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Missing from this article: any quotes from striking actors or union organizers actually saying that they oppose Project Gutenberg's efforts specifically. AI is

Missing from this article: any quotes from striking actors or union organizers actually saying that they oppose Project Gutenberg's efforts specifically. AI is one part of why actors are striking, and their fears are pretty directed at studios and employers. In particular they're worried about contract clauses that grant studios perpetual rights to use their likenesses and voices to train AIs that studios hope will replace them. It is a convenient narrative to phrase that as if they are opposed to AI entirely or that they are opposed to accessibility or voice-over technology. In reality even if actors were fully embracing AI-generated content, the terms being proposed by studios for ownership over training data and unlimited monopolization of actor voices and performances would still be egregious. There have been conflicts about text-to-speech efforts in ebooks before, but it's not clear to me that the majority of actors have any problem with stilted, lifeless text-to-speech designed by a nonprofit to increase ebook accessibility. And maybe actors will be furious at Gutenberg, I don't know. But that's the point, a good way of figuring out whether or not striking actors are mad at Gutenberg would be to talk to them directly, which this article doesn't do. What I'm saying is, in the middle of a highly public strike, be careful of uncritically accepting the word of writers who are not part of that strike when they tell you what the strike is about and what the people striking believe and want.

WalterBright 3y ago
Screen and voice actors have already put out of business legions of live performers, such as burlesque shows, stage shows, minstrels, etc.
- danShumway 3y ago
  You're making the same mistake the article is making. There is a huge effort going on to frame striking actors as if they're anti-technology and to turn what should be a conversation about clearly unacceptable studio terms around IP rights into a philosophical debate about the nature of progress. If the union organizers all come out and start condemning Project Gutenberg then fine, we can have a conversation about Gutenberg then. But as far as I can tell online, that hasn't happened yet. And even if we do end up having that conversation, it's not at all clear that striking actors are going to feel the same way about nonprofit accessibility tools as they would feel about purely profit-motivated projects for Amazon books or (more relevant to the actual strike going on) movie studios. These conversations oversimplify what actor demands actually are. Before you get into a giant argument, check to make sure that the argument is actually happening and isn't just the result of a single Internet article by a single writer. Made-up conflicts online started with "people on Twitter say" junk pieces that would quote single-digit follower Twitter accounts as if they represented a consensus, and have now moved past that into pieces just kind of confidently stating what demographics believe with literally no sources at all. If union organizers have a problem with Project Gutenberg, they will say something about it at some point. And maybe they will! But I can't find a source on that yet; as far as I can tell from some quick searches we have one isolated article online framing this as a major conflict with unions even though there are zero actual union organizers in the article saying that it's a conflict.

WalterBright 3y ago

Screen and voice actors have already put out of business legions of live performers, such as burlesque shows, stage shows, minstrels, etc.

danShumway 3y ago
You're making the same mistake the article is making. There is a huge effort going on to frame striking actors as if they're anti-technology and to turn what should be a conversation about clearly unacceptable studio terms around IP rights into a philosophical debate about the nature of progress. If the union organizers all come out and start condemning Project Gutenberg then fine, we can have a conversation about Gutenberg then. But as far as I can tell online, that hasn't happened yet. And even if we do end up having that conversation, it's not at all clear that striking actors are going to feel the same way about nonprofit accessibility tools as they would feel about purely profit-motivated projects for Amazon books or (more relevant to the actual strike going on) movie studios. These conversations oversimplify what actor demands actually are. Before you get into a giant argument, check to make sure that the argument is actually happening and isn't just the result of a single Internet article by a single writer. Made-up conflicts online started with "people on Twitter say" junk pieces that would quote single-digit follower Twitter accounts as if they represented a consensus, and have now moved past that into pieces just kind of confidently stating what demographics believe with literally no sources at all. If union organizers have a problem with Project Gutenberg, they will say something about it at some point. And maybe they will! But I can't find a source on that yet; as far as I can tell from some quick searches we have one isolated article online framing this as a major conflict with unions even though there are zero actual union organizers in the article saying that it's a conflict.