"In her own field, she is concerned about the number of books that are being “read” by machines. Audible, the Amazon-owned audiobook provider, has just announced it will allow publishers to create audiobooks using its AI technology. “I don’t know anybody who wants a robot to read them a story, but I am concerned that it is going to ruin the experience to the point where people don’t want to subscribe to audiobook platforms any more,” says Doty. She hasn’t lost jobs to AI yet but other colleagues have, and chances are, it will happen. AI models can’t “narrate”, she says. “Narrators don’t just read words; they sense and express the feelings beneath the words. AI can never do this job because it requires decades of experience in being a human being.”
Emily M Bender, professor of linguistics at the University of Washington and co-author of a new book, The AI Con, has many reasons why she doesn’t want to use large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT. “But maybe the first one is that I’m not interested in reading something that nobody wrote,” she says. “I read because I want to understand how somebody sees something, and there’s no ‘somebody’ inside the synthetic text-extruding machines.” It’s just a papier-mache made from lots of different people’s words, she says.
Does she feel she is being “left behind”, as AI enthusiasts would say? “No, not at all. My reaction to that is, ‘Where’s everybody going?’” She laughs as if to say: nowhere good."
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jun/03/creatives-academics-rejecting-ai-at-home-work
