The Disturbing Way The Late Steve Jobs Was Just Able To Give A Live Interview
A voice synthesis AI called Generative Pre-Trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) created by the company Play.ht was used to construct a digitally recorded interview between Joe Rogan and Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple Ltd., died in 2011 from pancreatic cancer. He was synonymous with the tech giant and was involved in many of its iconic technologies, including the original Apple 1 computer, which would be later developed into the MAC computers of today.
Jobs, along with co-founder Steve Wozniak, changed the face of personal technology and invented some of the main technology products we use in our daily lives. They took Apple from a failing business to the number-one technology company for phones, laptops, and other products.
While he died quite young at the age of 56, after a long and public battle with cancer, his innovations are still being used and built on today over a decade after his passing.
Technology in today’s world can do so much, like video chatting between two people on opposite sides of the world, but sometimes it can go too far. Super podcaster Joe Rogan released a podcast with Steve Jobs this week. How some people might ask, given that Job died over a decade ago. It seems like not even death can stop one from missing an interview.
The whole podcast is recorded using artificial intelligence. Voice synthesis is used to digitally clone the voices of both men to create a back-and-forth interview. This interview is the first episode in a podcast series called “Podcast.ai,” produced by Play.ht, a voice synthesis business.
Within the 19-minute interview, Jobs talks about various topics such as aesthetics, Google, Apple products, and LSD. While it was quite a mishmash of multiple quotes Steve Jobs has said throughout his life, it shows how fast technology is moving.
Generative Pre-Trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) was used to train Steve Jobs and Joe Rogan’s voices and dialogue. This training was completed by subjecting GPT-3 to various Jobs interviews and his biography. Anyone that had listened to the podcast would agree that his voice and opinions sound very authentic to any interview or speech he had done previously.
Whether there are any legal implications to using Steve Jobs’s voice without permission to promote your product remains to be seen. It has definitely got people’s attention, so from a marketing ploy, it is very successful.
This podcast isn’t the first time voice synthesis can be used on a beloved celebrity or character. Darth Vader’s voice was virtually synthesized in the new Obi-Wan Kenobi TV series on Disney +, and in 2021, a hologram was used of the late 2Pac at Coachella Valley Music and Art Festival.
Living in the technology age that we are living in, there is a new product or service that has been updated, created, or made self-serving every single day. From Space X to AI interviews to electric planes, all of the technology that seems so farfetched and unrealistic from childhood is now applied to our everyday lives. It makes you wonder what technology will become embedded in our daily lives in two or three decades, which seems unrealistic now. I vote for a cleaning robot.
