That's just weird... Part of the reason I listen to podcasts is that I just enjoy people talking about things and AI voices still have this uncanny quality to me
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.
After discovering my first AI covers (specifically Barbie Girl by Johnny Cash) a couple of weeks ago my first thought was "Yep, this is how Star Trek's universal translator is about to come to pass."
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 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 :|
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.
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.
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.
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.
Very cool tech that could potentially do a lot of good.
However, we're talking about AI and big platforms here, so usual questions apply:
How ethically sourced is the training data for this? Are we talking about billions of hours of audio where 50% of it was from speakers who never consented for their content to be used this way, tagged by third-world workers getting paid a dollar per day? Or did OpenAI suddenly change their morals?
Spotify is moving slowly and carefully for now, but how long do you realistically expect a platform company to leave money on the table? If they can suddenly hit 10x the market by unilaterally flipping a switch on everyone's podcasts, they're just gonna wait until the estimated backlash costs less than the estimated upside. And then what? We've got podcasters waking up to an inbox full of angry Italians cuz of a botched translation? If we don't do this carefully, we have the potential for this tech to build bridges between languages only to immediately set those bridges on fire. And the economic incentives prime us to tiptoe as close to that scenario as possible.