This AI-Generated Joe Rogan And Steve Jobs Interview Shows The Eerie Direction AI Is Headed
An AI-generated Joe Rogan podcast featuring the late Steve Jobs ends in quite a disturbing scenario about the role of machines in the future. Whenever artificial intelligence tries to create something by itself, the results are usually entertaining. However, when AI starts emulating full-blown conversations that never happened, things start to get a bit weirder. That's pretty much what happened when podcast.ai created a conversation between TV personality Joe Rogan and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs using play.ht — an AI text-to-speech generator that mimics "ultra-realistic voices." Although the late tech visionary had never been on Rogan's show, Jobs was treated as if he was a regular who was featured in previous non-existent episodes.
Now, most of the podcast does sound pretty convincing but the bulk of its content was pretty mundane. Jobs talked about his work ethic, future expectations, and even spiritual experiences. That is, until this Jobs impersonator started talking about the superior role of computers in the future, while also being self-aware of the potentially disastrous outcomes that might arise from such scenarios. So, is the podcast the result of random pre-recorded conversations being stitched together, or is AI creating something we don't quite understand just yet?
Rise of the machines?
For those wondering how the AI formulated Jobs' personality and idiosyncrasies in an eerily effective manner despite having no previous basis, well, it had to learn a lot about him first. According to podcast.ai, the AI had to learn from Jobs' biography, along with every recording of him they could possibly unearth on the internet. Of course, the podcast wasn't perfect, as various odd inconsistencies can also be heard. This is due to the AI having to work with the low-quality footage it was provided with, resulting in Jobs' awkward tonal shifts and audio glitches, as heard throughout the podcast. Play.ht co-founder Syed Hammad told Gizmodo that the end result is still "very impressive." Hammad also explained that podcast.ai (which was created by play.ht) serves as a demonstration of their "AI speech tool's capabilities."
One of the podcast's developers said in a Tweet that the fine-tuning of Jobs' AI-generated voice was done in about an hour and that people would soon be able to do the same for their own voice in a matter of minutes. That said, advancements in AI are already scaring even their creators, so the question now is, should the general public be frightened, too? After all, both synth-Jobs and robo-Rogan were self-aware about how scary the rise of machines would be, with the faux Apple guru even describing the scenario as "really cool." Fortunately, the podcast concluded with the two talking about throwing Mac computers out the window, so perhaps humans should keep that advice in mind.