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.
Same for me, I simply cannot stand AI voiced/narrated videos.
Same here, the minute I hear that AI voice I click away. The other super annoying thing, say I see a clip of the action scene from some movie I remember. I start to watch and instead of just showing the clip with the movie sound track, there’s an AI voice describing the action as it happens – “The cowboy sees the indian, he pauses and then pulls his rifle from the saddle, he carefully aims …” at which point I’m clicking away again. Incredibly stupid.
Amen to that %&*(*%#$ copyright infringement clickbait.
Didn’t take long for me to get fed up with everything AI.
Like, the 2nd time I heard/seen it was already too much.
And that shits everywhere now, and fake/untruthful stuff is the easiest way to chase people away.
Over at daily timewaster there is a constant back n forth about all the fake stuff CW posts there.
Liars defend it and the truthers kick it in the ass.
100% on this. It’s always the same shitty cadence, inflection, etc. Trying to sound real.
The overall effect is to make their historical presentation look completely made up.
It’d sound better if they used the tinny “Bell Bitch” voice from bitd.
At best, AI dumbs us all down. Worse case, it will drive some to madness.
Preach it, brother! Even worse are the completely fictional AI “stories”. You’ll be following along and the little “wait a minute” light will go on. “That can’t possibly be true!”, you’ll realize. AI Slop is the term.
Brace yourselves people. You are seeing, if we don’t get clobbered with an ELE ,
the demise of computers as we know them.
I dislike the AI voice overs as much as anyone especially the butchering of proper names
and common verbs, nouns etc.
Start with keeping in mind that there is no such thing as ‘artificial intelligence’. It’s a marketing gimmick/term and nothing more. The machines are still using plain old zeros and ones for operation, programs and programming etc. and you can’t find an accurate all, encompassing, definition of ‘intelligence’ so exactly how do you imitate something that you cannot even define ?
What is already here and growing, dangerously, is that you cannot trust the damn machines any more !!
What has made them so practical was consistency. Same answer for the same question regardless of machine or type.
This is no longer true. We all know it. Well, lot of us anyway. We simply cannot trust what we are told about ANYTHING !
Someone, long ago, told me, ‘don’t trust a thing you hear and only about half of what you see’. We are at the beginning of a era of ‘don’t trust ANYTHING’
Not just yes, but hell yes.
The mangled pronunciation and syntax are bad enough. For those of us who have been around long enough to have read books written by, and spoken face to face at length with those who were there, hearing the AI state historical “facts” that are just plain wrong is like fingernails on a chalkboard. It is all just drivel and gruel. Just add water and serve cold.
“When I hear mispronounced words — sometimes with several different pronouncements…”
Not “pronouncements”, Kim, it’s “pronunciations” in this context. Sorry to hoist you on your own petard.
I agree about AI narration, although I can think of one use case where it is acceptable, and that is in order to speak/pronounce a language that the author cannot, or cannot sufficiently well for broadcast use. I watch a YT creator whose native tongue is not English, and he uses an English-speaking AI voice to narrate his videos. I think that is OK.
> How difficult can it be to hire a speaker — an actual human — to read a frigging script,
For most youtubers it’s not “hard”, it’s “out of the question”. The economics of Youtube do not favor long-form content, and the longer the content the worse it’s going to be from a ROI perspective.
So it’s very likely that the choice is “Use AI voices, or not at all”. To which I agree “not at all”.
Now, for short form content, it’s laziness and a desire to make as much money as possible on as little effort as possible.