you cannot transfer is your imaginary internet points
Ironically enough, even though "imaginary" this aspect might be key to moderation. Assuming (and that's a flawed assumption) that people would upvote/downvote based not on their opinion but rather on how healthy/unhealthy to the discussion a comment is, then those "points" would be useful to see above/below a threshold one would want to interact, e.g. show content or not (or even now show even as to unfold).
Like I try to highlight, in most cases it's a shitty tool, doing a bad job, trained on stolen data, requiring a TON of energy and often used to put people out of work (and failing at it, cf news above).
So... sure, it's "just" a tool and in theory, it can be made the right way and used in a good context.
It is rarely the case though. Here specifically we are talking about Amazon, a company that has from its inception been built to be a monopoly, relying on AWS a service that is basically destroying the Internet by removing its decentralized nature.
So... again even if the tool would in theory itself be used the right way, build the right way, the company using that tool is problematic.
work remotely and keep my kids entertained while circumnavigating
FWIW depending on your work you can do a lot of that on the cheap, namely if you work is not heavy bandwidth or latency dependent, code and voice do not take much. You can get a lot of resources offline too, e.g. Wikipedia, Stackoverflow, etc in a convenient package with Kiwix. Download this at the port or prior to the legs of the trip where you don't expect to have good connectivity then update at the next point. It's honestly a matter of hours at most. I do it before every trip and it gets easier every time.
My suggestion anyway for kids entertainment is also offline entertainment, e.g. GCompris but even content. Again you can put Wikipedia from Kiwix on your then local WiFi (no Internet, just all devices on the boat) with a small RPi Zero (low energy consumption) with a 1TB microSD card (so cheap now!) but also a media server with all the videos you want from Internet Archive. There is a TON of content. Once there they can watch with any media player that supports network play, e.g VLC or mplayer.
TL;DR: 1TB from the middle of nowhere on the cheap is indeed tricky but 1TB from a good connection THEN go offline is actually both very easy and more than enough to be entertained for months, if not decades with e.g. Gutenberg project!
I'm not an economist but... 1 voice actor can serve 3 million consumers if they listen to the same content.
Anyway that's not even my point, my point is that it is possible to cover, we as a society, driven both by VC with strategies of capturing markets (so precisely going against "free" market as an ideal) and consumers are making choices (like when one buys from the local farmer market vs Amazon deliveries). If though we, while fully understanding the consequence of such choice (namely how the sausage is made, here how AI models are trained and then run), believe it's not valuable then sure, we can make that choice.
I'm just warning consumers then that if they don't pay for quality content made a certain way, they can't complain that they in turn don't get the job they wanted because nobody out there is ready to pay for it.
If AI is done alongside professionals, and done so ethically (not stolen training data, not ignoring ecological cost by pumping water in dry areas to cool down GPUs, etc) and economically (i.e. not having it "cheap" now but once a monopoly position is obtain, raise prices for a captive set of consumers) then yes it can be potentially empowering. This though is pretty much never the case.
That being said, if one "just" want read aloud, there are plenty of FLOSS alternatives and I believe Mozilla even a TTS/STT system based solely on voluntary voices.
Enshittification isn't adding new features that people want, it's gradually lowering the quality of the product. So here if Audible is solely adding more possibilities, never at the cost of higher quality ones degrading, then indeed I'm wrong.
If though they hire less people to do good voice acting, then it's really shitty.
I genuinely hope I'm wrong and they are ONLY adding new capabilities... but my entire experience with capitalism is that obtaining a monopolistic position is not done to improve quality but rather to increase margins regardless of how.
If the "fix" for an AI implementation in a use case is, again, to manually correct it and find a less demanding audience then... yes, by definition it's shitty.
The point isn't that it's infeasible, just that it will be low quality.
It's wrong, sure, in many ways (privacy, ecology, ethically depending on the dataset) but if there is 1 application where generative AI ads would make sense is through a personalized stream. So... yes it's bad, consumers might reject it, but it's not the actually dumbest way to use a terrible technology.
To be clear, again, I 100% hate it but if I was a greedy Netflix stakeholder I'd think "Hmmm yes, maybe!".
Because... the tool has no understanding of anything? It reads written words, yes, but no intention, no cultural context, no intonation. Unless everything is spelled out like a script, then it will not sound great, would it?
dont even have enough professional voice actors to cover the bandwidth
I'm pretty sure they'd be a lot more people ready to do that job if there was a good remuneration. Heck that sounds a lot more fun that a LOT of jobs out there!
Ironically enough, even though "imaginary" this aspect might be key to moderation. Assuming (and that's a flawed assumption) that people would upvote/downvote based not on their opinion but rather on how healthy/unhealthy to the discussion a comment is, then those "points" would be useful to see above/below a threshold one would want to interact, e.g. show content or not (or even now show even as to unfold).