“Welcome to another episode of the Bro Jogan Experience” is the welcome you’ll hear in this fictional podcast between Joe Rogan and Steve Jobs.
Now, you might have noticed a problem with that last sentence. “It’s not called the Bro Jogan Experience” and you’re absolutely right. There’s also the matter of Steve Jobs not being alive anymore. That doesn’t matter to Play.ht, a company that sells its voice synthesis services to the highest bidders.
“Jamie, dig up Steve Jobs real quick”
The podcast begins with fake Joe Rogan introducing his next guest, the late Steve Jobs. Of course, it was recorded by an AI, masked with voice cloning technology, similar to what we’ve seen with James Earl Jones’ Darth Vader AI cloned voice in the recent Obi-Wan Kenobi series.
You can listen to ‘Podcast.ai’ right here.
To create these voices, the company has to train the AI using real voice clips. In the case of Joe Rogan, the model has plenty of samples to pull from his own real podcast. Steve Jobs’s voice clips are fewer and far between, giving the model far less to work with. As you listen, you’ll notice that Jobs’ voice sounds choppier and more robotic than that of the podcast’s host.
“Transcripts are generated with fine-tuned language models,” says Play.ht on Podcast.ai’s website. “For example, the Steve Jobs episode was trained on his biography and all recordings of him we could find online so the AI could accurately bring him back to life.”
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The only problem is; it’s not completely convincing. Yet. As the world continues to delve further into AI
technology, we’ll eventually reach a point where AI and humanity are indistinguishable from one another. It’s scary. But for now, it’s still pretty easy to tell. In the podcast, Jobs starts speaking out against Microsoft, similarly to how he did back in 1995.
This technology raises the question; ‘is it legal to use these voices in a monetizable fashion?’. And, we don’t know. As we mentioned earlier in James Earl Jones’ case, the company training the AI models used licensed and released voice clips of Darth Vader – which Disney owns. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out as technology continues to one-up itself.
Source: Ars Technica
