This sounds like if you spliced together tape of Rogan and Jobs with scotch tape. An interesting concept but I never felt like I was listening to a conversation between two people. Jobs sounds weirdly far away, he also was never a "fast talker". Listen to his interview at MIT where he takes questions. He always stopped for long pauses, stares off into space for a minute. He didn't rush into responses and tended to nail timing really well.
Rogan sounds more believable but I suspect you'd get the same results sitting down at Audacity and cutting together an MP3. You just have better quality samples of him talking to people in a podcast setting.
It's an interesting demo but I'm not sure why I would want this to exist. It seems like technology which you could only abuse, either through the generation of podcast spam or through the production of fake audio. Podcasts are legion and are already cheap to make and based on open standards.
"My hope is someday, when the next Aristotle is alive, we can capture the underlying worldview of that Aristotle - in a computer. And someday, some student will be able not only to read the words Aristotle wrote, but ask Aristotle a question - and get an answer!"- Steve Jobs, 1985
Really? We just made a version of GPT3 finetuned on the complete works of Plato. It produced some solid new dialogues. About, for instance, the relationship between beauty and the good.
* Is beauty wise, socrates?
* Or rather, I will put the question more clearly: We know, do we not, that which is wise must also be good?
* Certainly.
* And what is good must also be beautiful?
* True.
* Then where there is wisdom there is goodness and beauty.
* Certainly.
* But where there is no wisdom there is no goodness. And where there is no goodness there is no beauty. Nor is this only true of the matter which we were discussing, but of all others as well.
* I agree.
* And therefore, where there is no music, we shall find neither wisdom nor goodness, nor beauty.
* I dare say.
* And that which has no music is unpleasing to the ear. But the unpleasing is the disagreeable, and the disagreeable is the evil, and therefore in music there is the greatness of goodness, and beauty, and wisdom, and lastly, in all that knowledge which relates to the music and harmony of the soul, which we have escaped to the end of our argument, in that, I fancy, you would place justice.
* 19. "And so, glaucon," I said, the cause of every thing, which you want to find, has been found ?"
* Certainly," he said.
* "And is not that cause beauty?"
* "I do not understand you," he said.
* "The cause of all things has the name of beauty.”
Did you just put Steven Pinker and Daniel Dennett in "a gang" ?
Wash out your mouth with soap, this instant!
Seriously, is there anything that connects these two other than having written some reasonably accessible books on matters in the realm of cognitive science?
Here’s my guess: Pinker writes sometimes on evolutionary psychology. A controversy I heard around the atheism plus days was that evopsych should be banned. Therefore it’s likely that Pinker has been declared cancelled. Thus, to mention his name is to sin, and a sinner must repent, so wash your mouth out with soap and divert yourself from this path of heresy lest you join him.
I just don't see Pinker and Dennett as remotely connected. They don't work in the same field, they don't have much to say about the things the other is interested, and they were not even really on the same page w.r.t. "new atheism".
Hm, let us see. 10 seconds on google and wikipedia revealed:
"Steven Arthur Pinker is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author and public intellectual. He is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind."
"Daniel Clement Dennett III is an American philosopher, writer, and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science."
Pinker and Dennett were quite chummy at least 15 years ago (along with Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris) as part of the "New Atheist" movement in addition to their shared interest in cognitive matters. I don't know what they feel about each other today -- there's been quite a lot of infighting and "New Atheism" as a movement has sort of splintered.
A slight tangent, but there's something extremely interesting on the topic of Ancient philosophers related to this Jobs' quote. Socrates wrote nothing down, to the point that some have claimed he was illiterate. And that is a possibility, though improbable.
But the reason he claimed to not want to write anything down is because, in a nutshell, 'books cannot defend themselves' : words can be taken out of context, meanings misconstrued, and text made to mean what the interpreter wants to make it mean instead of what the author meant for it to mean.
It's quite fortunate for the world that many of his students disagreed, but it's interesting nonetheless.
This is the first time I've read why Socrates didn't leave any writings. Which incidentally reminds me of a saying in Zen Buddhism of "do not establish words and letters" (see eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_scriptures ) If you squint hard enough, Zen's preferred method of teaching via teacher-student interactions very vaguely resemble the Socratic method.
So I wonder whether there's any more-than-incidental connection between the two, given https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhism -- i.e. was Zen Buddhism a very distant offshoot of the Socratic philosophy and methods?
(Sorry, might be too much of a tangent. But hey, Steve Jobs probably held Zen in high regard :D)
There's no way to know if Socrates' absence would have led to a net benefit or not
Edit: to expand on this, we can say it is fortunate that his words were written down, but in a Socrates-less world or a world where his thoughts evaporated, you don't know which philosophers would have taken up the mantle instead and what the consequences would have been
Yes, no one can ever no anything about a counterfactual. So does nothing matter beyond whatever each individual chooses to matter? (Nihilism / Hedonism.)
I meant more in the sense that we are primed to take one side of the issue by the default, the one we know. In the counter-factual Socrates-less world I'm describing, we are the unprovable counter-factual and people there are posting about how grateful they are that Eulogothenes' words were put to papyrus.
Perhaps a better way to illustrate this is to point out that the Mona Lisa's cultural prominence essentially ballooned once it was stolen.
It's a good point. Do any of his dialogues include the other side of the debate?
Did Plato ever speak about how we wants to communicate ideas to later generations? Maybe he didn't want to, and he trusted his students to preserve and improve his important ideas?
How did he expect people far away in time and space to study philosophy without access to great thinkers? Did he not care? Did he expect every niche to reinvent philosophy from scratch?
Thomas Jefferson wanted the US Constitution to be rewritten by 1810, but we are still stuck with it today (with amendments, granted).
It’s also quite unfortunate that the world needs to keep learning the basic lessons of media with every new communications technology.
The epistemological issues that Socrates had with the written word are not too dissimilar from the epistemological issues of contemporary social media.
This is such a great idea. And for me it goes even beyond being able to exploit the intellect of deceased geniuses. It could be the path to generating believable AI personas out of everyday people. If sufficiently accurate know I would love to have an AI with my father's advice and sense of humor once he is no longer with us.
I'd say it is highly unethical. Imagine thousands of people listening to fake podcasts as if they were real. Not only are they being lied to, but if they find out many are sure to become very angry on learning they wasted their time.
Fortunately, it's not there yet, since it's obviously fake.
I don’t think it’s worse than how people already believe headlines and even pictures of headlines (popular on Twitter, Reddit) while reacting to it much less demanding to read the actual article, if there even was one.
You can even just make up a caption next to an image like “this is Todd from Finland who raised $100k for the war in Ukraine” and this pic might spread virally as everyone pats Todd on the back “omg faith in humanity restored”.
And these scenarios are even less work and easier to consume than your doomsday. It’s already here and you don’t even have to listen to ab audio clip.
True. But listening to an hour-long or half-hour long podcast is considerable more investment than a simple headline. In terms of the investment in time the listener makes.
If you prohibit it then it will only be done secretly by governments and then used against naive populations. At least this way the population can learn how to identify and defend against it.
If we had transparent governance then maybe this wouldn't be a problem.
Why wouldn't people learn to spot it when the government does it? And I don't know if your argument follows - people clearly either don't know or don't care about the rise of Facebook false reporting.
How do people learn better: lots and lots of practice with varying levels of quality and published examples, or against a single powerful adversary that's trying to conceal what they are doing?
> many are sure to become very angry on learning they wasted their time
That is the best case outcome. Given ample real world evidence, however, I think most people will not get to this stage. They will be angry, yes, but at you for trying to introduce facts into their reality.
That’s the best case scenario. It gets a lot worse than that.
I saw a (scam) video on YouTube that had Elon Musk saying “if you want to make money in crypto, the best way is doing xxx, for example using the website yyy.com”.
I had to do a spit take because it was very convincing for a layman. Both the audio/video were deepfaked, but you couldn’t really tell other than the fact that it was uploaded in 240p.
If my mother had seen that, I’m sure she would have believed it since it’s something Elon would plausibly say. We’re entering a scary time.
I remember that. I reported it to YouTube and never heard anything back. Days later it was still running.
I remember looking at the chain and seeing over 6 figures sent in to the address. It was also timed to line up with one of Musk's "big announcements", which helped it be plausible.
As you said, it was very convincing to a layman - but YouTube aren't laymen, and they must have had dozens if not hundreds of reports about that scam.
> Dennett told Motherboard that these sorts of ethical considerations will be important in the future, when natural language processing systems become more available. “There are very dangerous prospects lying in the near future of this technology,” he said. “Copyright doesn’t come close to dealing with all of them. GPT-3 is a sort of automatic plagiarist, and unless great care is taken in how it is used, it can do great damage!”
Dennett after none of the experts familiar with his work was able to select the real reply from GPT-generated ones. Seems like we are there, or at least, started on the path.
I'd say it is highly unethical if this technology is used for deception, or if permission is not asked. Not unthinkable to soon be able to publish a high-quality book, by finetuning on the books another author already wrote.
I think the reason Jobs sounds weird is because it seems like the AI was trained on his public presentations, like maybe the iPhone introduction and his AllThingsD interview with Kara Swisher and Bill Gates - there's a noticeable amount of reverb baked in, he projects a bit more, sounds a bit more prepared - it's not how he'd speak in a 1-on-1 conversation without an audience. I would love to hear a version trained on his more intimate, 1-on-1 interviews, which he's done plenty of.
What I find funny is that both Jobs and Rogan sounds like they're doing stilted readings off of teleprompters at some points. The AI must have been trained on canned sponsor ad reads for the latter.
> Rogan sounds more believable but I suspect you'd get the same results sitting down at Audacity and cutting together an MP3.
I am sure you would. The interesting bit is not having to do that.
> An interesting concept but
The ol' "it's never gonna be as good as..." keeps failing us, and increasingly so. If the recent AI trajectories are any indicator, I'll give it a solid 6 month tops before it's good enough to generate something that fools absolutely everyone (granted, having an interviewee that is, you know, alive would probably be a precondition).
> you'd get the same results sitting down at Audacity and cutting together an MP3
Yes, but it would take you weeks to do it.
> It's an interesting demo but I'm not sure why I would want this to exist. It seems like technology which you could only abuse, either through the generation of podcast spam or through the production of fake audio.
Generally agree. There seems to be the kernel of some really cool tech here, and I think the non-abusive applications may be obvious only in hindsight.
It reminds me of those fake interviews they used to do on radio - where the artists would record one side of an interview and it would be sent out to hundreds of radio stations and the morning DJ from some podunk town would be interviewing Bono or whatever.
I agree. But give it some years and we'll get a proper AI "Joe Rogan & Steve Jobs" podcast (although I'm personally more interested in hearing more about Wozniak than Jobs).
How much did you listen to? The first few minutes with Jobs is rough but once there are questions presented, there is somewhat of a real conversation. Very interesting.
This is mindblowing. Like this could be real, and I'm learning stuff from it: There's an Indian epic that's 10 times as long as ...
There's some audio distortion (sounds like clips cut together, little "notches" in the soundscape) but apart from that, and some weirdness in sensing "the spatial location" where this audio was recorded...the concepts and the dialog are amazing.
Some parts are weird...but people can be weird. It you tidied this up, and added the right sounds affects and audio processing to this, without the cue that this is AI generated...holy fuck, I think people would believe it. Particularly if you cut it together as a "highlights reel". Jobs does sound a bit off tho, a bit thin...there should be enough data on him to do a sparse reconstruction of his voice to a level of accuracy beyond human discernment tho.
The thing this got wrong about Job's voice cadence, tho is: Jobs speaks a lot more slowly and deliberately, and with a lot more pauses, than here. I suspect the cadence / timing is not so emphatically modelled by this AI.
I think also they're missing some emotional trajectory coherence in both their voices. Like the emotional register of the voice does not sound or transition as naturally, and is less diverse.
Incredible PoC. AI folks are the new dark wizards. WTF can they not do? That list is shorter
I agree it's a fantastic PoC. Jobs' voice sounds very heavily derived from keynote speeches. People speak with different intonation and cadence in different situations and the uncanny valley effect here is due to having him speak casually on a podcast but in keynote voice. It'd be like training a Paul McCartney AI voice solely on Beatles songs - it wouldn't sound anything like McCartney's real life speech.
Joe Roegan I can guarantee you just had a MUCH better amount of background data to feed this thing - I doubt we have nearly enough high quality audio of Steve Jobs speaking casually to make a convincing facsimile.
A future Steve Jobs though where everyone has a smartphone and more is recorded.....that is kind of scary.
Stuff like this kind of makes me want to secretly record myself in very high quality in tons of situations and then put it all in a safe with a clause in my will to have it all donated to some AI research firm.
> The thing this got wrong about Job's voice cadence, tho is: Jobs speaks a lot more slowly and deliberately, and with a lot more pauses, than here. I suspect the cadence / timing is not so emphatically modelled by this AI.
That's because AI Broe Jogan got AI Jeve Stobs high before the show started.
>> That's because AI Broe Jogan got AI Jeve Stobs high before the show started.
He does this for every interviewee! I was shocked, but pleased when the Substack vp of comms wrote about her experience whilst colloquially escorting the Substack CEO for the interview. [1] [2]
>> At a long desk in the big main room sits an attractive nurse. She offers us an enhancer of B12 or NAD+, through a shot or an IV.
>> I get a shot of NAD+, which is supposed to be good for energy and metabolism. NAD stands for Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide, and I don’t know what the + is. (Actually, I don’t know what any of it is, but the nurse said she takes it, and if you saw this woman, you too would ask for a shot of whatever she’s on.)
Ultimately, this is pretty crazy to me. Those along with the interviewees get “high” too and since Steve Jobs, this is the first time it’s been written about it.
I wish people knew more about this! It’s been a while since Steve Jobs has been interviewed. 1000+ shots later, Rogan has grown and is stronger than ever.
Neither of those substances are used to get what is
colloquially known as "high" (one is a vitamin), you don't take either as a recreational drug.
I think what GP is referring to is Joe Rogan smoking weed with some guests before, during and after the show, rather than some vitamin and pro-metabolism shot.
There are IV clinics popping up all over the place, so there has to be some sort of streamlined process. No way they are full of MDs overseeing everything.
It was really hard to find good quality of Steve Jobs' voice, most of his speeches are keynotes on stage, I honestly was surprised that we managed to get to that quality from such poor quality recordings.
You can hear the "space" when Steve Jobs is talking that a lot of the training material are from keynotes on a stage in a big space. That's why it sounds a bit "thin" compared to Joe Rogans voice which is probably mostly based on recordings in a studio with Joe being close to a microphone (and a proper microphone for recording)
I work in audio post production and would be happy to take a crack at cleaning up your source audio. There's a lot we can do to isolate the dialogue from the space and restore presence.
AI Jobs' comments on the emergence of spirituality from the Indian subcontinent and his belief that intuitive knowledge is as real as scientific knowledge sounds like something he absolutely would have said.
That might just be lack of inputs for Jobs compared to Rogan. Like we have tons of Rogan speaking in a podcast setting. We have very few Jobs interviews in comparison and the ones we do have take place over a much longer stretch of his life (so speech patterns will have changed).
I might also guess that a decent amount of Jobs' audio might be from non-conversational contexts like keynotes and lectures.
Hi everyone, cofounder of play.ht (the startup behind this podcast) here. let me know if you have any questions.
To give more context, the podcast was totally AI generated, the content itself was generated from a finetuned GPT3 on SteveJobs' biography, the voices were cloned from few hours of both Joe and Steve voices, even though it was tough to get good content for Steve Jobs. And the podcast artwork was generated by SD.
We will be releasing more episodes soon which will be even more mind-blowing!
Please take the naysayers with a grain of salt, this is a fantastic demo of what's possible. While the voices aren't 100% convincing on good speakers, if this was over the phone it would be indistinguishable, the content of the podcast is also spot on with Joe's sort of rambling and Steve always acting like he's making a point or telling a story.
Honestly I expected Joe to ramble a lot more, but I understand this demo is meant for people to listen to Jobs so they probably had to cut out a lot Joe's ramblings.
Wow, I was sure, from listening to the first few minutes, that the script was written by a human trying to be funny. The part about the NeXT Computer and the three applications was just too funny. Edit: Not to mention the reference to the movie Ghost.
We will never use any cloned voice in any commercial way without consent and compensation, we only wanted to show the community what is possible and what generative AI models can do.
Aren't you using the cloned voices to generate marketing material for your company to make profit? Indirectly profiting without consent or compensation seems like a difficult ethical line. It also seems like something you want to have a very good stance on when a law could be passed that completely shuts down your ability to operate.
I know the reaction here is mixed and tbh that's what makes HN so interesting for me. But FWIW I love this podcast! It's a great demonstration of what AI can do. I am going to share it with my students before the next class so that they see what can be possible.
>...the content itself was generated from a finetuned GPT3 on SteveJobs' biography
Was the actual dialog generated by GPT-3, or just Jobs' responses? If the former, was any of the dialog human edited/spliced together or was the entire script generated as a single output?
This was the prompt:
"
Podcast.AI
Great people, great interviews with our host Joe Rogan.
Episode 1 - Steve Jobs
Summary:
"
Then GPT3 generated the summary, then we added:
"
Transcript:
Joe:
"
That is all.
I still have a hard time believing that the opening of the script was auto-generated. Did GPT-3 really generate the part about the movie Ghost? If so, it has a surprising amount of understanding of what it's generating.
We just finetuned another voice recently with only 1hr though... I think eventually (soon) we will only need 15-20 mins with zeroshot not even finetuning.
I'm amused that right now as I post this, the top comment is "This is terrible and sounds like it was cut with tape" and the next one is "this is amazing and indistinguishable from real life".
I guess we have a ways to go with AI, but it's already there for some.
The first post is not very fair at all. I personally am in the amazing camp, this is a rough diamond, a prototype, from here it will be refined and optimised. The first poster is trying to compare it to two humans in dialog, which is unrealistic for something so new. It very much looks to me though, it will get there and get there shortly.
The flow of Jobs' voice is a little off, but wow this is incredible. But also incredibly concerning. Its cool tech, and I guess nothing can stop the inevitability of new technology, but the ability to replicate people's voice, speech patterns, and how they look to a pretty accurate degree is mega sketchy. I guess to future proof yourself, just minimize your audio and visual data online...
The impression I got is that his tone sounded like someone giving a speech or presentation. Rogan sounded more natural.
I suspect a large part of the training data was Jobs giving presentations in front of an audience so his AI voice sounds like public speaking. Whereas Rogan's data would be most likely be conversations from his podcast so his AI voice sounds more conversational.
Or, you know, if you want to be "resurrected" after the singularity from your digital web-crumbs then make sure you leave plenty of them. People who left the best data will be first to be uploaded.
Do people understand this isn’t just speech synth? The script itself is AI?
The introductory bit is AMAZING. Coyly teasing out the introduction of the guest is something Rogan does.
I also assume the laughter bits are overused because of the Rogan transcripts, which probably indicate [Laughter]. You’d need a bigger model to know what’s the appropriate laugh for person to person discussion, not the laugh Steve Jobs gives to an auditorium.
I'm sure everything I'm about to say has already been said, but I would like to add my voice because it seems important.
This podcast was enjoyable to me. I was surprised that I enjoyed it so much and I ended up listening until the end. I really liked to listen to Steve Jobs, even knowing that this was some sort of combination of things he has said and generated content, he was very enlightening to listen to.
Both Joe and Steve stayed in character as far as I know, the audio and a few laughs that were misplaced seemed like the only flaws technically.
Morally I'm thinking that this falls short unfortunately, but only because i'm under the impression that permission was not given to use the likeness of either person. Since this is a relatively new way to achieve something like this particular production I believe that these first uses will have the biggest effect and I can understand why the two people featured were chosen. I hope that one day our society respects the right of people to be portrayed and used as they would wish, but I do understand that as of right now the power to enforce those protections are probably not well developed.
All in all I'm very impressed and a bit disturbed by the potential.
I feel similar to you — to combat the morality aspect — I wish there was an annotated community transcript that you can dig deeper into how it was put together.
I'm anti-AI so I'm biased against this from the start, but c'mon, let the dead rest in peace. It's really bad for the culture, imho, to endlessly repackage the same people, ideas, properties, etc. As much as I don't care for Musk, Joe Rogan talking to him provides infinitely more insight into the world of today than a fake Rogan talking to a fake Jobs.
It will be like, really bad for the culture when you won't know what is serious and what is a joke on the internet anymore. Suddenly people won't be sure whether they should take it seriously when that one guy from Fear Factor talks to a billionaire smoking a blunt on his show.
Now looks like a computer toy and yet, it's a perfect way for many anti-human agendas to use it as psy-weapon that slowly makes the population to loose more ties to reality and get closer to the normalization of alienating itself. A whole new level of mass-mad potential.
"My hope is someday, when the next Aristotle is alive, we can capture the underlying worldview of that Aristotle - in a computer. And someday, some student will be able not only to read the words Aristotle wrote, but ask Aristotle a question - and get an answer!"- Steve Jobs, 1985
AI will reduce the demand for "knowledge" and cultural workers (writing, music, art, programming, data analysts, etc, basically everyone who doesn't do manual labour) by 90-99% with the remaining workers being AI helpers/"prompt-engineers". Once this transition picks up steam, it will happen so quickly that the rust-belt-ification of the midwest will look measured and quant in comparison, and we saw how government didn't act to help people that got dislocated through absolutely 0 fault of their own. And that's not even getting into how AI/ML solutions often only hit the 80 mark in the 80/20 rule and cause bizarre issues for people that run afoul of the system (see: Google's ML driven account takedown processes with youtube/play store), while winning purely on their low marginal cost.
If AI was paired with an explicit promise of a generous UBI then I would merely personally choose to not consume AI content and not be against it in general. But that isn't how the market economy works unfortunately.
That seems less "anti-AI" and more anti our current economic systems, the inequality they produce, and their increasing incompatibility with the present and future. The "incompatibility" being between our values and the resulting outcomes. Our values tell us that AI and automation freeing up immense amounts of human labour/effort so that it can be directed to new (creative) ends should be wonderful and celebrated, but the reality is that it's bringing about a frightening future where an increasingly small few control the vast majority of the power in the world, and direct it towards "profitable" ends which are largely divorced from human values.
Yep essentially that is my thinking! AI/ML just hyper-charges the ability of capital to produce with an ever shrinking amount of required labor. And in our free-market with no guard rails every uptick in unemployment leads to more misery.
Yup. I'll add that it's not just unemployment that hurts us (under our current economic systems), but also underemployment, as we see with the "gig economy". Some people will overly focus on the unemployment stats, and naively conclude that all's well despite many people not living up to their potential, and barely making ends meet.
I've heard this argument over and over. I used to be an avid believer in this myself.
However, this has been the fear of people for years, with every new tech and every time, it seems like some new thing replaced the old, or even added to it. The electric guitar, the synth, DAWs, they never replaced musicians, they just gave them more tools, yet there were always nay sayers.
I see this happening in business too. People haven't been fired en masse due to tech and we're currently having massive shortages in the work force. Even with McDonald's moving to self-service screens. I'm getting less and less scared of tech taking over and removing people from everything.
It's easy to discount a disrupting technology when you see yourself as far removed from it.
- Autonomous McDonalds doesn't bother me because I don't work at McDonalds.
- Stable Diffusion doesn't bother me because I'm not an artist.
- Copilot doesn't bother me because my code requires creativity and critical thinking.
But then again, Copilot doesn't need to be "good" before it starts to take away programmer jobs. It just needs to be better than the worst programmer on your team.
And yet, McDonald's and many restaurants in general have been almost permanently short staffed since Covid. In spite of attempts at automation.
I have yet to see anything impressive from Copilot. You still can not describe a set of business requirements to it and have it translate that into a full stack application that factors for performance, security, GDPR, usability, etc. It's at best a form of auto complete.
The difference is the speed and generality of the change brought on by this specific tech. That is why AI/ML is so heavily capitalized right now, people with capital know the power of this. Previous changes were painful (automation of auto manufacturing + offshoring of auto manufacturing led directly to political backlash for decades) but they were scoped to individual industries at a time and with enough time for society to adjust. I think AI/ML is a step change in the speed of this and we won't be able to just muddle through it like we did with manufacturing automation.
At least that is my thought on how this is different, I am aware that this has been said for basically every previous technological advancement.
While impressive, I think it is extremely bothersome. Did you get JRE's permission or the family of Steve Job's permission to do this? Considering how much news/social media/blogs like to cut and paste one-liners taken out of context, I find it unethical to put words into Joe Rogan's mouth like this.
I get that you needed someone who everyone recognized for a good demo, but I honestly think using someone who is alive was not a great choice.
To remove anyone's ability to believe this interview actually happened, some other interviewers could've been used, like Walter Cronkite or David Brinkley.
There are two parties in the interview and only one is dead. The parent is saying that to eliminate all doubt, they should have gone to great lengths to pick two very dead people for the demo.
I should've made more of an effort to separate my two points. You are indeed correct. I still have issue with putting words into Steve Job's mouth w/o permission from his estate. I think the bigger issue is including someone who already has many news outlets picking and choosing one-liners from his many years of podcasts to make him out to be a horrible person. My stupid solution was to use not one, but two dead people for the demo. My first point still stands I don't think they should've put the words into the mouth of anyone living or dead.
I don't think one needs a giveaway to know that you or anyone aware of Steve Jobs is aware that he is dead. It's just funny how you think a conversation with someone dead is somehow going to cause misinformation issues.
I've never listened to Joe Rogan - but does he really sound like his voice has passed through a square wave? He has almost no intonation. The AI can't even pronounce "Swayze" correctly.
Job's laugh sounds psychotic and out of place. And his voice, again, sounds robotic.
Everyone knows it's terrible, but it's cool that they could do this at all. Like, it's a small preview of what's possible. Imagine this 10 years from now.
I imagine in 10 years it'll be the same. Firstly because if you can't get "enough" good content to model, you will have to manually shape the models to make it sound authentic - and that isn't AI, that's editing. But secondly because humans are very good at recognizing authentically human interactions, and algorithms simply aren't good enough to generate all the nuances we identify as authentic.
If you want to fake someone out, use a regular person, and clean it up in post.
It's state of the art. It sounds amazing compared to anything that's existed before. What alternative are you comparing this to to say that it's awful?
A contrarian outburst seems to be the default on HN these days. Perhaps it has seeped in via the rampant infestation of politics. The ‘hackers’ get blasted when sharing projects.
Personally I’m in awe of this tech. But I also detest its inevitable weaponisation. But the tech! Wow.
The first minute or two of Jobs is pretty bad, but after that it is not that bad. Not totally convincing, but it isn't bad. I suspect most people saying this did not listen past that part.
The issue is Job's training data is likely 99% his public "presentation voice" audio -- cadence, inflection, emphasis from public remarks at Apple events, commencement addresses, shareholder meetings, etc -- which OF COURSE sounds unnatural in regular conversation.
Meanwhile Rogan has million hours of regular conversation audio to learn from.
Humans are expensive though. If you have a lot of speech to record, it might be cheaper to use the human to train the AI and then let the AI finish the rest.
Would the fact that Joe's data is more standardized and produced the same way. Job's data is likely a mix of different volumes, echo levels, processing have an effect
Probably significantly more training data for Rogan than Jobs and a much wider range thanks to his long running pod cast. I am not super familiar with Steve Jobs so I can't think of anything other than his keynotes and some interviews that you would be able to use for him.
Unrelated point...that laugh was incredibly bad and repetitive to the point it felt like they were playing laugh.wav file each time they wanted a laugh instead of generating a new laugh of variable pitch and length.
Maybe there's more training data available for Rogan. The guy pumps out hundreds of hours of content a year in which he's recorded discussing every topic under the sun. I can't imagine there's a similar quantity of recordings of Jobs's voice - or of almost anyone's voice for that matter.
Edit: four other people replied in the time it took me to type two sentences. I guess the answer is that obvious.
Presumably because we have hours, days, weeks of Joe Rogan speaking - not just on his podcast but as a sports announcer as well. Steve Jobs... we have a few speeches and presentations, but we don't have much data on how he spoke by comparison.
This has some obvious rough edges but still it's a harbinger of things to come. Seems this was trained on recordings of Jobs' on-stage voice rather than his casual conversation voice. The rough edges in this will be smoothed out over time by new tricks of AI trade. This will get crazy when combined with an AI Jobs that paces around a virtual stage in a black turtleneck hyping AI-invented products.
So we have ai replacing humans; but more, they will even be assuming our names and the internet will be full of fake conversations and articles and fake stories allegedly by these replaced people
The really bizarre thing is that I found myself enjoying this podcast, perhaps even more than the average Joe Rogan podcast. This didn't feel quite as hollow as the average AI-generated content.
This really feels like next level stuff--as Jobs would love to note, that's the magic of integration. But, it's really not novel--just someone putting together the building blocks of foundational ML models already out there.
I'm really excited to see version 2 and so on of this.
I think what they're saying is that this artifact could have been produced a long time ago with very similar techniques, and the novelty is in the ecosystem and tooling which lowers the barriers to creating it.
Exactly! My comment is not a ding on the product, but amazement at what a couple engineers with the right mindset can achieve with existing tools in this day and age.
What I'm waiting for is when these imagined conversations are generated for an audience of just me. When references I understand and abstractions I'm familiar with are tossed around with ease, but unfamiliar concepts are expanded on and picked apart, as you might with a good friend.
If the speakers are brilliant I often don't want to actively be part of a conversation, I just want a personal performance. Though I imagine in 10 years, with a tricorder on my face (brain sensor included), I'll probably always be part of the conversation/performance, however passive.
For people complaining that it is not good enough, it may sound a bit off because its ML and also depends on the availability of good data. Over time, the algorithm will fix these issues, may be.
For me the overarching thing is, why should this exist?
1. Are they auditioning for a deep fake service and picked the most eye catching, legally controversial thing possible?
2. Do they think it has a viral potential and so it could be a continuous source of revenue?
Either way, for me it's a PoC that shows how trivial it is to fake someone's voice and think about the ramifications of this for our society.
Very engaging after the first act. Imaginary Conversations is already an established sub genre of history books and I can't wait to see where this style of hybrid curation / creation goes, surely into the present like this. Maybe a.i. voice debates will be so offensive to the popular pundits being cloned it will encourage more real live debates again, giving people exactly what they want just to compete with underground a.i.
I expect soon there will be Unauthorized Biographies written in the first person with the audiobook read by the subject's a.i. voice. What a trip.
It sounds good on a first glance, but then the topic switches are totally absurd.
Like Steve talking about LSD all of a sudden, then Joe Rogan asks about Newton (which Jobs didn’t make) and Steve starts talking about… product and iteration?
It sounds like someone is superficially trying to act like Jobs would act, which … it kind of is!
I needed to turn it off after 10 minutes as it obviously goes nowhere. But really interesting experiment nonetheless, and better than I would expect.
This is a common trope in sci-fi, but I personally don't get the appeal. It's not talking to my dead loved one, it's just a weird technological puppet of them. An actual recording of their voice is much more meaningful, even if it's not interactive.
It actually already exists. There's companies that train AI on a deceased loved one's messages and then have them send texts back. They act as if they're alive and well.
Ray Kurzweil discussed something like this on the Lex Fridman podcast. He fed all his late father's writing into an AI system and it's able to ask it questions and get answers that seem believable to agree with what his dad would have said.
The opening minute or two sounded a little off, but either Jobs' cadence sped up or I got used to it, and it got it better as it went on. The last few minutes were astounding - Jobs riffing about the good and bad potential of technology, and the final bit about throwing computers - if that was not either heavily curated or copied from pre-existing material I am quite impressed.
"The episodes are rendered using play.ht's ultra-realistic voices, and transcripts are generated with fine-tuned language models. 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." - https://podcast.ai/about
Feels like both written and voiced by AI after listening to it. There were some tangents that felt a bit off. The Gizmodo bit was probably about the iPhone that was left at the bar but they never actually addressed the subject matter which was strange.
Some of it is very convincing! The first parts about spirituality especially. But for me it really fell apart and became an obvious GPT text later on — for instance the part about what Adobe should do is completely nonsensical.
The contrast between what is said, facetiously, & what the reader knows to be true, or discovers as the joke becomes clearer, become a unique & essential part of the expression.
Mind is blown.. it's verry good. Although there's no real coherence in the 'ainterview', it's very convincing. In terms of TTS, there are some minor glitches here and there, but overall I'm super impressed.
one of the things was the "sell you a quarter of a car" part. I couldn't find a google hit for that.
"People will accept your ideas much more readily if you tell them that Benjamin Franklin said it first" can now be amended to "people will be more willing to listen to your ideas if you synthesize a podcast of Joe Rogan and Steve Jobs talking about it."
I don't think anything being said is new wisdom or truth. We've heard these same things said elsewhere. However, because we spliced together the voices of Joe and Steve, you'll get a different level of engagement from a different set of communities. It's already hard enough to separate form and substance on the internet. I'm not sure what this adds.
The 1st thing I noticed is that Jobs voice sounds like he's giving a talk to a large audience as opposed to a one-on-one conversation. Is it because most of his clips are him doing a monologue?
Something often discussed is how things like this can be used to make incriminating fake audio of other people's voices. Seems obvious that it wouldn't be too hard to find signs of that in the digital files.
My question is has anyone made a filter that goes the opposite direction, ie makes your voice on phone or zoom calls sound like it's been AI generated by inserting specific artifacts?
We might have an interesting arms race ahead of us. Maybe a good time to get into digital forensics.
This was very uncomfortable for me to listen to. I felt compelled to close out of the tab 3 minutes into it. While I can appreciate that the AI has stitched together dialogue read by synthesized voices, ultimately it sounded like nonsense and an invasion of privacy for both parties. Maybe I'm just weird and have a low tolerance for that uncanny valley feeling.
My expectations weren't that high to begin with but... hmmm... What should I have been expecting in context of what the AI is actually doing? Is it automatically cutting together clips to fit a script? The cadence of Jobs just seems strange and comes off as being stitched together. Surely an AI that can get this far could add some natural gaps to the conversation.
How many bits of information was there in the prompt. If it is was a very small amount, this is mind blowing!
Being trained off Steve's autobiography dampens how impressive this is, but the grammatical structure and flow of sentences is beyond belief. We did see this in GPT3. But the responses seem more coherent, probably because of the source material- Jobs biography!
I wonder how much more effective this would be if the prompt wasn't "this was generated by AI." It would be really interesting if someone with a popular podcast injected an AI conversation into their feed and didn't tell their audience for a couple weeks. A real life Turing Test.
A thought this prompted: I absolutely cannot wait to see how litigation erupts as this stuff improves. Digital forensic evidence investigation is going to become a massive industry.
People are going to be imprisoned and put to death for things that never even happened. Unreal times we're living in.
It's interesting many people's reactions to that of Jobs are "he wasn't like that", "doesn't sound what he would say" etc..... (1) a dead person, freaky, (2) countering people's biased "memory" of someone from their past.... what we pick and choose to remember... going up against something generated (with it's own biases/problems) from the content that person produced over years and years...what seemingly should be a really decent representation of their -isms/personality.
But I put it all down to do philosophy, then some soul searching and God turned up. Spirit, astral projection, lightsoul, God, Christ, heaven -- all real.
Most mindblowing thing I've seen in recent memory. With the amount of available training data, isn't it now just a small step to AI-generate new episodes of existing podcasts? Exciting and scary.
Fantastic marketing execution. Most surprising was the gravitation of the conversation. I'm really curious about the script behind the voices. Was it written by a person or ai as well?
Obviously it has some kinks that need to be worked out and it sounds spliced, and Joe never starts the show “Hello to all you freak bitches” but was better than I expected.
A lot of people aren't going to like this. The general public perception is going to be that not only are AI after our creative jobs but even our identities.
The first 20 secs of dialog from Jobs is not believable. He never did chit-chat. He wouldn't give a toot about some podcast. His mission would be to get to the point - himself, his company, or a big idea that intersects one or the other. He wouldn't try to flatter the the host.
Bro Jogan, on the other hand, sounds very believable.
This might have something to do with the ratio of Bro/Jobs training material.
Rogan sounds more believable but I suspect you'd get the same results sitting down at Audacity and cutting together an MP3. You just have better quality samples of him talking to people in a podcast setting.
It's an interesting demo but I'm not sure why I would want this to exist. It seems like technology which you could only abuse, either through the generation of podcast spam or through the production of fake audio. Podcasts are legion and are already cheap to make and based on open standards.