John Grishams New Legal Drama Is a Real Life Fight Against AI Audiobooks on YouTube

There’s an argument to be made that audiobooks are the finest form of content. You take a book—already off to a good start—and you get to have someone read it right into your ears. And when I say “someone” I mean the GOATs in the voice game. I could cite examples of celebrities you never knew narrated audiobooks, but here’s a sample of Werner Herzog narrating his memoir Every Man for Himself and God Against All that I think speaks for itself: What could be better than this? Not only are audiobooks heaven, you can probably get all the audiobooks you want for free (and legally) by getting yourself a library card and using your local library’s preferred app ( Libby , perhaps). I say all that, because given all the easy and free access to high quality audiobooks, why in the world would anyone listen to a John Grisham audiobook presented like this ? Don’t click that link. Instead of the actual audiobook, which is read wonderfully by Michael Beck , it will take you to a YouTube video consisting of an AI narrator reading Grisham’s recent hit novel the Widow , and the narration plays under 13 hours of AI slop video—simulated stock footage of fake vacations, basically. It looks like the video they display under the lyrics on Hell’s karaoke machine. I don’t have any science to back this up, but it will definitely give you brain cancer. As the New York Times points out , 80,000 lost souls listened to the Widow this way. And Grisham is pissed about it. “The thieves and pirates who steal my work and try to profit from it, in any format, should be punished civilly and criminally […] And in this particular example, YouTube is complicit because it’s clear they know what is happening and refuse to stop it,” Grisham told the Times in an email. He should really write about this. YouTube, for its part, says the video is still up because there hasn’t been a takedown request, and that it doesn’t proactively police fo