Things Solenoid Narrates

post by Solenoid_Entity · 2024-04-12T23:57:16.169Z · LW · GW · 2 comments

Contents

  Human Narrations
  AI Narrations
  Other things that are like my thing
  The Future
None
2 comments

I spend a lot of time narrating various bits of EA/longtermist writing.

The resulting audio exists in many different places. Surprisingly often, people who really like one thing don't know about the other things. This seems bad.^[1]

A few people have requested a feed to aggregate 'all Solenoid's narrations.' 

Here it is. (Give it a few days to be up on the big platforms.) I'll update it ~weekly.^[2]
 

And here's a list of things I've made or am working on, shared in the hope that more people will discover more things they like:

Human Narrations

• Astral Codex Ten Podcast
  • ~920 episodes so far including all non-paywalled ACX posts and SSC archives going back to 2017, with some classic posts from earlier. 
  • Archive. Patreon.
• LessWrong Curated Podcast 
  • Human narrations of all the Curated posts. Patreon.
• AI Safety Fundamentals 
  • Narrations of most of the core resources for AISF's Alignment and Governance courses, and a fair few of the additional readings. 
  • Alignment, Governance
• 80,000 Hours
  •  Many pages on their website, plus their updated career guide.
• EA Forum Curated podcast
  • This is now AI narrated and seems to be doing perfectly well without me, but lots of human narrations of classic EA forum posts can be found in the archive, at the beginning of the feed.
• Metaculus Journal
  • I'm not making these now, but I previously completed many human narrations of Metaculus' 'fortified essays'.
• Radio Bostrom: 
  • I did about half the narration for Radio Bostrom, creating audio versions of some of Bostrom's key papers.
• Miscellaneous: 
  • Lots of smaller things. Carlsmith's Power-seeking AI [EA · GW]paper, etc. 

AI Narrations

Last year I helped TYPE III AUDIO to create high-quality AI narration feeds for EA Forum and LessWrong, and many other resources.

• Every LessWrong post above 30 karma is included on this feed. 
  • Spotify
• Every EA Forum post above 30 karma is included on this feed: 
  • Spotify
• Also: 
  • ChinAI
  • AI Safety Newsletter
  • Introduction to Utilitarianism

Other things that are like my thing

• Eneasz is an absolute unit.
• Carlsmith is an amazing narrator of his own writing.
• There's a partially complete (ahem) map of the EA/Longtermist audio landscape here.
• There's an audiobook of The Sequences, which is a pretty staggering achievement.

The Future

I think AI narration services are already sharply reducing the marginal value of my narration work. I expect non-celebrity^[3] human narration to be essentially redundant within 1-2 years. AI narration has some huge advantages too, there's no denying it. Probably this is a good thing. I dance around it here. [LW · GW]

Once we reach that tipping point, I'll probably fall back on the ACX podcast and LW Curated podcast, and likely keep doing those for as long as the Patreon income continues to justify the time I spend. 

1. ^{^}

   I bear some responsibility for this, first because I generally find self-promotion cringey^[4] and enjoy narration because it's kind of 'in the background', and second because I've previously tried to maintain pseudonymity (though this has become less relevant considering I've released so much material under my real name now.)

2. ^{^}

   It doesn't have ALL episodes I've ever made in the past (just a lot of them), but going forward everything will be on that feed.

3. ^{^}

   As in, I think they'll still pay Stephen Fry to narrate stuff, or authors themselves (this is very popular.)

4. ^{^}

   Which is not to say I don't have a little folder with screenshots of every nice thing anyone has ever said about my narration...

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