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This ship has sailed and worrying about AI copying a particular actor or voice of a professional actor is virtually meaningless long term. AI will enable the c

This ship has sailed and worrying about AI copying a particular actor or voice of a professional actor is virtually meaningless long term. AI will enable the creation of voices and people who never were and even the corpus of people used to train the AI wont need to include actors. If you read books out loud or are an extra you don't and honestly shouldn't expect an income from it and this problem stands to get worse not better. These is little political will to implement UBI so best get to learning a new profession whilst audio books transition to tools produce dozens of professional virtual voice actors for 19.99 or free if you dont mind user unfriendly open source you have to set up yourself.

namaria 3y ago
> If you read books out loud or are an extra you don't and honestly shouldn't expect an income from it It's the other way around. If people cannot expect an income from doing work, the work will be left undone. Or it will be done poorly by cut rate profiteers.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  Maybe we should all go back to hand making our own soap, too, instead of having cut-rate profiteering industry do it. https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/home/cleaning/a20705805/how-to-make-homemade-soap/ https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/home/cleaning/a20705805/how... We should also go back to making our own thread, weaving our own cloth, and sewing our own clothes. Naaah.
  - namaria 3y ago
    I see you opted for a reduction ad absurdum. Never mind comparing manufacture of soap bars to creative output of voice actors.
    - WalterBright 3y ago
      Nearly all jobs today were enabled by the automation of previous activities.
- michaelmrose 3y ago
  There wont be much space for people doing this for work for money in 10 years. There is no reason to believe the quality of automation will continue to be poor any more than we would have been reasonable to believe that chess engines would continue to perform poorly.
  - namaria 3y ago
    I hadn't noticed chess engines had replaced human players. Do we have more or less professional human players today than back when Kasparov lost that historic game?
    - michaelmrose 3y ago
      The point is that primitive engines were replaced by more advanced engines in time that surpassed humans first running on super computers and now on laptops. Computers haven't replaced chess players because chess is recreation it is an end unto itself not a means to an end. With voice acting it is the means toward an end which is the finished audio file which can be licenced to consumers for money. The means costs about 300 usd per hour of finished audio whereas there is every reason to believe software can drive the per unit cost so low its impossible for a human to make a living whilst still being profitable. Eg most of the work could end up open source leaving someone to provide 2 people to burn 6 months to produce millions of hours of audio. Lets value their time ar 150k per year and suppose they produce 3 million hours the labor cost is roughly 5c per hour. They can probably afford to offer 4.99 per hour while being wildly profitable even after other costs are considered. A human being doing a dozen hours a week wouldn't be able to afford a good enough tent to impress the other hobos.
      - namaria 3y ago
        I get that you think software can only improve because it evidently gets more efficient and fast over time and that means anything humans do for money is liable to be replaced by computers. What I think you fail to realize is that better technology enables people to become better at what they want to do. There are now more _professional_ chess players than in the 90s. Because people like to play chess? That's circular reasoning isn't it? People can train and learn from software, with the end goal of being better players and the economics of the game have because of this absorbed more people. When you take a snapshot of a field of human activity and imagine the next one, you guess there will be less people and more machines. This is naive and unfounded in history. There are now more fashion designers and tailors and a more complex sartorial economy than before robotic looms. Even accounting for population growth. There won't be less voice actors in a generation because of robotic voice acting. There will be a more diverse and more complex economy around producing voice content. Predicting machines will replace people is predicated on a industrial view of the economy where people are either capitalists or workers and capitalists vie to use capital to reduce labor costs. In practice, many trade-offs apply, and often the introduction of technology changes dynamics in unpredictable ways. Not everything in the economy is some form of inefficient manual labor that can be profitably replaced by a box. This whole "entitled workers shouldn't expect to deserve an income" smacks of elitist propaganda. Technology changes culture and economy in complex and nuanced ways, and the caricature of workers mad at clever engineers robbing them of cushy jobs is usually just a front for selling some mass produced lower grade substitute. And the people working on the high quality stuff don't get replaced by robots. They learn how to use the technology to innovate and add more value, out-competing these sorts. Take the auto industry for example. They went heavily into robotics for decades, automated welding heavily and raced to the bottom culminating in a heavy series of recalls in early 00s. Meanwhile, skilled welders have become some of the highest payed industrial workers and what did the auto industry do to climb up the value ladder again? Crammed their cars full of non-robot made software.

namaria 3y ago

> If you read books out loud or are an extra you don't and honestly shouldn't expect an income from it It's the other way around. If people cannot expect an income from doing work, the work will be left undone. Or it will be done poorly by cut rate profiteers.

WalterBright 3y ago
Maybe we should all go back to hand making our own soap, too, instead of having cut-rate profiteering industry do it. https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/home/cleaning/a20705805/how-to-make-homemade-soap/ https://www.goodhousekeeping.com/home/cleaning/a20705805/how... We should also go back to making our own thread, weaving our own cloth, and sewing our own clothes. Naaah.
- namaria 3y ago
  I see you opted for a reduction ad absurdum. Never mind comparing manufacture of soap bars to creative output of voice actors.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    Nearly all jobs today were enabled by the automation of previous activities.
michaelmrose 3y ago
There wont be much space for people doing this for work for money in 10 years. There is no reason to believe the quality of automation will continue to be poor any more than we would have been reasonable to believe that chess engines would continue to perform poorly.
- namaria 3y ago
  I hadn't noticed chess engines had replaced human players. Do we have more or less professional human players today than back when Kasparov lost that historic game?
  - michaelmrose 3y ago
    The point is that primitive engines were replaced by more advanced engines in time that surpassed humans first running on super computers and now on laptops. Computers haven't replaced chess players because chess is recreation it is an end unto itself not a means to an end. With voice acting it is the means toward an end which is the finished audio file which can be licenced to consumers for money. The means costs about 300 usd per hour of finished audio whereas there is every reason to believe software can drive the per unit cost so low its impossible for a human to make a living whilst still being profitable. Eg most of the work could end up open source leaving someone to provide 2 people to burn 6 months to produce millions of hours of audio. Lets value their time ar 150k per year and suppose they produce 3 million hours the labor cost is roughly 5c per hour. They can probably afford to offer 4.99 per hour while being wildly profitable even after other costs are considered. A human being doing a dozen hours a week wouldn't be able to afford a good enough tent to impress the other hobos.
    - namaria 3y ago
      I get that you think software can only improve because it evidently gets more efficient and fast over time and that means anything humans do for money is liable to be replaced by computers. What I think you fail to realize is that better technology enables people to become better at what they want to do. There are now more _professional_ chess players than in the 90s. Because people like to play chess? That's circular reasoning isn't it? People can train and learn from software, with the end goal of being better players and the economics of the game have because of this absorbed more people. When you take a snapshot of a field of human activity and imagine the next one, you guess there will be less people and more machines. This is naive and unfounded in history. There are now more fashion designers and tailors and a more complex sartorial economy than before robotic looms. Even accounting for population growth. There won't be less voice actors in a generation because of robotic voice acting. There will be a more diverse and more complex economy around producing voice content. Predicting machines will replace people is predicated on a industrial view of the economy where people are either capitalists or workers and capitalists vie to use capital to reduce labor costs. In practice, many trade-offs apply, and often the introduction of technology changes dynamics in unpredictable ways. Not everything in the economy is some form of inefficient manual labor that can be profitably replaced by a box. This whole "entitled workers shouldn't expect to deserve an income" smacks of elitist propaganda. Technology changes culture and economy in complex and nuanced ways, and the caricature of workers mad at clever engineers robbing them of cushy jobs is usually just a front for selling some mass produced lower grade substitute. And the people working on the high quality stuff don't get replaced by robots. They learn how to use the technology to innovate and add more value, out-competing these sorts. Take the auto industry for example. They went heavily into robotics for decades, automated welding heavily and raced to the bottom culminating in a heavy series of recalls in early 00s. Meanwhile, skilled welders have become some of the highest payed industrial workers and what did the auto industry do to climb up the value ladder again? Crammed their cars full of non-robot made software.