allowed to do it, but machines aren’t?
name, image, and likeness can be trademarked.
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It wouldn't be to save the cheap coat of a voice actor.
It's so they can play the audio to their AI for free without having to say it was fed a copywritten text. It would also get better at telling stories, depending on the quality it was fed.
But the main advantage is training it to follow a long verbal narrative. And decide if it's better to transcribe it for full reference, or just make a summary as the story goes and risk missing an important bit.
Then to repeat it in the AI's "own words". This would make a huge loophole for exploiting famous authors. If you feed AI the text, the author can argue it was trained on it. If the AI just listened to it and makes a summary and remembers the structure. Derivative works of famous authors can be claimed to be no different than a human emulating popular authors that they had read.
They're just trying to find a way around using the full text, and reading it aloud might be enough.
That’s some wild speculation there.
What you described would be a contrived and inefficient workaround that would have little to no impact on its legality compared to just using the underlying texts as part of a training corpus.
Not sure why you think Spotify wouldn’t want to eliminate the cost of voice actors and production. If you’re self-publishing, recording and producing an audiobook traditionally is a substantial expense. If Spotify can offer something like Google’s Auto-Narrated Audiobooks to authors, then that would enable them to bring those authors to Spotify (potentially exclusively).
Spotify’s goal also is not necessarily to imitate the voices from the existing audiobooks. There is a lot that goes into making an audiobook successful, and just copying the voice alone wouldn’t convey that. For example, pairing tone and cadence changes with what’s being narrated, techniques for conveying dialogue, particularly between different characters, etc.. How you speak is just as important as your raw voice.
That would allow Spotify to create audiobooks using those techniques without using the voice of anyone who hadn’t signed away rights to it. However I would argue that some of the techniques they would likely use are integral to a person’s voice.
It’s also feasible that Spotify wants to be able to take an existing audiobook and make it available with a different voice. This wouldn’t require the audiobook to have ever been trained on - they would just replace the existing voice in it with another while preserving the pauses, tone shifts, etc. (and possibly adjusting them to be appropriate for the new voice).
More closely aligned to the specific derivative work they mentioned would be to implement something like Kindle/Audible’s Whispersync, potentially in collaboration with a non-Amazon ebook retailer like Barnes&Noble or Kobo.
This is a much better take.
Intonation is huge, and something general models tend to have trouble with - especially with something like an audiobook, which is narration - it's very contextual in a way not found in almost any other form of communication. It even encapsulates every other form of context through dialogue.
And not only that - a lot of audiobooks have versions by multiple voice actors. And they might change a word here or there, but it's highly structured data - it's truly a treasure trove
I'd go a step further and say they really want access to the dataset - not just for audiobooks, but because this is a fantastic dataset to train very context aware (and silky smooth) text to voice.
Spotify probably doesn't have the chops to do this, but they might be trying to leverage the dataset - I'm not sure if they could sell it wholesale or not, but if nothing else they could "partner" with Microsoft or Google to train VTT capabilities into multi-modal LLMs (a pitch with all the buzzwords to make investors need to change their underwear)
Make the policy change, see if they can get it to hold up in the courts. AKA normal business practices for corporate America.
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I wonder how many of these policies are being created in companies privacy policies not because of AI, but because it gives a "reason" to allow collection of all user data?
A little from column A, a little from column B...
I anticipate a LOT of audiobook authors and publishers aren’t gonna be ok with that.
That is if they are aware of it. How many time do you just hit accept on a TOS agreement
Maybe it’s time people start taking their business elsewhere to show they are not satisfied with this deal.
I saw this getting traction on Tik Tok a few days ago warning rightsholders they have until, I think, Mar 5th to pull their content from the platform.
I can't wait to hear what Brandon Sanderson says about this
They don't. The message right now is to boycott Spotify.
Except Spotify is one of the only hopes against Audible. Audible gives terrible deals to authors, if you sell your audiobook exclusively through audible they take a 60% cut of the sale, and if you sell through multiple audiobook stores they take 75%.
And that's just the official numbers, according to this source they actually pay out even less than that. The average author's cut for an exclusive title is only 21%, and for a non-audible exclusive is only 13%.
Large established authors get significantly better deals, but all the smaller authors desperately need audiobook rivals like spotify to be a viable alternative to Audible's monopoly death grip on the industry. So it's not as simple as "boycott spotify", spotify or someone else badly needs to succeed in getting a meaningful slice of the market.
Thankfully there are alternatives out there, and we should be using them.
When discussions like this happen I think it’s good to actually suggest alternatives!
I don’t listen to audiobooks, but a lot of people I know use libro.fm
Also your local library probably partners with Hoopla and/or Libby which allows you to borrow audiobooks straight to your PC/phone!
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I hope not! I hope they interpret it this way and are willing and able to take action, by removing their catalog or maybe even a class action lawsuit.