You want to know what Steve Jobs would think of the new iPhones? A Dubai company might have the answer, or nearly so. In fact he published a podcast in which a fake Joe Rogan interviews a fake Steve Jobsboth generated byArtificial Intelligence (AI). With (almost) realistic results, even if not necessarily original. And above all, controversial.
Joe Rogan interviews Steve Jobs in a podcast, both voices generated in AI
The first episode of the Podcast.ai series lets you hear the voices of two people who are world famous in their respective fields. On the one hand, the most successful podcaster in the world (even if contested for no-vax positions and more) Joe Rogan. On the other, the co-founder of Apple Steve Jobs. That as you know, he’s been dead for eleven years now.
The company based in Dubai Play.ht in fact, he recreated the voices of both using deep learning. Listening to people’s vocal patterns for many hours, she is able to grasp all the nuances of voice and speech for generate results very similar to the original. We recently saw something similar in voce of Darth Vader in the series about Disney + Obi-Wan Kenobi
Train the machine
To take advantage of artificial intelligence they are needed many hours of audio content. Joe Rogan is therefore the ideal candidate for this type of technology: continuously records hour after hour on podcasts for Spotify, has launched specials on Netflix. So much so that, as reported by The Verge, in the past a company called Dessa had already synthesized the voice of the podcaster.
For Steve Jobs, the matter is more complex, as he didn’t have that much time to record podcasts while running Apple. However, deep learning has sampled the voice of the former Apple CEO from the famous ones product launch keynote and interviews made for radio and television. The result for Jobs is less fluid: sometimes his voice seems broken. But it works. Enough.
Question and answer
Even the text of the interview, both Joe Rogan’s questions and Steve Jobs’s answers, they are all generated by artificial intelligenceusing templates from Large Language Model (LLM), such as OpenAI’s GPT-3.
In the podcast description, the company explains that: “The Steve Jobs episode was trained on the biography and all of his recordings that we could find online, so that the AI can carefully bring it back to life“. Which isn’t a very sensitive choice of words, but it explains the process pretty well.
Credit: Apple
However, the path followed by19-minute interview doesn’t make too much sense. After some time, it appears that Jobs returns to some of the highlights from his past interviews as they were “Greatest hits” a little too disconnected from each other. Speaking for example of the success of the original Macintosh along with the competition with Google.
At one point Jobs seems to retrace his famous interview with Triumph of the Nerds nel 1995, while varying the words used. “The problem I’ve always had with Microsoft is that in many ways they are smart people and do a good job, but they never tasted. They never had any aesthetic sense ”.
Will we hear more podcasts featuring Steve Jobs?
We don’t know whether to use the voices of Steve Jobs and Joe Rogan either really legal, especially to promote a commercial product like play.th software. We imagine we can find out if Rogan or Jobs’s heirs decide to sue.
But it seems the time when we will have to ask ourselves if this kind of deep fake is appreciable and ethical is coming. Is it okay for a company to use Steve Jobs’ voice for their next hit tech podcast? We will be able to use the deep fake by great actors of the past for modern movies and TV series?
Above all, how are we going to protect the interests of these people when they are no longer here to have their say. In the podcast, Steve Jobs tells Rogan that “I like to relax in the car and listen to you rant”. We are sure you would agree to say he is a fan of a controversial podcaster like Rogan? We do not know. And perhaps it is right to continue not to know.