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This sounds like if you spliced together tape of Rogan and Jobs with scotch tape. An interesting concept but I never felt like I was listening to a conversation

This sounds like if you spliced together tape of Rogan and Jobs with scotch tape. An interesting concept but I never felt like I was listening to a conversation between two people. Jobs sounds weirdly far away, he also was never a "fast talker". Listen to his interview at MIT where he takes questions. He always stopped for long pauses, stares off into space for a minute. He didn't rush into responses and tended to nail timing really well. Rogan sounds more believable but I suspect you'd get the same results sitting down at Audacity and cutting together an MP3. You just have better quality samples of him talking to people in a podcast setting. It's an interesting demo but I'm not sure why I would want this to exist. It seems like technology which you could only abuse, either through the generation of podcast spam or through the production of fake audio. Podcasts are legion and are already cheap to make and based on open standards.

starkd 4y ago
I'd say it is highly unethical. Imagine thousands of people listening to fake podcasts as if they were real. Not only are they being lied to, but if they find out many are sure to become very angry on learning they wasted their time. Fortunately, it's not there yet, since it's obviously fake.
- KMnO4 4y ago
  > wasted their time That’s the best case scenario. It gets a lot worse than that. I saw a (scam) video on YouTube that had Elon Musk saying “if you want to make money in crypto, the best way is doing xxx, for example using the website yyy.com”. I had to do a spit take because it was very convincing for a layman. Both the audio/video were deepfaked, but you couldn’t really tell other than the fact that it was uploaded in 240p. If my mother had seen that, I’m sure she would have believed it since it’s something Elon would plausibly say. We’re entering a scary time.
  - LtWorf 4y ago
    Well he only promotes scams so it was extra believable!
  - mandmandam 4y ago
    I remember that. I reported it to YouTube and never heard anything back. Days later it was still running. I remember looking at the chain and seeing over 6 figures sent in to the address. It was also timed to line up with one of Musk's "big announcements", which helped it be plausible. As you said, it was very convincing to a layman - but YouTube aren't laymen, and they must have had dozens if not hundreds of reports about that scam. Thanks for reminding me of that.
  - lupire 4y ago
    Eh, celebs promote scams all the time. This new way just saves the cost of the bribe, which is a net positive. More of a concern is putting lies into the mouth of someone who actually is legitimately credible.
- wellbehaved 4y ago
  If you prohibit it then it will only be done secretly by governments and then used against naive populations. At least this way the population can learn how to identify and defend against it. If we had transparent governance then maybe this wouldn't be a problem.
  - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    Why wouldn't people learn to spot it when the government does it? And I don't know if your argument follows - people clearly either don't know or don't care about the rise of Facebook false reporting.
    - wellbehaved 4y ago
      How do people learn better: lots and lots of practice with varying levels of quality and published examples, or against a single powerful adversary that's trying to conceal what they are doing? I.e. your question is stupid.
- hombre_fatal 4y ago
  I don’t think it’s worse than how people already believe headlines and even pictures of headlines (popular on Twitter, Reddit) while reacting to it much less demanding to read the actual article, if there even was one. You can even just make up a caption next to an image like “this is Todd from Finland who raised $100k for the war in Ukraine” and this pic might spread virally as everyone pats Todd on the back “omg faith in humanity restored”. And these scenarios are even less work and easier to consume than your doomsday. It’s already here and you don’t even have to listen to ab audio clip.
  - starkd 4y ago
    True. But listening to an hour-long or half-hour long podcast is considerable more investment than a simple headline. In terms of the investment in time the listener makes.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  > many are sure to become very angry on learning they wasted their time That is the best case outcome. Given ample real world evidence, however, I think most people will not get to this stage. They will be angry, yes, but at you for trying to introduce facts into their reality.
- ididitagain 4y ago
  > Dennett told Motherboard that these sorts of ethical considerations will be important in the future, when natural language processing systems become more available. “There are very dangerous prospects lying in the near future of this technology,” he said. “Copyright doesn’t come close to dealing with all of them. GPT-3 is a sort of automatic plagiarist, and unless great care is taken in how it is used, it can do great damage!” Dennett after none of the experts familiar with his work was able to select the real reply from GPT-generated ones. Seems like we are there, or at least, started on the path. I'd say it is highly unethical if this technology is used for deception, or if permission is not asked. Not unthinkable to soon be able to publish a high-quality book, by finetuning on the books another author already wrote.
jdelman 4y ago
I think the reason Jobs sounds weird is because it seems like the AI was trained on his public presentations, like maybe the iPhone introduction and his AllThingsD interview with Kara Swisher and Bill Gates - there's a noticeable amount of reverb baked in, he projects a bit more, sounds a bit more prepared - it's not how he'd speak in a 1-on-1 conversation without an audience. I would love to hear a version trained on his more intimate, 1-on-1 interviews, which he's done plenty of.
- lupire 4y ago
  Style transfer is a pretty well solved problem, at least for visuals. Could be applied to audio too, to fix reverb and such.
- Apocryphon 4y ago
  What I find funny is that both Jobs and Rogan sounds like they're doing stilted readings off of teleprompters at some points. The AI must have been trained on canned sponsor ad reads for the latter.
  - jdelman 4y ago
    Exactly. I don't think it would be too difficult to do a little editing and end up with much more natural sounding speech from both of them.
rco8786 4y ago
> you'd get the same results sitting down at Audacity and cutting together an MP3 Yes, but it would take you weeks to do it. > It's an interesting demo but I'm not sure why I would want this to exist. It seems like technology which you could only abuse, either through the generation of podcast spam or through the production of fake audio. Generally agree. There seems to be the kernel of some really cool tech here, and I think the non-abusive applications may be obvious only in hindsight.
itronitron 4y ago
next AI website will be 'idontwantthistoexist.com'
roflyear 4y ago
How much did you listen to? The first few minutes with Jobs is rough but once there are questions presented, there is somewhat of a real conversation. Very interesting.
eruleman 4y ago
"My hope is someday, when the next Aristotle is alive, we can capture the underlying worldview of that Aristotle - in a computer. And someday, some student will be able not only to read the words Aristotle wrote, but ask Aristotle a question - and get an answer!"- Steve Jobs, 1985
- jonathanstrange 4y ago
  Maybe he should have tried reading some of Aristotle's books.
  - somenameforme 4y ago
    A slight tangent, but there's something extremely interesting on the topic of Ancient philosophers related to this Jobs' quote. Socrates wrote nothing down, to the point that some have claimed he was illiterate. And that is a possibility, though improbable. But the reason he claimed to not want to write anything down is because, in a nutshell, 'books cannot defend themselves' : words can be taken out of context, meanings misconstrued, and text made to mean what the interpreter wants to make it mean instead of what the author meant for it to mean. It's quite fortunate for the world that many of his students disagreed, but it's interesting nonetheless.
    - Bakary 4y ago
      There's no way to know if Socrates' absence would have led to a net benefit or not Edit: to expand on this, we can say it is fortunate that his words were written down, but in a Socrates-less world or a world where his thoughts evaporated, you don't know which philosophers would have taken up the mantle instead and what the consequences would have been
      - lupire 4y ago
        Yes, no one can ever no anything about a counterfactual. So does nothing matter beyond whatever each individual chooses to matter? (Nihilism / Hedonism.)
jstummbillig 4y ago
> Rogan sounds more believable but I suspect you'd get the same results sitting down at Audacity and cutting together an MP3. I am sure you would. The interesting bit is not having to do that. > An interesting concept but The ol' "it's never gonna be as good as..." keeps failing us, and increasingly so. If the recent AI trajectories are any indicator, I'll give it a solid 6 month tops before it's good enough to generate something that fools absolutely everyone (granted, having an interviewee that is, you know, alive would probably be a precondition).
artursapek 4y ago
He sounds far away because the samples are probably from him speaking on stage
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
nsxwolf 4y ago
It reminds me of those fake interviews they used to do on radio - where the artists would record one side of an interview and it would be sent out to hundreds of radio stations and the morning DJ from some podunk town would be interviewing Bono or whatever.
- drewzero1 4y ago
  Weird Al Yankovic also did some of those in video form. I thought it was pretty clever and at times even convincing, if a bit ridiculous.
asveikau 4y ago
Let's also not deny that this is hilarious. If you view it as parody rather than looking at what it lacks in realism, I'd say it did a very good job.
Bilal_io 4y ago
> He always stopped for long pauses, stares off into space for a minute. He didn't rush into responses and tended to nail timing really well. The first part makes me wonder if Jobs had ADHD, the second part screams NO.
Zedronar 4y ago
I agree. But give it some years and we'll get a proper AI "Joe Rogan & Steve Jobs" podcast (although I'm personally more interested in hearing more about Wozniak than Jobs).

starkd 4y ago

I'd say it is highly unethical. Imagine thousands of people listening to fake podcasts as if they were real. Not only are they being lied to, but if they find out many are sure to become very angry on learning they wasted their time. Fortunately, it's not there yet, since it's obviously fake.

KMnO4 4y ago
> wasted their time That’s the best case scenario. It gets a lot worse than that. I saw a (scam) video on YouTube that had Elon Musk saying “if you want to make money in crypto, the best way is doing xxx, for example using the website yyy.com”. I had to do a spit take because it was very convincing for a layman. Both the audio/video were deepfaked, but you couldn’t really tell other than the fact that it was uploaded in 240p. If my mother had seen that, I’m sure she would have believed it since it’s something Elon would plausibly say. We’re entering a scary time.
- LtWorf 4y ago
  Well he only promotes scams so it was extra believable!
- mandmandam 4y ago
  I remember that. I reported it to YouTube and never heard anything back. Days later it was still running. I remember looking at the chain and seeing over 6 figures sent in to the address. It was also timed to line up with one of Musk's "big announcements", which helped it be plausible. As you said, it was very convincing to a layman - but YouTube aren't laymen, and they must have had dozens if not hundreds of reports about that scam. Thanks for reminding me of that.
- lupire 4y ago
  Eh, celebs promote scams all the time. This new way just saves the cost of the bribe, which is a net positive. More of a concern is putting lies into the mouth of someone who actually is legitimately credible.
wellbehaved 4y ago
If you prohibit it then it will only be done secretly by governments and then used against naive populations. At least this way the population can learn how to identify and defend against it. If we had transparent governance then maybe this wouldn't be a problem.
- SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
  Why wouldn't people learn to spot it when the government does it? And I don't know if your argument follows - people clearly either don't know or don't care about the rise of Facebook false reporting.
  - wellbehaved 4y ago
    How do people learn better: lots and lots of practice with varying levels of quality and published examples, or against a single powerful adversary that's trying to conceal what they are doing? I.e. your question is stupid.
hombre_fatal 4y ago
I don’t think it’s worse than how people already believe headlines and even pictures of headlines (popular on Twitter, Reddit) while reacting to it much less demanding to read the actual article, if there even was one. You can even just make up a caption next to an image like “this is Todd from Finland who raised $100k for the war in Ukraine” and this pic might spread virally as everyone pats Todd on the back “omg faith in humanity restored”. And these scenarios are even less work and easier to consume than your doomsday. It’s already here and you don’t even have to listen to ab audio clip.
- starkd 4y ago
  True. But listening to an hour-long or half-hour long podcast is considerable more investment than a simple headline. In terms of the investment in time the listener makes.
rootusrootus 4y ago
> many are sure to become very angry on learning they wasted their time That is the best case outcome. Given ample real world evidence, however, I think most people will not get to this stage. They will be angry, yes, but at you for trying to introduce facts into their reality.
ididitagain 4y ago
> Dennett told Motherboard that these sorts of ethical considerations will be important in the future, when natural language processing systems become more available. “There are very dangerous prospects lying in the near future of this technology,” he said. “Copyright doesn’t come close to dealing with all of them. GPT-3 is a sort of automatic plagiarist, and unless great care is taken in how it is used, it can do great damage!” Dennett after none of the experts familiar with his work was able to select the real reply from GPT-generated ones. Seems like we are there, or at least, started on the path. I'd say it is highly unethical if this technology is used for deception, or if permission is not asked. Not unthinkable to soon be able to publish a high-quality book, by finetuning on the books another author already wrote.

jdelman 4y ago

I think the reason Jobs sounds weird is because it seems like the AI was trained on his public presentations, like maybe the iPhone introduction and his AllThingsD interview with Kara Swisher and Bill Gates - there's a noticeable amount of reverb baked in, he projects a bit more, sounds a bit more prepared - it's not how he'd speak in a 1-on-1 conversation without an audience. I would love to hear a version trained on his more intimate, 1-on-1 interviews, which he's done plenty of.

lupire 4y ago
Style transfer is a pretty well solved problem, at least for visuals. Could be applied to audio too, to fix reverb and such.
Apocryphon 4y ago
What I find funny is that both Jobs and Rogan sounds like they're doing stilted readings off of teleprompters at some points. The AI must have been trained on canned sponsor ad reads for the latter.
- jdelman 4y ago
  Exactly. I don't think it would be too difficult to do a little editing and end up with much more natural sounding speech from both of them.

rco8786 4y ago

> you'd get the same results sitting down at Audacity and cutting together an MP3 Yes, but it would take you weeks to do it. > It's an interesting demo but I'm not sure why I would want this to exist. It seems like technology which you could only abuse, either through the generation of podcast spam or through the production of fake audio. Generally agree. There seems to be the kernel of some really cool tech here, and I think the non-abusive applications may be obvious only in hindsight.

itronitron 4y ago

next AI website will be 'idontwantthistoexist.com'

roflyear 4y ago

How much did you listen to? The first few minutes with Jobs is rough but once there are questions presented, there is somewhat of a real conversation. Very interesting.

eruleman 4y ago

"My hope is someday, when the next Aristotle is alive, we can capture the underlying worldview of that Aristotle - in a computer. And someday, some student will be able not only to read the words Aristotle wrote, but ask Aristotle a question - and get an answer!"- Steve Jobs, 1985

jonathanstrange 4y ago
Maybe he should have tried reading some of Aristotle's books.
- somenameforme 4y ago
  A slight tangent, but there's something extremely interesting on the topic of Ancient philosophers related to this Jobs' quote. Socrates wrote nothing down, to the point that some have claimed he was illiterate. And that is a possibility, though improbable. But the reason he claimed to not want to write anything down is because, in a nutshell, 'books cannot defend themselves' : words can be taken out of context, meanings misconstrued, and text made to mean what the interpreter wants to make it mean instead of what the author meant for it to mean. It's quite fortunate for the world that many of his students disagreed, but it's interesting nonetheless.
  - Bakary 4y ago
    There's no way to know if Socrates' absence would have led to a net benefit or not Edit: to expand on this, we can say it is fortunate that his words were written down, but in a Socrates-less world or a world where his thoughts evaporated, you don't know which philosophers would have taken up the mantle instead and what the consequences would have been
    - lupire 4y ago
      Yes, no one can ever no anything about a counterfactual. So does nothing matter beyond whatever each individual chooses to matter? (Nihilism / Hedonism.)

jstummbillig 4y ago

> Rogan sounds more believable but I suspect you'd get the same results sitting down at Audacity and cutting together an MP3. I am sure you would. The interesting bit is not having to do that. > An interesting concept but The ol' "it's never gonna be as good as..." keeps failing us, and increasingly so. If the recent AI trajectories are any indicator, I'll give it a solid 6 month tops before it's good enough to generate something that fools absolutely everyone (granted, having an interviewee that is, you know, alive would probably be a precondition).

artursapek 4y ago

He sounds far away because the samples are probably from him speaking on stage

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

nsxwolf 4y ago

It reminds me of those fake interviews they used to do on radio - where the artists would record one side of an interview and it would be sent out to hundreds of radio stations and the morning DJ from some podunk town would be interviewing Bono or whatever.

drewzero1 4y ago
Weird Al Yankovic also did some of those in video form. I thought it was pretty clever and at times even convincing, if a bit ridiculous.

asveikau 4y ago

Let's also not deny that this is hilarious. If you view it as parody rather than looking at what it lacks in realism, I'd say it did a very good job.

Bilal_io 4y ago

> He always stopped for long pauses, stares off into space for a minute. He didn't rush into responses and tended to nail timing really well. The first part makes me wonder if Jobs had ADHD, the second part screams NO.

Zedronar 4y ago

I agree. But give it some years and we'll get a proper AI "Joe Rogan & Steve Jobs" podcast (although I'm personally more interested in hearing more about Wozniak than Jobs).