There's a big difference in precisely how the technology is applied.

Transformer models making screen readers better is cool. Companies deciding to fire their human voice actors and replacing all audiobooks with slop is decidedly not cool.

You can really see this happening in translation right now. Companies left and right are firing human translators and replacing their work with slop, and it's a huge step down in quality because AI simply cannot do the previous level of quality. (Mr Chad Gippity isn't going to maintain puns or add notes for references that the new audience won't catch.)

And that's in a market where there is commercial pressure to have quality work. Sloppy AI translations are already hurting sales.

In accessibility, it's a legal checkbox. Companies broadly do not care. It's already nearly impossible to get people to do things like use proper aria metadata. "We're a startup, we gotta go fast, ain't got no time for that".

AI is already being used to provide a legally-sufficient but practically garbage level of accessibility. This is bad.

Firing voice actors is not great. Replacing human-narrated audio with AI narrated audio is not great.

But the coverage of audiobooks is… also not great? Of the books I've purchased recently, maybe 30% or less have audiobooks? What if I want to listen to an obscure book? Should I be paying a human narrator to narrate my personal library?

The copyright holders are incentivized to make money. It does not make financial sense to pay humans to narrate their entire catalog. As long as they're the only ones allowed to distribute derivative works, we're kind of in a pickle.

Boy my experience with small chunks of translation between languages I know well is not the same at all. When prompted properly the translation quality is unbelievable and can absolutely catch nuances, puns, and add footnotes.

That said, I use it with pretty direct prompting, and I strongly prefer the "AI Partners with a Human" model.