AI-generated Al Michaels to provide daily recaps during 2024 Summer Olympics | Hacker News Reader

AI-generated Al Michaels to provide daily recaps during 2024 Summer Olympics

arstechnica.com

7 pointspseudolus20 comments

The clip they have in the article as a demo doesn't sound like it's state of the art. Compared to Eleven labs it doesn't sound natural at all, the way there's no pauses between sentences and other flaws. Hope they can improve it for the final version

I usually avoid meta commentary but this was a really annoying one to have the ambiguous font on.

Honestly, I don't even think I care. I like Al Michaels, but written recaps are fine for the events I miss anyway. An emulated voice can do this as well as a person. At least when I worry about AI-generated slop replacing quality entertainment content, it's not the recap I'm thinking of. As long as the recap is of real competitive events that were actually contested between humans, so be it. Software-generated voice can replace a talking head reading off a result sheet, but it can't replace the Olympics themselves.

I'm sure any human could have done those recaps, it's not like Michaels was some Nobel prize winner commenter. And even if he was, he definitely wasn't the only one. Instead of hiring another person they just wanted to cut costs, and it's all a race to the very bottom of the bottom of the bottom.

Cool technology and application.

And yet, it feels as if all mainstream media, social and otherwise, is going to become AI-generated slop.

AI-generated slop trained on AI-generated slop, all the way down.

Sigh.

This is a people problem. If it wasn't generative AI, it would be some other tech being used to cut costs, and that's the crux of the issue, it's all companies trying to cut costs while maximizing content output with little to no regard for content quality as long as it meets a certain threshold.

I'm not saying AI isn't enabling it by the way, just making an observation that businesses only see the money in this, and it could be literally anything else, it just so happens to be generative voice.

EDIT: Creative people can do creative things with AI, it enables a lot of people who otherwise couldn't express that creativity to do so, but it also enables the lazy and money seeking, it's tradeoff.

>it's all companies trying to cut costs while maximizing content output with little to no regard for content quality as long as it meets a certain threshold.

That isn't a people problem, that's a capitalism problem.

You know civilization is going great when you're lamenting the loss of authentic Al Michaels content.

;-)

Not exactly. I'm lamenting the loss of human-generated content, period.

That's the joke, one is an absurd proxy for the other.

> AI-generated slop

This is prejudice.

Hah! :-)

Nah, I'm not a "specieist."[a]

My prejudice is only against slop... Although I don't want to see human-generated content disappear.

---

[a] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/03/technology/ai-openai-musk...

Prejudice against what? Are we owing AI already human respect? And if we don't, are they gonna come after us? Or at least send their own SJW? No really, what was this comment for??? Or maybe it was sarcasm and I missed it...

Replace "AI" in this comment with any other marginalised group and see how clever it sounds!

I wasn't being sarcastic, but I wasn't really 100% serious either. I suppose I was really trying to get beneath the kneejerk "AI bad" response and provoke some thought.

Obviously we don't need to afford AIs the same rights that we afford humans. (I think?). But it definitely is prejudice to assume that content will be slop just because it's generated by an AI.

> any other marginalised group

To be clear, LLMs are not people, nor are they sentient.

the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: "there's actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you fucking moron"

You aren't excited when next year:

You child is taught by an AI that follows them through their development, instead of different teachers each year that expose them do different points of view. And with an AI always with them, no need to actually go to a physical school.

Your exercise classes are replaced by an AI instructor (custom tailored to you, aka considers like 3 factors) removing that pesky need to leave your house or have any human interaction.

Drones deliver your groceries/restaurant prepared meals removing the need to leave your house.

When you do leave, you use a driverless Uber to get where you are going so need for any human contact.

Man, good thing we aren't already suffering from a loneliness crisis. But hey, we'll have the AI consensus algorithms blathering the same bland most predictable responses at us using the mindset of the pre-2022 internet (forever), so if you like Wonder bread in verbal form you are going to be friggin stoked!

The only question I have is: how will I pay for all these services?

News organizations have been assigning "summarize who won the game and any notable events" stories to computers for a while, although having the computer narrate the story is less common

This is macabre. I feel like I am going to spend the remaining years of my life watching recycled versions of dead people rather than a natural cycle of renewal and innovation.

Dad, I want to be a sportscaster when I grow up. Sorry kid, that's only a job for dead people.

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