First art 🎨, now AI’s coming for your audio

Scared of AI yet?

No?

Man, how do you stay so chill with all this talk of AI content taking over the internet + daily news of bear markets and looming recession? Teach me how to be more like you 🕶

…what’s that? You snack on edibles like they’re going out of fashion? I see. I see.

Hey, it’s all good with us! 🍃💨😎

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve read about AI toasters, art generators, nail painting machines, smoothie makers, and now – AI podcasting.

Are we seeing the beginning of the consumer AI revolution? Intelligent apps, services, and products that learn to make better results every time?

Podcast.ai is a new weekly experiment from text-to-voice company Play.ht.

They use language models and archive audio to produce totally fictitious podcasts with realistic celebrity voices – complete with convincing speaking styles, relevant subjects, and very human-sounding laughs, pauses, and emotions.

Here’s their first creation: Joe Rogan interviewing Steve Jobs

😳

Scary stuff, but let’s be brave at take a closer look – what’s actually impressive here?

One thing that’s noticeable in the audio above, as well as in creations from art AI bots like Midjourney, is that AI tends to focus on style over substance.

AI generators are awesome at copying details, looks, and sounds. This can result in artwork that’s visually stunning on first appearances.

– and here, it looks like AI can also make podcasts that sound frighteningly real, if you’re like me, and use them as background noise during a workday without paying too much attention.

Spend a little longer with AI-generated content, however, and you’ll start to notice that the meaning and quality of content doesn’t always match up to first impressions.

Sometimes it feels like AI generators are creating with real intentions. Other times, they seem like toddlers play-acting as astronauts or chefs without understanding what those concepts actually mean.

There are sections of this AI podcast where Rogan and Jobs exchange genuinely compelling dialogue.

Like this comment from Austin’s favorite Alpha Bro toward the end of the show:

Rogan: “That’s why young people love Apple, because it means something to them.”

Jobs: “Yeah?”

Rogan: “They feel like they’re getting in on something. Your products have a feeling of personality. They seem to have a soul, in a way, and- some people almost get religious about this stuff because it’s so powerful and it means so much.”

We tripping, or is the bot talking about more than just Apple here… 🤯

Disappointingly, however, AI Jobs responds with a bunch of unrelated soundbites about how to run a company:

Jobs: “If a company gets to the point where it’s successfully doing a few things, you don’t have to try and do everything. We’re in the process now of trying to cut the things we’re doing so that we can concentrate on the few that are really high on our priority list because if you try to do too many things, none of them get done well. You’ve got to focus on a few and make sure those are done well…”

Ok Steve, calm down. You sound like me during Decentra Daily team calls.

It’s an example of how the AI podcast sounds kind of like a conversation but isn’t actually producing a real back-and-forth. There are minimal parts of the episode where Jobs and Rogan trade ideas and build on what each other says.

It makes me wonder how much of the higher-quality audio is lifted more directly from the source material. It seems like the AI has an easier time recreating Rogan’s voice than Jobs – presumably because there’s so much more Rogan audio online to work with.

Podcast.AI says, “the Steve Jobs episode was trained on his biography and all recordings of him we could find online.”

Rogan’s voice is more realistic, makes more sense, and seems to be making more original points. Jobs’ audio, on the other hand, sounds more like it’s copy-pasted from Ted Talks and Apple product launches.

The wider point...

is that you can use current AI to give the impression of meaningful content – but it’s an impression. One that frequently depends on good source data, running many iterations, and a lot of patient manual editing.

If you let AI rip by itself and expect it to produce intentional writing, artwork, or audio, you’re likely to be a little underwhelmed by the results.

You can see this all the time with AI art.

Because the bots don’t really understand the content they’re creating, they’ll often produce people with three legs, demonic animal creatures, and other nightmarish mutant visions:

(The r/SyntheticNightmares Reddit thread collects some of Midjourney’s more horrific creations)

For now then, AI generators seem more like tools than creative engines.

Artistic people can become skilled prompt engineers, using AI like a paintbrush or design software to make original content based on their own vision and creativity.

And AI can also do a great job of copying content that’s already creative, artistic, or insightful – spinning and remixing it to create something that’s not quite plagiarism, but not quite new.

However, I’m yet to see an AI bot that can generate its own original & meaningful/intentional content. If you put bad content in, you tend to get bad content out.

So it looks like our feeds are safe… at least for another week.

//joe.

P.S. Twist! This article was written entirely by an AI language learning model. Impressed yet?

jk just messing 😉 …or am I?

Podcast.AI has a community forum where you can suggest and vote on future episode ideas. Right now, a conversation between Einstein and Buddha is the most requested suggestion – no pressure devs!

…and if you’re still scared of AI taking over, here’s a video of an art-generating robot falling asleep whilst being questioned in a UK House of Lords’ hearing.

It’s so cute – it finds politics boring, just like us! 🤖