No More

Being a history buff, I’m always attracted to those Eeewww Choob videos that talk about the events that shaped our world.  But now I look askance at these videos, and in most cases I turn them off after only a few minutes.

The reason?  A.I. narration.

WTF is going on?  How difficult can it be to hire a speaker — an actual human — to read a frigging script, instead of turning the script over to some machine to create a sorta-human voice?

I am, as my Readers will know, something of a stickler for correct speech, be it grammar or spelling (in print, of course), and that sticklishness extends very much, oh very much indeed to the spoken word as well.

When I hear mispronounced words — sometimes with several different pronouncements of the same word during the course of the narration — it irks me as much as would a series of different misspellings of the same word in print in the course of a single article or essay.

So no, I’ve made a decision to ignore any video, no matter how interesting the topic, if it uses that stupid, wooden A.I. nonsense.

I’m irritated almost as much, by the way, by A.I.-generated “photos” or pictures, but when it comes to history, of course, there’s not always a photographic record of the event or of the people involved, so I can sort of deal with it.  Historical re-enaction using actual human beings can be horribly expensive, for not much benefit, so I can get along with phony actors and scenery.

But when it comes to speech?  Ugh, no.  There’s just too much dissonance — I mean, my own dissonance — for me to have any respect for the material, no matter the initial interest.

There it is:  no more A.I. narration for me.  I’d rather just buy a book on the topic.