AI has opened the door to so many possibilities, and every time we think we’ve seen (or heard) everything, it surprises us with something new. Such is the case of podcast.ai, a peculiar project that promises to generate a new podcast episode every week using only artificial intelligence. The first chapter joined the popular podcaster Joe Rogan with Steve Jobs the most important figure in the history of Apple.
The result? an amazing interview created entirely with AI and with surprisingly realistic nuances. The 20-minute audio offers an exchange between the artificial versions of the host of The Joe Rogan Experience and the co-founder of the Cupertino firm.
This proposal was born to promote a tool to create ultra-realistic voices with artificial intelligence, which belongs to the company Play.ht. Although not much detail has been provided on how this peculiar podcast is generated, the developers have mentioned the use of transcripts created with “fine-tuned language models”.
“The Steve Jobs episode was trained on his biography and all recordings of him that we could find online, so that the AI could accurately bring him back to life,” they explained.
Joe Rogan and Steve Jobs, ‘hand in hand’ in this podcast created by an AI
Listening to the fictional interview, it quickly becomes clear that the most natural results have been obtained with the voice of Joe Rogan. His expressions and intonations have been very well replicated, while Steve Jobs’s interventions feel a bit more artificial.
Although the interventions with the voice of the co-founder and former CEO of Apple are generally good, at times they are somewhat “weird”. This can be seen mainly when the responses become too long and rambling. There are even some cuts or pronunciation changes typical of a speech generated by software.
Surely this responds to the availability of material to work on both voices. After all, there are hundreds and hundreds of hours of current Joe Rogan material on Spotify and YouTube. While in the case of Steve Jobs it is not so, since more than 10 years have passed since his death and the audio or video resources to educate AI are much older.
If you’re a machine learning enthusiast, or want to hear your favorite topics treated in a new way, or just want to relive voices from the past, this podcast is for you.
Endless combinations of protagonists
The case of podcast.ai is striking, and the first episode with Joe Rogan and Steve Jobs has served as a kick for countless combinations of protagonists. In fact, the public can propose ideas for the next episodes by entering this link. Some are really hilarious: a conversation between Einstein and Buddha, Elon Musk interviewing Nicola Tesla, or Donald Trump interviewing himself, or Sherlock Holmes questioning OJ Simpson. The list is endless and some of the inputs are considerably more feasible than others of course.
Clearly, we are talking about an experimental project but with very interesting characteristics. Although it also opens the door to controversy, because it is unknown if Play.ht has permission to address such an initiative.
In the case of Steve Jobs, it could be argued that, having died, it is a tribute, but this justification does not apply to Joe Rogan. In the case of the podcaster, It’s about a deepfake of his voice and that can have quite controversial implications.