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Thank you, James, for again perfectly encapsulating something important in a way that stops me cold and gives me something to brood about.
It takes constant vigilance, like bracing yourself in an uncomfortable office chair, to fight "encrapification." In my own craft, the temptation to let some fluff or stumble go rather than record a pickup and blend it into the original is probably my biggest temptation to encrapify. If I've done something obviously wrong, like somehow creating a Congressional Church instead of Congregational, the pickup decision is easy to make. But little stumbles that don't interrupt the flow (or don't seem to) are tempting to pass.
I remind myself that anything that has the potential of taking a listener out of that comfortable word-cloud I'm trying to create is a Bad Thing, especially since it's not all that hard to fix. I've gotten pretty good at blending in pickups, to the point that when I hear it poorly done in a book produced by someone else, I wonder what they're paying their engineer for. A little title I did last year, Why Sound Matters, talks about this phenomenon from the standpoint of an engineer setting up a live performance and running the sound board.
I also remind myself of the looming monster shadow over the horizon...AI narration, or "Virtual Voice" as Audible calls it. Got to keep the lance ready for that dragon. So far I'm protected by the fact that it does such a crappy job, but it will get better; it always does. Add the fact that it is undoubtedly using my published stuff to improve itself, without my permission, and my head is down and locked with my main valve stuck wide open. Rowrbazzle.
But at the end, thank you again, James, for adding some brightness to my Monday morning and making my neurons combine in new and unforeseen ways. I'm grateful.
Discussion (11)
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The original Reese's Peanut Butter Cup is terrific, of course, but I really dig their Take 5 candy bar. I need to try their Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups one day.
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I really love Circus Peanuts. They are so bad it would be difficult to encraptify them further.
But Reese's? That's just un-American!
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The AI narrators, and I am talking about those whose voice tones are pleasant enough to allow people to listen to them, still goof up often enough that the listener easily realizes it is AI.
English is a weird language. So no amount of relying on a method of phonetically sounding out a word will bring about a faithfulness to how a word is supposed to be spoken. AI narrators sound out consonants that are meant to sit silently inside a word. Or they hit the wrong syllable in emphasis, so although the word might be spoken correctly, it is jarring to the listener.
Abbreviations are a problem too. USA becomes U-sah.
I wish the non human narrators could be given a
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Doug you write: "Add the fact that it is undoubtedly using my published stuff to improve itself, without my permission, and my head is down and locked with my main valve stuck wide open."
What a major pity that none of us have Bezos-style resources necessary to sue AI into oblivion for taking our hard earned copyright protected works from being plagiarized by the new weapon of the One AI Ring That Rules Us All.
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Grrr. So far I can identify AI narration when I hear it. Soulless.
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