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I guess this is more of a case of garbage in - garbage out. The original sentence itself is not well-structured. But people who write like that and don't edit i

I guess this is more of a case of garbage in - garbage out. The original sentence itself is not well-structured. But people who write like that and don't edit it; won't care of how the AI reads it. I don't feel like this is a product for carefully producing audiobooks, but to create them by the pound, so to speak. I'd say it's a move for the "make your own business through audiobooks" people [1] -- very strange for Apple. [1]: I didn't know this audience existed until I saw this video on it (and the cons that happen) from Dan Olson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=biYciU1uiUw

ClassyJacket 4y ago
I can understand that sentence fine, I don't see anything wrong with it.
- dbspin 4y ago
  Writer here, it's a terrible sentence. "I know Bill carried within him deep currents of spiritual yearning that he found easiest to express through the beauty he saw in all places wild." "Deep currents of spiritual yearning" is both cliched and unspecific / unclear. "That" is superfluous. It's unclear how Bill is expressing the beauty he sees, and the sentence structure implies he's somehow responsible for the natural beauty. "All places wild" is wilfully awkward and anachronistic. There are countless better ways to say the same thing. For example the tone would be similar and the sentence more concise just to say: 'When Bill spoke of the beauty of nature, I could sense it inspired spiritual feelings in him.' Or simply: Natural beauty inspired in Bill a yearning for connection to something spiritual. Neither are great - because the central thought is unclear. Writing is to a large extent the process of expressing a thought or feeling. Clarifying exactly what one wants to say is a central part of writing and editing. The author seems to have failed to clearly define their idea or emotion, so its expression is decorated rather than clarified however you phrase it.
  - gbourne 4y ago
    > "That" is superfluous. I always use the trick when I write of reading the sentence without the "that"...still makes sense then you don't need "that". Mostly.
  - bottled_poe 4y ago
    > Writing is to a large extent the process of expressing a thought or feeling Neither of which we believe a machine to be capable of conceiving.
  - jtbayly 4y ago
    It doesn’t matter if the sentence is terrible writing. It can still be easily read out loud correctly, but not by this computer program.
  - botro 4y ago
    Could you do Hemingway, McCarthy and Joyce next? It's untenable they wrote 'unspecific / unclear / superfluous / awkward / anachronistic' language such that our robots cannot render to speech.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - defen 4y ago
      They write literary fiction, though. The selected passage is listed under "Nonfiction/Self-development"
      - TheCoelacanth 4y ago
        "The Distant Shore: Stories of Love and Faith in the Afterlife" It's a book of stories about her dead husband. Non-fiction, yes, but it's not exactly "How to Lose 10 Pounds in 10 Days".
  - drcongo 4y ago
    Mind if I ask where you're from? While not really adding anything or altering the meaning (so technically it could be called superfluous), removing it here to my British brain makes the sentence sound lazy and I was definitely taught in school that it should be there. I do also agree that the sentence is terribly written in general though.
leokennis 4y ago
To me this feels like the automated video slideshows that Apple Photos (and undoubtedly Google Photos) makes for you. Perfectly fine, but indeed even on a casual watch you notice mistakes/imperfections you'd never make if you were producing such slideshow manually. But that's the thing...is "perfection" worth 3 hours of video editing for something you casually consume? I think almost any audiobook listener will vastly prefer a serviceable but imperfect audiobook when compared with no audiobook at all.
- paulryanrogers 4y ago
  Agreed. I bought an old Kindle for traveling because I could use its TTS to listen to ebooks. Now that's a common feature of most reader apps, yet at the time it was rare and even newer Kindles had dropped TTS.
- klondike_klive 4y ago
  I find those slideshows unintentionally hilarious - ten photos of my kid interspersed with a flash photo of the back of the washing machine and some cable that's hanging down underneath my car, an accidental screen grab of a text message, all treated with the same importance and jaunty library soundtrack.
  - smugma 4y ago
    This made me LOL, as I’ve had this happen many times. But much less so in the past 2 years, around the time iOS Photos started integrating with Apple Music.
    - klondike_klive 4y ago
      Actually now you come to mention it I haven't noticed it very recently - maybe I've stopped looking at those suggested slideshows, maybe I've turned a setting off without realising it.
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  > But that's the thing...is "perfection" worth 3 hours of video editing for something you casually consume? Any book of any length took countless hours to write and edit. Yes, I think it's worth a bit of extra time for a human to go through and read the thing aloud. If the alternative really is no audiobook at all... okay, I guess something is better than nothing. But on the whole, I'd like publishers to just record more audiobooks, and I'm concerned this technology will result in fewer "real" audiobooks being produced.
apocalypstyx 4y ago
>But people who write like that and don't edit it; won't care of how the AI reads it. Now human language, limited as it already is, is to be is to be humbled before machines that humans have also invented. In our inability to create a machine capable of doing cognitively what humans do, we prefer that humans function as if they had been lobotomized, in deference to our crude machines. We have built god, and god is stupid, and we bow before him because god has been created, once again, in the image of man.
andrepd 4y ago
"Our algorithm isn't stupid, it's the literature which is wrong" is not something I expected to read today.
- AstixAndBelix 4y ago
  Have you ever read a written passage out loud and failed because the text was too contrived and the nature of the intonation only became apparent after re-reading the sentence multiple times? I have, plenty of times. And in most of those times I got really angry at the author for writing "wrong". So yes, to me saying that the literature is wrong is nothing unexpected.
  - andrepd 4y ago
    It depends. Is it technical writing? Then I agree with you. But literature is meant to make you feel a certain way, to paint a mood or a picture, or even to experiment with language. The "AI" has trouble with that because it's fundamentally a machine for recombining already existing information.
- cprecioso 4y ago
  It’s more like “the algorithm is stupid, so it can’t fix bad literature in its brain like humans do”

ClassyJacket 4y ago

I can understand that sentence fine, I don't see anything wrong with it.

dbspin 4y ago
Writer here, it's a terrible sentence. "I know Bill carried within him deep currents of spiritual yearning that he found easiest to express through the beauty he saw in all places wild." "Deep currents of spiritual yearning" is both cliched and unspecific / unclear. "That" is superfluous. It's unclear how Bill is expressing the beauty he sees, and the sentence structure implies he's somehow responsible for the natural beauty. "All places wild" is wilfully awkward and anachronistic. There are countless better ways to say the same thing. For example the tone would be similar and the sentence more concise just to say: 'When Bill spoke of the beauty of nature, I could sense it inspired spiritual feelings in him.' Or simply: Natural beauty inspired in Bill a yearning for connection to something spiritual. Neither are great - because the central thought is unclear. Writing is to a large extent the process of expressing a thought or feeling. Clarifying exactly what one wants to say is a central part of writing and editing. The author seems to have failed to clearly define their idea or emotion, so its expression is decorated rather than clarified however you phrase it.
- gbourne 4y ago
  > "That" is superfluous. I always use the trick when I write of reading the sentence without the "that"...still makes sense then you don't need "that". Mostly.
- bottled_poe 4y ago
  > Writing is to a large extent the process of expressing a thought or feeling Neither of which we believe a machine to be capable of conceiving.
- jtbayly 4y ago
  It doesn’t matter if the sentence is terrible writing. It can still be easily read out loud correctly, but not by this computer program.
- botro 4y ago
  Could you do Hemingway, McCarthy and Joyce next? It's untenable they wrote 'unspecific / unclear / superfluous / awkward / anachronistic' language such that our robots cannot render to speech.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - defen 4y ago
    They write literary fiction, though. The selected passage is listed under "Nonfiction/Self-development"
    - TheCoelacanth 4y ago
      "The Distant Shore: Stories of Love and Faith in the Afterlife" It's a book of stories about her dead husband. Non-fiction, yes, but it's not exactly "How to Lose 10 Pounds in 10 Days".
- drcongo 4y ago
  Mind if I ask where you're from? While not really adding anything or altering the meaning (so technically it could be called superfluous), removing it here to my British brain makes the sentence sound lazy and I was definitely taught in school that it should be there. I do also agree that the sentence is terribly written in general though.

leokennis 4y ago

To me this feels like the automated video slideshows that Apple Photos (and undoubtedly Google Photos) makes for you. Perfectly fine, but indeed even on a casual watch you notice mistakes/imperfections you'd never make if you were producing such slideshow manually. But that's the thing...is "perfection" worth 3 hours of video editing for something you casually consume? I think almost any audiobook listener will vastly prefer a serviceable but imperfect audiobook when compared with no audiobook at all.

paulryanrogers 4y ago
Agreed. I bought an old Kindle for traveling because I could use its TTS to listen to ebooks. Now that's a common feature of most reader apps, yet at the time it was rare and even newer Kindles had dropped TTS.
klondike_klive 4y ago
I find those slideshows unintentionally hilarious - ten photos of my kid interspersed with a flash photo of the back of the washing machine and some cable that's hanging down underneath my car, an accidental screen grab of a text message, all treated with the same importance and jaunty library soundtrack.
- smugma 4y ago
  This made me LOL, as I’ve had this happen many times. But much less so in the past 2 years, around the time iOS Photos started integrating with Apple Music.
  - klondike_klive 4y ago
    Actually now you come to mention it I haven't noticed it very recently - maybe I've stopped looking at those suggested slideshows, maybe I've turned a setting off without realising it.
Wowfunhappy 4y ago
> But that's the thing...is "perfection" worth 3 hours of video editing for something you casually consume? Any book of any length took countless hours to write and edit. Yes, I think it's worth a bit of extra time for a human to go through and read the thing aloud. If the alternative really is no audiobook at all... okay, I guess something is better than nothing. But on the whole, I'd like publishers to just record more audiobooks, and I'm concerned this technology will result in fewer "real" audiobooks being produced.

apocalypstyx 4y ago

>But people who write like that and don't edit it; won't care of how the AI reads it. Now human language, limited as it already is, is to be is to be humbled before machines that humans have also invented. In our inability to create a machine capable of doing cognitively what humans do, we prefer that humans function as if they had been lobotomized, in deference to our crude machines. We have built god, and god is stupid, and we bow before him because god has been created, once again, in the image of man.

andrepd 4y ago

"Our algorithm isn't stupid, it's the literature which is wrong" is not something I expected to read today.

AstixAndBelix 4y ago
Have you ever read a written passage out loud and failed because the text was too contrived and the nature of the intonation only became apparent after re-reading the sentence multiple times? I have, plenty of times. And in most of those times I got really angry at the author for writing "wrong". So yes, to me saying that the literature is wrong is nothing unexpected.
- andrepd 4y ago
  It depends. Is it technical writing? Then I agree with you. But literature is meant to make you feel a certain way, to paint a mood or a picture, or even to experiment with language. The "AI" has trouble with that because it's fundamentally a machine for recombining already existing information.
cprecioso 4y ago
It’s more like “the algorithm is stupid, so it can’t fix bad literature in its brain like humans do”