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Amazon’s Alexa+ Now Produces AI-Generated ‘Podcasts’ Featuring Chats Between Two Robot ‘Co-Hosts’ (variety.com)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/fuck_ai@lemmy.world
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Brought to you by Amazon.
For those who thought listening to two voices having a discussion was too human.
If anybody knows inhumane, it's Amazon!

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[–] 5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

I guess the nasty thing isn't replacing the anchors. They're just reading from the teleprompter at that point. It'd make me a bit uncomfortable to listen to a bad AI voice and watch an uncanney avatar, but that's not dangerous. However, the problematic part is replacing the journalism behind it. And that already started. I hope my German news stations aren't using ChatGPT too much for the research. But I heard there's been several attempts and local "newspapers" (elsewhere) who run on fabricated facts.

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  • [–] [S] 5 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 child)

    Journalistic integrity is an orthogonal issue - albeit an important one of course.

    The topic at hand here is whether you want to see or hear fake humanity when you choose to watch a video or listen to a podcast.

    Personally, I don't. I want a person reading an audiobook, not a machine. I want people hosting a podcast. And I want to see a person reading the teleprompter, even if they're only reading the teleprompter.

    This is not a rational way to get the news. The most efficient way is reading it. But human contact is what makes us human. That's why we've always had talking heads on TV wasting gigantic amounts of bandwidth to deliver a 5-line news reports. If I choose this medium instead of reading, I expect to see and hear fellow human beings, not artificial simulacra.

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  • [–] 3 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

    Sure. I guess I'm always a bit more worried about the consequences and the dangerous parts, that's why I jumped on the other orthogonal axis. And this Alexa thing does both. Not only does it do Text to Speech. It also fabricates the script.

    I'm not necessarily against TTS. I occasionally use it myself. For example I read a tech news article on my phone and the washing machine beeps... I'll just scroll up and use the text to speech and let it read the rest of the news article to me, while doing the laundry. It's not great. That's why I first tried to read it. But I still find that feature more useful than offensive (to me). And technically it didn't make anyone lose their job. There simply wasn't any audio version there before. But it's rare edge-cases.

    Podcast are definitely a ludicrous use-case. I listened to some of the examples when they published the NotebookLM thing which is mentioned here. And it's kind of insufferable?! Dunno why anyone would want to listen to it. But Amazon seems to disagree with me. Plus you're definitely right on the human beings part. I listen to a lot of Podcasts if time allows. Most of them are great because of the humans involved, their personality, experiences and anecdotes, quirks, way of talking, because I can relate or they have some unique perspective because of who they are and that comes off as genuine and sincere... Content is also a factor. But that human/personal factor is usually the appealing part to me and what makes them stand out. And I'm always fascinated by how many great and interesting Podcasts we have. I have no clue why we would want to forfeit on that and consume some crap instead.

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