This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Honestly, as long as the person whose voice it is gives full permission it's probably one great use for AI.
That being said, you could just hire people who actually know the language to translate.
I am for hiring people who know the language and the target audience. Mainly to avoid AI taking away possible jobs and to avoid something literally translated that either doesn't make sense or ends up being offensive by accident.
You will never ever in any case be able to stop technology from progressing. Instead of fearing the loss of jobs, how about making sure that we can properly handle and integrate AI into our society with everyone benefitting from it?
Stop the defeatist attitude, get politically active and help kick conservatives and fascists into the ditch where they belong.
As long as money's involved, there's no way AI tech benefits society.
That kinda shit will only benefit the wealthy and the owning classes.
So, like... a claim so broad as "As long as money’s involved, there’s no way AI tech benefits society" is obviously untrue, right? Even if we accept a premise like "On the whole, AI will hurt society more than it helps", it's basically just dogma to blanket deny any practical usefulness. Take firearms, for example: they're often strictly controlled, but rarely if ever completely purged -- almost all societies accept that some situations exist where the utility sufficiently justifies the harm.
To be honest, I feel really weird pushing back against this because we seem rather ideologically aligned. I think we both feel that technologies which promote economic development will -- by default -- disproportionately empower those rich and powerful few. With that being said, from an ideological perspective, technological developments are not in fundamental opposition to Marxist philosophy (yes, even technological developments which render some skilled labor obsolete).
On the contrary; if we are to believe that the next step of economic development lies in casting aside class division, then we must necessarily concede that the only way forward is to recruit novel technological developments toward that purpose. It is self-undermining and shortsighted to argue that simply allowing a development will inherently undermine anti-capital interests, because how then could such a system so apparently incompatible with future technologies also claim to itself be the future?
Might as well go back to the fields the with all the other Luddites then.
We live in a capitalist society, every bit of progress benefits the rich first. It's always been like that, it has nothing to do with the AI part.
As the other person said, we're not going to be able to avoid this kind of change and 8 don't think we should want to. There are more podcasts to translate than can possibly be done without AI.
A better use of translators, in my opinion, is as editors. Listen to the AI result while reading the English transcript to fix the types of problems that you mention.
It can be both at the same time - getting a professional voice actor to translate the script, then apply AI magic to have the voices match the original as exactly as possible.
Or instead of hiring people you could use AI and then pocket that money because you're a greedy CEO/shareholder and fuck everyone but yourself.
Ah. So now people can listen to Joe Rogan in the original Russian.
as it was meant to be heard
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
A large language model took a 3 second snippet of a voice and extrapolated from that the whole spoken English lexicon from that voice in a way that was indistinguishable from the real person to banking voice verification algorithms.
We are so far beyond what you think of when we say the word AI, because we replaced the underlying thing that it is without most people realizing it. The speed of large language models progress at current is mind boggling.
These models when shown FMRI data for a patient, can figure out what image the patient is looking at, and then render it. Patient looks at a picture of a giraffe in a jungle, and the model renders it having never before seen a giraffe… from brain scan data, in real time.
Not good enough? The same FMRI data was examined in real time by a large language model while a patient was watching a short movie and asked to think about what they saw in words. The sentence the person thought, was rendered as English sentences by the model, in real time, looking at fMRI data.
That’s a step from reading dreams and that too will happen inside 20 months.
We, are very much there.
I don't think what you're saying is possible. Voxels used in fMRI measure in millimeters (down to one of I recall) and don't allow for such granular analysis. It is possible to 'see' what a person sees but the image doesn't resemble the original too closely.
At least that's what I have learned a few years ago. I'm happy to look at new sources, if you have some though.
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.
Make it stop.
Fuck this whole shit.
What's your beef with this?
In what world does someone who only speaks Spanish being able to listen to and enjoy a podcast that was recorded in English end up being such a terrible thing?
"Broader accessibility of information? No, please make it stop!!"
This is pretty great if the creators get the same cut...
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."
That's going to cause so many lawsuits. Also wonder since the WAG strike finally finished and are creating a contract, if this will affect it?
Why do you think that? It sounds like it's a feature that a Podcaster can choose to use if they want to. It doesn't sound like they are just going to do it to every podcast without permission.
Honestly, as dumb as the AI hype can be, I see this as an actual good use of the tech, but I could be wrong.
Sure, as long as everyone gets paid!
Well they get more people listen to their podcast, more advertising.
Yes exactly, as long as that adds up to the same compensation percentage the original voice actor signed up for then I don't see an issue with this.
I'm almost 100% sure that won't be the case without a fight
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.
Is this good or bad. I can see this being used to steal your voice and use it without your permission.
Assuming that nothing nefarious happens, I can still see this being a problem if the translations aren't top quality. Imagine that speakers of another language are offended or you're embarrassed in front of them because something you said was incorrectly translated; then it's rendered in your voice so it seems you said it.
Handle it just like horror podcasts usually do. Disclaimers before and after the podcast. Disclaimers in the podcast description. Notices in the ToS.
"This podcast has been translated into *your language* with the help of OpenAI. This is an automated service. As such, it may contain transcription and translation errors which may result in dialogue not intended by the original podcaster. Please report errors to *support link here*."
Be more concerned about this being like what Hollywood just pulled, where Spotify includes a usage clause that gives them the rights to the podcaster's voice in perpetuity.
And, it doesn't even need to be wrong. Sometimes very innocent things have a specific meaning or connotation in certain languages. Be it innuendos or euphemisms.
Using 3/5 in connection with Black people would mean basically nothing in Germany, but would perk up ears in the USA. On the other hand 18 and 88 is not that well known in the USA as anything particular, but in Germany you can't have it easily on your car plate, especially if you're from Hamburg (HH).
So you could quite correctly translate things, but they still get a different connotation depending on culture and language.
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 :|
You pay for premium and they're still serving you ads?
Every day I feel better about never having used Spotify.
If it does a good job and people get paid fairly then this seems like a great thing to me.
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.
It seems easy to take this position as a native English speaker, but what if you aren’t proficient in English, perhaps only in a smaller regional language that doesn’t have the same nearly infinite pool of content? This is a potential game changer for that, allowing you to listen to thousands of podcasts you never could before. No jobs were lost because there was never anyone doing the translations in the first place. When viewed this way, it’s an accessibility feature.
Bing bang boom.
I think people are totally steeped in capitalist rhetoric and are completely used to living it. I 100% support creative work and I will die paying humans cold hard cash for their artistic output. But everything else should 100% be automated where it can be with the expectation that humans no longer HAVE to work to be comfortable.
This is the same thing to me as worrying about accountants and HR when a bunch of them got displaced with computers. It disproportionately takes away jobs without equivalent replacements from people that are trained and educated with this specialization in mind, but it also moves us toward a world where we don't have to sell our waking moments to someone else.
It absolutely sucks ass that we aren't already preparing for a post-capitalist or semi-post-capitalist world and people are stressed, hungry, and unsheltered. But every time I see something like this, it feels like we're making some kind of progress toward that because not only does it remove a space for humans to be exploited for labor, but it enables previously-unfathomable levels of accessibility that has been locked behind economic barriers (e.g. hiring people to translate Ologies into Pidgin languages would be totally unprofitable and therefore would almost never happen).
/rant
"A partnership with OpenAI". I stopped reading. Probably shouldn't but god damn.
Does this mean I can listen to my podcasts in Klingon?
Time to get Duolingo out again
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.
Henry Zebrowski in Spanish is going to be something else.
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.
