Apple co-founder Steve Jobs passed away more than 11 years ago, but that didn’t prevent him from giving a new interview with superstar podcaster Joe Rogan. In it, the co-creator of the Mac talks about the importance of Eastern mysticism, his thoughts on LSD, Google, innovation and more.
There’s just one tiny wrinkle: The entire podcast is generated by artificial intelligence. That includes Jobs’ and Rogan’s voices and their responses.
Steve Jobs gives new podcast interview
Jobs died on October 5, 2011, as a result of pancreatic cancer, so he’s not giving new interviews. podcast.ai, a podcast that is entirely generated by artificial intelligence, apparently took that as a challenge.
“This is our ongoing project in speech synthesis,” one of the developers wrote on Reddit. The team created Steve Jobs’ and Joe Rogan’s voices using “voice cloning technology,” according to the dev. And they generated the text “using gpt3 after fine tuning it on Steve Jobs biography.”
For those who aren’t up on the latest in AI, Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3, aka GPT-3, uses deep learning to produce humanlike text, including Job’s dialogue in this artificially generated podcast.
Anyone who watched Apple product release events for many years can agree that Jobs’ AI-generated voice sounds eerily authentic, though the laughter is questionable. And none of the opinions expressed in the podcast seem out of character for the former Apple chief executive.
Joe Rogan interviews Steve Jobs in AI-generated podcast
Listen to the Steve Jobs/Joe Rogan podcast and judge for yourself.
Note: It seemed appropriate to use an image generated by artificial intelligence to illustrate this article. It’s a creation of Hotpot’s AI Art Maker being asked for “steve jobs doing a podcast.” As often happens with AI, the picture looks mostly excellent. However, some of the details are wrong. Jobs’ trademark turtleneck was always black, for example.
Ed Hardy has been writing full-time about tech for 25 years, and using it for much longer than that. His intro to Apple was a Macintosh Classic II (which he still has), but now he uses a 13-inch iPad Pro as his primary computer. He’s written for NotebookReview, TabletPCReview, and Brighthand, as well as other sites.
