There is an argument that audiobooks are the best form of content. You pick up a book – already a good start – and someone reads it to you. When I say “someone” I mean the GOATS in the sound game. I could give examples of celebrities you’ve never met narrating audiobooks, but here’s an example of Werner Herzog narrating his memoir. Every Man for Himself, God Against All I think it speaks for itself:
What could be better than that?
Audiobooks aren’t just heaven, you can get all the audiobooks you want for free (and legally) by getting yourself a library card and using your local library’s preferred program (Libbyperhaps).
I say all this because, given all the easy and free access to high-quality audiobooks, why in the world would anyone listen to a John Grisham audiobook? is presented as such?
Do not click on that link. Instead of the actual audiobook Beautifully read by Michael Beckwill take you to a YouTube video of a talking AI reading Grisham’s latest hit novel. a widowand the narration plays just under 13 hours of AI slop video – mostly simulated warehouse footage of fake vacations. It’s like the video they show under the lyrics in Hell’s Karaoke Machine. I don’t have any science to back it up, but it will definitely give you brain cancer.
as The New York Times notes80,000 lost souls listened a widow this way. And Grisham is pissed off about it. “Thieves and pirates who steal my work and attempt to profit from it in any format should be punished civilly and criminally (…) And in this particular instance, YouTube is complicit because it’s clear they know what’s going on and refuse to stop it,” Grisham told the Times in an email. He should really write about it.
YouTube, for its part, said the video was still live because there was no takedown request and it was not actively policed for copyright violations. “For more than two decades, we’ve built systems that help rights owners manage and monitor copyrighted content — and we’ve continually invested in making sure those systems evolve as new threats emerge,” YouTube spokesman Jack Malone wrote to the Times.
If you’ve had a video flagged for copyright infringement on YouTube, it may be because of a feature called Content ID that music publishers absolutely love. It allows copyright holders to scan YouTube and automatically detect copyrighted content. Sometimes Content ID has been a valuable money making scheme For copyright holders who can reset accidental or inadvertent use of copyrighted material, especially music, and monetize other people’s videos by making a claim. It can’t do that anymore, but it’s something YouTube’s copyright system is designed to support.
As the Times points out, Content ID isn’t very good at finding AI-narrated audiobooks. The audio waveform of the content is not the same as the audio the publisher has, making it difficult to know what to scan. The author owns the copyright on the text, which can be altered by the creator of the YouTube video while still keeping the book largely intact – good enough for casual listeners, anyway.
This allows publishers and authors to manually manage the cancellation process, so it appears that a widow still there, just to avoid happening.
Too bad. I don’t mean that it deprives John Grisham of audiobook sales, which is bad, but not the greatest injustice in the universe. It’s bad because people are listening such terrible rubbish simply because it exists. And they really indeednot necessary.
