Silicon Valley and dehumanization. Name a more iconic duo. Seriously, though. Every part of the human estate that technologists touch turns to shit or gets pilfered. Throw this on the pile.
this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2024
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The problem is systemic IMO. The whole VC model requires the enshitification cycle to work. Any technology that should reduce human labour and be a net positive for society instead always ends up in the hands of capitalists who'll use it to extract maximal profit.
Like, on a fundamental level, automating people's jobs is a good thing. The problem is all the benefits are going to a very small number of people.
I'm reminded of a comment I saw once where somebody was saying how when they were young, they were told that AI would do the miserable jobs so that people would have more time to make art and poetry, while today the AI makes art and poetry so that we can work longer hours at the miserable jobs.
And the AI bros say that this is just a necessary step towards automating away the crappy jobs, but it's not like they'll stop automating everything else if/when AI reaches that point. The AI will still continue to automate away the hyman experience of art and culture for the rich. They're not going to suddenly decide to implement Luxury Gay Space Communism at that point. They'll just cram everybody into Kow Loon style ghettos.
Sorry I can't upvote your comment any more as it's at the maximum 111. I would add 3 exclamation marks if I could!!!
What's awful about this is, this technology would be amazing for some people.
My father had ALS, the first thing to go was his voice. As a result, the tools at the time to give him his own voice back (using text-to-speech apps) couldn't make due with what we had, we would have needed to have the recordings of the specific sounds already in specific phrases.
Since then, there have been improvements in leaps and bounds. I could remake his voice today with what I have of him on video. I wish I could have done this for him when he was alive. My daughter could have heard him speak in his own voice, instead of a meh sounding tts voice or a family member reading what he said to her.
But instead of looking to doing amazing things like that for people, we get companies pulling this bullshit.
What is it with this post that the top two comments cant be upvoted any more.
Sorry, I would upvote but your getting all the love with 69 votes, 70 feels like a downgrade.
Why do you say instead of when describing something that exists and is available? It's not even expensive.
I think what you mean is why is all the focus always on negative uses and never positive and that's because you're on a website with a hate boner for technology, especially ai.
Because this is where the money is universally going, and no, its not "readily available" for most.
I can do it.
ALS patients and their families, in terms of what's covered, are getting mostly the same as what was available 5-10 years ago. This isn't about focusing on the negative, this is just where things are right now. Services to recreate a voice for tts to folks with ALS or similar issues are insanely expensive, to the point of being exploitative.
So I say it because its the truth.
I did VO work for years. I'm out of the industry now, but I'm pretty certain that there's no real point in getting back into it because most VO actors will be replaced soon. The voice that they gave ChatGPT with simulated emotional inflections has convinced me of that.
I would probably be a little more protected because I specialized in characters, accents and impersonations, but really, for the most part, if you aren't already famous as an actor, you probably won't be getting much VO work in the near future.
but really, for the most part, if you aren't already famous as an actor, you probably won't be getting much VO work in the near future.
Time to start a Dungeons & Dragons podcast!
Might have worked out for him, but I think people on Lemmy are tired enough hearing from me as it is. I'd hate to inflict myself on the general public like that.
I, for one, enjoy seeing a familiar squid, even if we've disagreed once or twice ❤️
Thanks. Much love back. I was mostly being facetious. I have considered doing a podcast before but I honestly have no idea what I would do a podcast about or what people would want to hear from me. I also don't really want to do it alone, but don't have anyone to do it with.
Maybe one day...
Have you ever listened to the podcast “ologies”? It’s a woman who interviews people who are -ologists (proctologist, ornithologist, geologist, etc., as well as some non-ologist specialties that nonetheless fit the theme)
Maybe something like that would work for you :) then you aren’t stuck with a single topic, you don’t have to do it alone, and you don’t have to find one person to commit to it, it could be several. Just come up with good questions and have a semi-formal chat. It’s a very enjoyable model for learning new things you didn’t know you wanted to know about.
Thanks. It sounds fun, but it's not really in my skillset. My skills would involve character voices and accents along with my comedy writing and improv abilities. So it would be some sort of comedy podcast. But honestly, I have been out of creative ideas for a long time.
That’s totally fair; I’m also not really capable of doing something like that consistently (even tho I would absolutely love talking to smart people - my degree is science communication, so talking to smart people to learn about things and pass them along is easily my favorite thing), so I get it.
That kinda makes me wonder if interviewing comedians would be funny.. I’ve never really talked to any in person for the full impact, but some of them have that timing and wit that means any conversation can be funny. I certainly thought morning radio shows where they have guest comedians on sucked big time, but those are meant more for mass appeal, and they probably work for a lot of people or they wouldn’t have them on.
Unfortunately, there are so many shows that do that already, ones already done by well-known comedians. I wouldn't even be able to get their guests.
Nope. In fact I worry if you aren’t posting.
I think a lot about the fact that, on anonymous forums like this, any one of us that others have gotten to know over our time here could die and we'd never know. They'd just stop posting one day. I'm sure it's happened to people I've befriended on forums over the year more than once. It makes me sad. I wish there was some good way we could let people we talked to know after the fact. I suppose tell loved ones to create accounts and make a post.
Oh shit, really?? Any work we'd know?
I never got any real work as a VO artist, but Lord knows I've worshipped those who have had some success.
In one case, in the sense that you would know those characters, yes. In the sense that you would know the work I did with them, much less likely. When I was voicing those characters, it was for flash webstoons for the skeleton of the company that was about to close up shop and just become another arm of its parent company. I don't even think there's an online record of most of it. I also had very early success on YouTube long before you could monetize anything, so my voice was heard there.
I'd say the other really big thing I did that people here might have heard my voice in was a PS2 game... but I don't really want to dox myself any more than that.
There aren’t that many PS2 games let’s all start guessing lol
Wikipedia says there are over 4000, so good luck with that. It was a well-received game but it wasn't exactly GTA.
4000-1
Unless I was being highly deceptive and I'm actually Ice-T.
^(I'm^ ^not^ ^Ice-T)^
Holy shit! Flying Squid is actually Ice-T!
I'm the O.G.
Old Guy.
John Madden had some pretty successful games, I bet FlyingSquid is the ghost of John Madden!!!
John Madden was no squid!
Automation is taking the creative jobs and leaving us with the dirty, dangerous, and low paid jobs.
It was supposed to be the other way around!
That's not even close to true though, it just makes it obvious you've never been on a building site, in a mine, smelting works, factory or pretty much any traditionally dangerous job.
Creative jobs aren't widely displaced yet, there's the hint of that in the future but as of now it's still an increasing field, especially in content creation and marketing. Manufacturing jobs have been getting replaced rapidly, when my parents were kids a whistle would blow and machinists would flood out the two factories and fill the pubs and streets, now both factories have closed because one factory can make and transport them far cheaper with a thousandth of the workforce. We do have factories in this areas still, they make much more complex things but the majority of their workforce is in the offices because CNC and CV assisted QC replaced the need for people to lug heavy things or twiddle control knobs all day.
I have friends that fucked their back up in their twenties carrying bricks up ladders, this job was common twenty five years ago but is virtually nonexistent now because of automation (largely factory based automation allowing prefab pieces and labour saving tools to out compete people working for minimum wage)
Yes it's a fun and funny thing to say and I understand the sentiment but look at old pathe news reels showing how farming happens and compare them to a modern farm, automation has been helping people avoid backbreaking labour for decades - they don't even drive the tractors on a lot of farms these days.
I get what you're saying. I did bristle a bit at first over the "traditionally dangerous job" bit because I very much did a dangerous job. But you're right that I didn't grow up in a manufacturing town or work a factory job. So it would seem automation has already hit the dirty jobs sector pretty hard, it's just coming for the creative and professional class now. So our thinking about how it's supposed to work is just behind by a generation.
I wonder how much of our current "affordability" crisis has to do with half the factories and 99% of the workforce being replaced but not necessarily compensated out of the increased productivity? Sure some people were able to step up to higher paying jobs controlling the automation but it's a rule in economics that not everyone can be promoted or get higher paying jobs. It follows in some schools of thought that workers losing a job through no fault of their own should be compensated.
It was supposed to be blue collar workers that lost their jobs and lived in poverty!
Well ideally the resulting wealth would be shared and no one would live in poverty.
But that's not happening either.
It kinda is a bit if you really look at quality of life changes in the last hundred years, even the last fifty - yes people feel like food is more expensive but a large part of that is diets are far better and more diverse for poor people. We have access to far higher quality stuff and this is a trend that's been going strong since the start of the industrial revolution, do you know anyone that wears the same jute shirt every day? If so its a weird style choice not because they can't spend less than an hours minimum wage to get a new shirt. Want to learn about house flys or rocket engines? I can point you to huge amounts of amazing free resources, it's not too long ago you'd have to walk to the library to get a paragraph in an encyclopedia.
Sure it doesn't feel amazing because we all want more, we want what the current rich have but actually look not that far back in time and we have access to far better things than the wealthy in terms of food, entertainment, and so many things. The rich also have far less power, again its easy to overlook but computer tools have eroded their control of media and government considerably which ironically is part of the reason we're so aware of the existing inequities.
When polled what most people consistently want is to provide for their family without feeling like they're struggling to do so. That standard varies by income class but for most people it simply means food, shelter, a night out with friends once a week, a night out with family once a week, and a vacation once a year. (It doesn't need to be international or Disneyland)
You're right that we've come a long way since the industrial revolution. However there's two things you're missing. The industrial revolution actually represented a lower standard of living for the workers moving into the cities, which is why we see the great statesmen of the 18th and 19th centuries begin to push for policies about sick pay, healthcare, unemployment insurance, and basic standards. They weren't pro worker so much as they were trying to head unionization off by providing benefits the union speakers promised. Many of these people had times in living memory that they worked half the time and were able to drink at the pub and provide for their family. The top down benefits scheme of leaders like Bismarck didn't work though because the owners were the ones setting the system up and they tried to give just enough to keep people quiescent. Not actually engage in the system with good faith.
So we fought literal shadow wars over the right to unionize and once we won that right things began to actually improve for workers. That brings us to point 2; we've seen how well we can share out the profits without going communist. We had a high water mark in the 1960's and 1970's of being able to pay for stuff with the fewest hours worked since workers had to move to the cities a couple hundred years prior. Since then though it has been a grinding degradation of purchasing power in the lower half of the economy. It doesn't just feel like everything is more expensive, it actually is. The mode of income, (data point that appears the most in a set of data, in this case the income bucket that has the most people) sits around $30k a year. The household median is around $70k a year. Ideally we'd be clustered around that median except for outliers. In reality it seems that the dataset is relatively spare between those two numbers and then it has a more normal distribution after the median.
That means that all of our calculations based on the median don't account for this group that's stuck at half that number for some reason. The 70k-100k group might be saving less for retirement with the current inflation problems, but the 30k group is literally getting evicted. Recent studies show that homeless people are generally from the area that they're homeless in, do not have a drug habit or picked one up only after becoming homeless, and they worked full time in the 12 months before becoming homeless.
We do live in a time of marvels. Which is why it's so galling that we're actively leaving people behind.
One day someone will invent a new internet with no bots, and people can be assured they are talking to a real human again. We will call it PersonNet!
Or we could go talk to our neighbors again like in the old days. Until the Boston Dynamic new Serialized Human Interface Technology robots start living 20 to a home and infiltrating neighborhoods to subvert dissidents and advertise for their corpo overlords.
Hmmm. Guess ill just live in my mind then.
Almost sounds like a sort of robotic gentrification... Hrm. Mildly concerning.
Full disclosure, I know one of the people involved in this venture.
A different business model, it uses voice models of professional artists to replace vocal tracks. The artists helped make the models and get royalties.