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Fake Joe Rogan interviews fake Steve Jobs

by on13 October 2022


Nothing is real, and nothing to get hung about....  

Play.ht, a voice synthesis company based in Dubai has published a fictional podcast where an AI version of comedian and podcast host Joe Rogan interviews Apple’s founder Steve Jobs.

The podcast uses realistic voices digitally cloned from both and is the first episode in a series called ‘Podcast.ai’, a weekly podcast entirely generated by artificial intelligence.

Play.ht is an AI-powered text to voice generation tool that enables users to ‘instantly convert text into natural-sounding speech’.

The podcast seems to be a promotion for the tool as the episodes are rendered using play.ht and transcripts are generated with fine-tuned language models.

Podcasters like Rogan are ideal targets for AI voice training using deep learning models thanks to the ample quantities of their voice available publicly.

Jobs' voice is less available was trained Jobs’ Apple keynote speeches and other interviews and so tends to say the same vacuous and self-serving rubbish that has been the erotic fantasy of fanbois for decades.

As a result, the fake Steve Jobs talks about Google, Microsoft, and Adobe, and the success of the original Apple Macintosh. ‘The Steve Jobs episode was trained on his biography, which he is unlikely to have written, and all recordings found online so the AI could accurately bring him back to life,’ said the company on their website.

Popular choices for AI generated interviews include billionaire Elon Musk but given that he would show up and give his point of view on anything anyway this seems particularly pointless.

The AI voices are far from perfect and it isn’t hard to tell that they are essentially robot voices talking but it’s an interesting application.

A number of startups are now promising digital immortality through chatbots, AI and holograms. Recently, James Earl Jones even signed over the rights to his iconic Darth Vader voice to AI technology to feature in Disney’s Obi-Wan Kenobi TV series.

 

Last modified on 13 October 2022
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