Let’s make something you love.
Subscribe to help Abridged By Us take on what interests you! Book reviews posted here accompany the serious videos.
About the series
Watch on YouTube.
Abridged By Us tries to make you nostalgic or curious about books via Wikipedia text and musical accompaniment. Wikipedia summaries trend toward terseness, allowing music to editorialize what narrative is there.
This series is fundamentally an art project about AI in the Information Age, in which time we made it our mission to proliferate information as far as we could, only to be collectively embarrassed by the first machines that could overhear it.
Music
Udio v1.5 composes all audio featured in the series, exclusively using clips from the current plot lyrics. That is to say, you won’t hear us reuse anything across videos, and there is no library of pre-generated music.
Lyrics
Wikipedia supplies the exclusive text content in audio and captioned on video. In the video medium, we include miscellaneous lines from the article as information slides during musical breaks, but these too are presented as-is.
Because the presentations are focused on a snapshot in time for a Wikipedia article, be aware generally that they can change for any reason. Separately, no one should grief or interfere with articles for any reason.
Stock Art
Pictory assigns default art for each sentence (and any Wikipedia facts) and highlights keywords as it sees fit. You’ll be excused for mistaking the highlights for hyperlinks in the source text. We’re sorry about that, but it’s just more AI noise for you to enjoy.
AI Disclosure
Unless noted, all text here, within the audio’s scripts, and in the video’s captions is human-made. However, the audio/visual media published for Abridged By Us is the result of AI in so far that:
Human-made prompts were given to the music AI, and the AI gives back audio.
Human hands arrange the audio for narrative, pulling only from the above audio.
Video captions are given to a licensed stock art router that matches sentences to art, while user-defined styles control timing and appearance.
The AI deployed for this series is in service of provoking humans to stop ignoring the public information available to us. Wikipedia facts that appear in video content are selected where possible to highlight interest in yet more human creativity.
Looking forward to opportunities to produce human music and art, for now this project is a beacon calling for aid. Short the aid, let’s bop a little and like books made by humans.
Non-Commercial Fan Art Disclaimer
Audio and video files published by Abridged By Us contain words, phrases, and names trademarked to commercial entities representing the underlying original works.
All published audio/visual media containing such trademarks is provided as non-commercial fan art. While such media is provided on YouTube with a “Standard License” that allows remixing in more non-commercial contexts, you may not possess the right to reuse the audio or video if that reuse violates the copyrights of others.
If you reuse fragments of Abridged By Us, it must be done in compliance with those original copyrights, which are not owned by Abridged By Us, Discovery Written LLC, or any other unofficial or non-affiliated entity.
Any subscriptions paid to this site will pertain to separate and distinct content and will not be paid in the anticipation of new fan art (e.g., “for commission”).
Book reviews which directly embed fan art are published non-commercially.
The YouTube channel itself is monetized but the book videos are not.
Text post content for the series is not to be classified as fan art, as the content is traditionally human-made without AI assistance, and is posted with fair use.
If you are a rights holder for trademarks or copyrights represented in the fan art audio/video and wish to discuss removal, please reach out here or via YouTube @ discoverywritten.com and we’ll gladly help out!
