Podcasts are more fashionable than ever: according to a study, approximately 620 million people in the world listen to them frequently. And it is that this format offers the possibility of listening at length to specialists in infinite areas and connecting with them in a way that the radio did not allow. The latest episode of Podcast.ai, for example, is an interview of almost twenty minutes in which Apple founder Steve Jobs himselftalks with Joe Rogan about various topics.
But wait… Didn’t Steve Jobs pass away in 2011? If dystopias make you suffer, don’t read on.
Podcast.ai is a weekly program that deals with innovations around Artificial Intelligence and has decided to kick off with a shocking demonstration of what it can do: nothing less than “resurrect” Steve Jobs and have him chat quietly on a podcast with another bot.
For this they have used the library of 907 realistic voices of play.ht and have trained the AI to imitate the voice and inflections of Jobs, feeding her all the available recordings of the late tycoon and teaching her his biography to give you a better understanding of yourself. The result is incredible: although there are some forced laughs, it really does feel like we’re listening to Steve himself talk about technology and spirituality.
This new “feat” is associated with an unavoidable ethical issue that adds to the long list of fears that the vertiginous development of artificial intelligence is generating, especially in professional sectors in which technology threatens to make human work obsolete. The latest controversy in this regard has revolved around the world of art as a result of the fact that, in recent weeks, social networks have been flooded with AI-generated images such as DALL-E or Stable Diffusion.
But drawing is not the only thing these complexes can do bot: there are already AIs able to speak texts, such as VocaliD or Audiobook.ai; of generate videos from textsuch as Meta’s Make-A-Video, from generate code and even create games or web applications from natural language, such as Codex, and even from continue and develop a text from a paragraphlike the GPT-3 AI.
Despite the suspicions of artists, designers, editors and other groups that see their functions threatened, most AIs are conceived as tools intended to complement and facilitate the work of humans and some could play a key role in scientific and technological development.
Take Alpha Fold as an example, a program developed by DeepMind of Alphabets/Google that allows prediction of protein structure in a way that no human brain could compete with. this knowledge could lead to a revolution in numerous areas of biology and medicinesuch as the development of drugs capable of acting on specific targets.
The consequences of the development of computing are difficult to predict and we still have many applications to discover and many surprises to see. What is clear is that, whether we like it or not, Artificial Intelligence is here to stay.
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Artificial Intelligence goes to the next level by “resurrecting” Steve Jobs