521
Spotify is going to clone podcasters’ voices — and translate them to other languages
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
521 points (96.3% liked)
Technology
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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.
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.
You'd better get into the factory with the other 1984 drones then. 🤷
We all can play that stupid game. Theft and copyright infringement aren't progress.
Read the article dude, it's the exact opposite of theft and copyright infringement.
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?
Unless, you know, it's properly regulated and stuff. Regulation works through laws. Laws are passed by the government. The government is elected by the people.
So get the proper people into government.
That's naive and delusional. At least in the USA, there's no chance of such regulations coming about, regardless of who is put in power. The RNC and DNC both are far more swayed by the money of those eliminating their work force than the plight of the worker. That isn't changing any time soon.
I'll eat my hat if they pass a law that actually protects workers and bans use of AI to replace human jobs.
And now refer back to my first comment, let that defeatist attitude go, and work on getting those things changed. If you were right, we'd still be living under kings and owning classical slaves ;)
I'm not saying it's easy or quick, I'm saying that your thinking makes it reality because you just accept getting assfucked... Which is exactly "their" goal.
Exactly, so just spread your asscheeks and accept it!
And controlled by the wealthy. You don't really think your local representative cares what you think, do you? Because that would be laughably naive.
They care what their lobbyists and major donors think.
First of all that is a very simplistic and therefore incomplete view of the things. Second of all, that's why you work on getting people there who do care and want to fix that.
Uh, no. You are not all powerful and abusive technology is not an inevitability we have to submit to. We'll never submit to garbage that steals shit from people.
The AI doesn't steal anything, the people creating it do. This is something that can and should and must be regulated.
To add my personal opinion to that, I don't think there is a problem with models being trained on all possible data, but it must not be used by a single company to profit some few people. It must be available to anyone and everyone, since it learned from anyone and everyone. We all learn from others and AI is no different - the problem is in the centralization and further abuse of its power.
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.
If it was feasible to do that we would've been doing it already.
An AI makes to cost effective to translate audio for an audience of just a few people.
In cases where it has been cost effective to pay a translator in the past I expect it will continue to be so. I'm aware that AI generated audio is pretty good, but translations are often pretty poor.
Just throwing this in here because it reminded me of it.
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.
I mean.
Would you not like to hear the OG voice but in your language? Movies dubbed in Spanish sound straight up awful to me because the voice actors sound wonky compared to the original.
Not everything has to be about a greedy CEO, sometimes the proposal could actually be good if done right. We seriously need to chill with this narrative in every fucking thread.
Assume billionaire is greedy unless proven otherwise.
It sounds like you have a problem with tax rates more than the technology. Are we also fed up with being able to translate web pages with a browser extension?
Yeah this must be opt-in only.
If it isn't the amount of backlash will be insane