Okay HarperCollins. What, and I can not stress this enough, THE FUCK??? www.thebookseller.com/news/harperc...
HarperCollins is partnering with audio AI company ElevenLabs to create audiobooks for HarperCollins’s foreign language business.
So from a quality perspective this is going to be akin to having the voice of your phone’s navigation app read an entire novel to you? The same monotone voice, the same level of bugginess, mispronunciations, and lack of nuance? Plus translation? What could go wrong? 😑
Us: we like human connection AI: mmm best we can do is a robot
And it’s for backlist non-English market titles so I suspect the pushback will be smaller, because fewer people will know TO push back because they won’t know the things exist in the first place and/or the linguistic area will just be too small to have an impact there. So evil.
Had you seen the Harlequin categories that had AI narration? A whole bunch of them popped up on Hoopla recently. The AI is from Apple books.
For FUCKS sake
I have been out here begging indie authors to hold the line and not buckle and do AI narration, because it was very clear to me that they were going to try to drive a wedge between authors and narrators to peel us away by offering us virtually free audiobooks. (A huge barrier for many indies!)
Boycotting Harper Collins, gotcha. Seriously, we should send angry letter en masse.
Everybody is getting on this. I got an offer from Amazon the other day to join some pilot program where they would have AI do my audiobook for Audible.