Today I read the unsurprising but kind of terrifying news that a machine learning model can turn text into a pretty spot-on recreation of spoken voice, using Joe Rogan’s recognisable baritone as a test case.
I wanted to know if there’s a way to tell the difference between a voice that was actually recorded and one that was synthesised — could this fake Joe really be ‘perfect’? Would slight imperfections allow experts (or software) to act as fact-checkers for potentially synthesised voices?
Today I’ll be talking about YouTube videos, specifically fix-it videos. While these don’t rack up views to rival Baby Shark or Pewdiepie, they’re still popular and handy if your smartphone screen breaks, or your washing machine stops spinning. I’ll argue that these videos are more than just a useful tool: in aggregate they open up space for critique and a re-imagining of our disposable material culture.
The internet moves disturbingly fast for an Old Millennial / Generation Catalano / Xennial / Oregon Trail Generation-er like myself, and sometimes memespiration strikes hard well after the news cycle has moved on. It’s the internet version of l’esprit de l’escalier, and I wish there was a word for it. I also wish there was an appropriate forum for sharing years-old hot takes that are too inconsequential or stupid to deserve an analytic essay.
Today, Google CEO Sundar Pichai published a blog post setting out seven principles for how Google will use and develop AI, as well as a list of things it won’t use these technologies for.
