Historically, being told that a voice recording is AI generated would be enough to tell you to expect basic TTS robotic voice, but with advances in AI voice generation we're approaching the point where AI can sound as good as real humans - it's not yet to the point where it's easy to generate an audiobook as good as a professional reader, but that point will come in the not too distant future.

And equally on the other side, something being recorded by a human doesn't automatically mean it has the quality of a professionally-read audiobook. This is something LibriVox has always had to deal with, by gatekeeping which volunteer recordings to either give feedback requesting improvements to or to not use at all.

In some but not all cases, an amateur human reader can already be as good as a professional, that will soon be true for AI. For both AI and humans it will remain the case that some efforts are not as good, but the line between them (for quality) isn't going to be whether or not they are AI - though I do agree that AI or not should also be labelled.

I don't come telling you that your projects suck or that you apparently can't be bothered to mention them on your profile.

It has a lot to do with the tone you use. Had you said "It's a great project, I wonder if they thought about adding X", I wouldn't have said anything. But you said "Man, nobody at LibriVox can be bothered to", which is disrespectful. The fact that you don't seem to realise suggests that you are part of those people that make open source toxic (often not in purpose).

I have many examples where people came to my open source project and heavily complained because they struggled with something, or pressured me into implementing a feature for them (for free, obviously) or into changing the licence, etc. And when I tell them how toxic their behaviour is, many times they hadn't realise (some apologise, some are jerks). Still their behaviour is toxic.

When people do stuff for free, we should at least be respectful.

Yes, yes and yes. I don't know how long you've been around, but in the (earlier) days of open source, this was very explicit: Open source authors are writing to solve their problem, not their users' problems. If they go out of their way to solve other people's problems, that's certainly nice, but not to be expected. This was very explicit, and well understood.

We're not arguing with you that having a well curated list is a bad idea from a user's perspective. We're pointing out that doing it well is work, and doing it poorly does make things worse. We don't want people burnt out, so we don't want to push for this.

> Or, you could write a database query that finds the top 5 reads in 5 genres that runs once a week for the homepage.

This is the opposite of a well curated list. In my experience, such lists based on raw numbers leads to a poorer experience. There's a reason HN doesn't follow this approach.

> Except in LibriVox's case, it's a repo that everyone else spent hours of their life contributing to. Just make the dang README. Promote a few volunteer contributions.

Talk is cheap. Do you want to spend the time making a curated list? If so, go forth and volunteer!