It's an experiment Udemy should conduct. Maybe. It can go either way. Might end up being very beneficial to all parties, Udemy, instructors, and students:
- wider reach through multi-languages
- faster course creation and course updates for instructors. We might not need to record every single lectures. Record only the talking heads and let the AI voice do the voiceover parts.
- more instructors on the platform. Those who felt to be shy on camera or felt their voice never sounded good enough.
On the other hand. The platform might end up being flooded with AI-voice courses. Students might develop a distaste for it. And associate Udemy with just a "bunch of AI courses". Do you enjoy watching movies with AI voices? Or YouTube videos with AI voices? Probably not. Sure, if the result is indistinguishable then probably we won't be bothered. But our time and money is valuable and we constantly try to filter out the never-ending stream of content we have access to. We're trying to find the gems. Knowing something is artificial, is an enough reason for us to filter that thing out.
Copyright issues are going to be an uphill battle. People are already stealing and leaking out courses on YouTube and torrent sites. Now, they'll be able to steal the course content, ask ChatGPT to paraphrase the entire content, mix things up, mash it up with several other courses on the same topic, and bam! You've got a completely new original course, impossible to make copyright claims to. Put a sexy AI voiceover on it, with AI talking heads when needed, and you've got a course that has a chance to outsell the original course.
Someone should definitely conduct this experiment. Might end up beneficial for humanity. I dunno. But is Udemy really in the position to be the one doing it? I'd leave the experiment to YouTube and Netflix. If it works there, then bring it in.
Probably more step-by-step approach would have been better. Like giving this privilege to instructors with disabilities. And for rest of us, capping AI-generated voice to like 20% to 40% of the course.
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