Steve Jobs returns from grave as a chatty AI

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Steve Jobs returns for grave as a chatty AI
A new AI chatbot isn't Steve Jobs. But it does sound like him.
Photo: Hotpot/Cult of Mac

Although Apple co-founder Steve Jobs died more than a decade ago, he’s back as an artificial intelligence. Kind of.

A programmer made a chatbot able to carry on conversations in a voice that sounds like Jobs. The result is authentic enough to be eerie.

We can talk to Steve Jobs (sort of) thanks to AI

There’s a sci-fi dream that someday people will be able to copy their personality and memories into a computer and then live forever. Let’s be clear: That has not happened to Steve Jobs.

Instead, John H. Meyer merged samples of Jobs’ voice with OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

“I trained an AI on Steve Jobs’ voice and then connected it to the ChatGPT API and finally connected it all to Facebook Messenger to allow for 2-way voice conversations with Steve Jobs about anything!” said Meyer in a tweet Sunday.

The samples Meyer provided show the Apple co-founder able to discuss the events of the 2020s — and even give parenting advice.

But this wisdom doesn’t come from Jobs. The chatbot’s words are compiled by ChatGPT from the general information it had been trained on. It is only read in Jobs’ voice.

That makes Meyer’s creation different from the Steve Jobs AI that Joe Rogan interviewed in 2022. That artificial intelligence had been trained on Jobs’ biography, so it knew some of what Jobs himself knew.

So don’t suggest making Meyer’s Jobs-sounding chatbot into the next Apple CEO.

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