Can’t believe our ears anymore? |
Artificial intelligence brings Steve Jobs back
Nobody knows exactly what the future will look like. But you can now hear what it sounds like in a podcast on the Website podcast.ai Listen. It’s a nearly 20-minute conversation between US podcaster Joe Rogan (55) and Apple co-founder Steve Jobs († 56). It was recorded just now, about eleven years after Jobs’ death.
How is that possible? An artificial intelligence not only wrote the script for the conversation, it also imitated the voices of the two interlocutors.
For the content of the conversation, the computer analyzed material it found about Jobs and Rogan on the Internet. In this fictitious, forgive me, calculated conversation, Jobs reports on his enthusiasm for Buddhism, drug use and Apple’s success.
But the voice output is more exciting than the content itself. The digitized Rogan sounds exactly like the original. No wonder he has thousands of hours of artificial intelligence hearing material. Jobs’ sound samples come from just a few of the Apple co-founder’s presentations and interviews.
Jobs’ voice doesn’t always come across as perfect in conversation. But the quality of the podcast is definitely enough to keep asking yourself whether the Ober-Apple might not have climbed out of the grave after all.
And what’s the point? The podcast is a project by the company play.ht, which uses artificial intelligence to try to simulate realistic voices – and which apparently succeeds very well.
Joe Rogan comments on MMA fights, performs as a comedian and has caused quite a few scandals with his podcast The Joe Rogan Experience. However, he was not involved in the fictional interview with Steve Jobs
As impressive as the almost 20 minutes may be, they are just as creepy. The creators ask in a forum, what fictional conversations are to take place in the next episodes of the series. There are suggestions like “Buddha and Einstein”, “Trump interviews himself”, “Elon Musk talks to Nikola Tesla”, and that may all be quite funny.
The bottom line is this technical feasibility: we can no longer believe our ears! Joe Biden could announce the third world war in such a podcast, Karl Lauterbach could overturn the mask requirement or Gerhard Schröder could savagely insult Vladimir Putin.
Sometimes, despite all my enthusiasm for technology, the future scares me a bit.
This article comes from BILD am SONNTAG. The ePaper of the entire issue is available here.