"I wonder if the whole thing is AI now. Books, audiobooks, everything"
October 21, 2024 5:19 AM   Subscribe

AI Audiobook Narrators in OverDrive and the Issue of Library AI Circulation Policy. Librarian Robin Bradford found that some audiobooks in her library were AI-read. Then she and Smart Bitches, Trashy Books went down a rabbit hole about whether the authors themselves are real.
posted by paduasoy (29 comments total) 29 users marked this as a favorite
 
This is truly the dumbest timeline.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 5:21 AM on October 21, 2024 [7 favorites]


About a year ago, I formally gave up on ever publishing a novel and just write for fun, now. You look at the Kindle self-published pages, and it's nothing but AI, plus a few humans who can't distinguish between its and it's. I don't understand at all who reads this shite, let alone pays for it, but the volume of garbage is so high that it's pointless to try.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 5:36 AM on October 21, 2024 [4 favorites]


I have one of those Amazon Paperwhites with ads on the lockscreen, and while something like 80% of the time it is predictably "fiction you haven't bought by authors you have bought", it occasionally goes into these multiweek stints of showing me something seemingly completely untargeted. It used to be that these stints consisted mostly of near-future military sci-fi thriller stuff (which is not my thing, but it's a real product that Amazon has reason to believe might appeal to someone who wasn't already an active fan), but in recent years it is invariably "books for children with conspicuously AI-generated covers and titles". And I can't help but wonder why. Why would Amazon be eager to highlight that their bookstore is full of terrible shit nobody wants? Are the AI content mills paying for lockscreen ads? If so, how the hell are they profitable?
posted by jackbishop at 5:54 AM on October 21, 2024 [8 favorites]


Are the AI content mills paying for lockscreen ads? If so, how the hell are they profitable?

When they make literally thousands of them they probably occasionally (Although at steadily dropping rates, I imagine) sell them at some rate.
posted by wafehling at 6:06 AM on October 21, 2024


Note that this series began circa 2015 (well before ChatGPT, or GPT-anything) and is apparently of high-enough writing quality that nobody noticed, at least compared to other free Kindle titles. So it's likely more of a writing collective (or content mill) than AI-written.

As for narration, I'm surprised libraries don't have a policy, given non-AI synthesized voices have been common enough for years now. I'd expect any such policy to lean towards allowing these titles with a disclaimer, given the way they make titles more accessible for less (including niche titles or multiple languages which might not be economical to record professional narration for otherwise). The latest generation of text-to-voice is virtually indistinguishable from real narration and capable of impressive, context-sensitive emotional nuance; absent a court ruling them illegal, it would be hard to justify libraries refusing to carry them while keeping older, more noticeable TTS recordings in circulation.
posted by Rhaomi at 6:07 AM on October 21, 2024 [1 favorite]


This is both awful and stupid. There are so many writers who do publish and many many more who could. Don't flood the market with shitty AI books. And a good narrator is an artist! I have listened to some books chosen solely for the narrator. We need both of these professions and we need to value them and pay them. And I say this as someone who enjoys some very formulaic or trashy books and series-- I'm not advocating for only high literature.

I'm glad to have a heads up about these and will be screening more closely. If they are going to exist, I want them clearly labeled and there should be an option to sort them out of my searches-- and for librarians to exclude them when they're purchasing.
posted by carrioncomfort at 6:12 AM on October 21, 2024 [3 favorites]


I seem to remember that a few years back, there was a flurry of fly-by-night ghostwriting sites that popped up, all trying to sell people on "make money fast by hiring our ghostwriters to write anything for you - a blog post, a book, etc." The only problem was that they were claiming that books by the likes of Stephen King or John Scalzi came from them - not that they said that openly, but rather if you went to their "works by our authors" page you saw pictures of some very familiar-looking covers. (Although sometimes they would make claims like CARRIE having been called something totally different, and attributed to Chuck Klosterman or something.) The authors whose work had thus been co-opted immediately slapped them with a whole bunch of cease-and-desist suits and it looked they kind of faded into the woodwork.

....Except maybe they didn't, and just pivoted to AI instead.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 6:22 AM on October 21, 2024 [2 favorites]


My publisher had an AI read the audiobook for my most recent book. Previous title they partnered with another company to have a human read.
I don't know if this one's in libraries yet. At least one readers emailed me to say they listened to the book and realized it was AI after a while.
posted by doctornemo at 6:29 AM on October 21, 2024 [1 favorite]


…plus a few humans who can't distinguish between its and it's.

Right?! Their is far to much of that going on!
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 6:31 AM on October 21, 2024 [8 favorites]


doctornemo, did they ask you first? And how did you think it sounds?
posted by wenestvedt at 6:35 AM on October 21, 2024


I think I saw it here on the blue somewhere, but Folding Ideas made a video in 2022 about this grift of paying taskrabbit / mechanical turk / on demand -type copywriters to churn out SEO-optimised 'books' with a view to getting them narrated and uploaded to Amazon and Audible. The aim was to amass hundreds or thousands of them as cheaply as possible, and to cash in by collecting the long-tail residuals from all the algorithmically generated 'if you like this you'll love this' downloads that people are encouraged to make. The contrepreneurial idea: own a swarmp of IP, make bank. Except it doesn't really work.
posted by Joeruckus at 6:35 AM on October 21, 2024 [5 favorites]


Someone realized that enough humans have bad enough taste that they can monetize auto-generated slop. Is it so much worse than human-generated garbage? Is it elitist to want people to enjoy higher quality writing than they do?
posted by rikschell at 6:39 AM on October 21, 2024


This same sort of thing burned through the foraging community earlier this year, with AI generated books telling people to eat poison mushrooms, and giving them nonsense advice on how to make toxic things edible.

This sort of slop is going to get someone killed.
posted by stilgar at 6:54 AM on October 21, 2024 [10 favorites]


The question is, can Blake Pierce identify all the images containing BICYCLES?
posted by biogeo at 7:34 AM on October 21, 2024 [3 favorites]


I'm really curious about Blake Pierce. He's written over 700(!) books, and they're not horrible? I pulled up Girl, Alone (the first in a 25 book series) in the Amazon store, and it's 211 pages. I have a hard time believing that a LLM could write a 200+ page book without going off the rails at some point. I could maybe see AI generated plots ghostwritten by starving writers, but could you really make money this way?
And while it's free on Kindle, apparently there's a hardback edition? I'm curious if it's a real print run, or print on demand. Not enough to pay money, though.
posted by Spike Glee at 7:52 AM on October 21, 2024 [2 favorites]


Holy hell, the "ghostwriters" thing was more recent than I thought.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:07 AM on October 21, 2024 [1 favorite]


I recently (with a friend) published our first print-on-demand book and the Amazon bots kept flagging it for "verification issues" (one of the 6 illustrators who provided a custom graphic for one of our poems is named "Tom Sale," but the bots didn't believe a human being would actually be named something like SALE, so after uploading his driver's license, a photo of him holding up his name handwritten on a piece of paper and some other dumb runaround stuff, after 12 days of non-human "quality" reviews, they finally released our book for publication.

Truly, the dumbest timeline.

As far as audiobook narration goes, I can't say enough good things about Finty Williams, daughter of Dame Judi Dench, who narrated the audiobook version of The Girl With All the Gifts. She's jaw-droppingly talented.
posted by Unicorn on the cob at 8:18 AM on October 21, 2024 [8 favorites]


NYT has an "automated voice" setup for some (not all) of their articles. I've put it on a few times just to see how it works, and it is eerie. I don't think you would have any idea this wasn't a person. Of course, these are news articles that are intended to be read in a flat affect. I don't think that would be desirable for most creative work.

I'm also irritated that NYT would spend, I'm sure, a small fortune on this technology rather than just paying a voice actor to read a fucking article. It's not as though every article has this feature; I presume some algorithm selects the articles, and it seems like it's maybe one in ten. You could pay a few people less than $100k annually to read news articles.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 8:24 AM on October 21, 2024 [1 favorite]


I've listened to a few generated voices on Netgalley - where they clearly state that the voice is not the final version before you even request it. This makes sense so the early reviewers don't rate the book poorly for the robot voice. I wouldn't be surprised to see some publishers foregoing that as an experiment once they are using some better voices.

I am listening to Sammy Keyes, a ya series of 18 books that started in 1998 on Libby right now. It was obviously ripped from CDs, since every few chapters it says "this is the end of the CD. The story continues on the next CD." But there are also audio artifacts like static at the end of two different books that I've heard so far, so they aren't using the master audio tracks for every book. I had the same experience with another 1990s series from Australia on Libby, but I suspect that was actually a cassette tape. I much prefer this authentic noise to a robot, even if the robot wasn't stealing work from humans.
posted by soelo at 8:26 AM on October 21, 2024


(In NYT's defense, an automated voice does mean that if an article is revised, as breaking news articles often are, there is no worry that voice and text won't match. I still think it's creepy!)
posted by kittens for breakfast at 8:28 AM on October 21, 2024 [2 favorites]


I read some Blake Pierce reviews. Going by the reviews, Blake uses she/her pronouns. I am not sure how much I should care about pronouns for someone who is a collective of ghostwriters or an LLM, and the author bios seem pretty scrupulous about not gendering Blake Pierce.

The reviews in general are like, "this is pretty good, but there are a lot of mistakes, and the name of the main character changed halfway through. Three stars." I am encouraged by how forgiving my fellow humans are of things which are crap. But also, wow, a review of less than five stars really does mean "this is terrible!"
posted by surlyben at 8:34 AM on October 21, 2024 [7 favorites]


Libro.fm is including this stuff? That annoys me and I have always found them responsive in the past. I may need to write an email.

I also listened to a recent article from the New Yorker that had been recorded and I found the narrator's correction of their own pronunciation of a word or two to be comforting. I don't know if this is an official recording from the magazine or if it was done by a fan. But I am sure they'll start putting those human speech patterns into the audio tracks now.
posted by soelo at 8:41 AM on October 21, 2024


Why would Amazon be eager to highlight that their bookstore is full of terrible shit nobody wants?
Paid placement.
I am so sick of shitty ads, which is the vast majority. Even when I want to buy something, it's stupidly difficult. Amzn and fb and surely all the others just want ad revenue, and do not care if ads are junk, scams, fake. LL Bean has a persistent problem with fake LLBean ads of fb. You order at great prices from llbeancom.sale.klasgoifsjkl.ru and your money is gone and you will never get anything. Fb could stop this crap but they don't bother.
posted by theora55 at 9:15 AM on October 21, 2024 [3 favorites]


doctornemo, did they ask you first? And how did you think it sounds?

wenestvedt, my publisher did ask. I agreed, partly to get a bigger audience for the book (about climate change and higher education), partly because I research AI.

I listened to about one hour and most of it sounded decent. When I listened closely, there were a few hiccups.
posted by doctornemo at 10:22 AM on October 21, 2024


This is crazy. I hate it. I'm gonna look into it. I also suspect this is one of MANY MANY such scams.
posted by BlackLeotardFront at 11:33 AM on October 21, 2024


This very interesting comment contains a statement regarding a copyright claim, describing a method which uses AI extensively but also has significant involvement from the author ('author'?).

I guess that would work? (Of course, such a description proves nothing.)
posted by demi-octopus at 12:40 PM on October 21, 2024 [1 favorite]


And I can't help but wonder why. Why would Amazon be eager to highlight that their bookstore is full of terrible shit nobody wants?

You have to look at through the lens of spam economics: is it profitable to send out millions of spam emails just to generate a single "sale"?

Yes. Yes it is.

AI has just opened up spam to new mediums: books, journalism, fake reviews, fake social media comments, fake social media sites, podcasts... entirely new areas have been opened up for enshittification as spam economies because of LLMs.
posted by AlSweigart at 1:37 PM on October 21, 2024 [4 favorites]


It's so weird that the typical published author's narrative involves years of finding an agent, endless rewrites, years of rejection, shelving that book and starting another, finding a new agent, more years of rejection…but someone publishes an AI book and people are reading it, listening to it, and reviewing it. It's crazy.
posted by jabah at 10:41 AM on October 22, 2024


I'll have to ask my local library if they have a policy on this yet. In the process, I'll probably be quoting this comment from user hapax, who found lots of AI-narrated books in their library's Hoopla catalogue:

"As to those who say, “eh, if people are reading them, what’s the harm?”, the harms are these:
1. The extruding of these works (I do not say “writing” or “narrating” causes incalculable harm to the planet, as noted above.
2. The word-extrusion-machines operate on a plagiarism model – that is, stealing the real work of thousands (millions) of real humans, without their permission and without compensation
3. Every dollar of Your Tax Money spent on these fake books with fake narrators goes to enriching a scam artist and grifter, and not to supporting real authors and real narrators. But as “publishers” flood the market with cheap fakes, the real artists will not be able to make a living, and soon the fakes are all that will be available."
posted by cybercoitus interruptus at 5:01 PM on October 23, 2024 [1 favorite]


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