I was wandering through the news this morning when this line caught my eye, “..personalized highlights packages generated by artificial intelligence with the voice of Al Michaels” The aforementioned line was part of an article about US media coverage changes to the olympics. One of those changes is daily highlight packages curated by an AI voice that sounds like the great announcer Al Micheals. Yeah, he’s on board with this and argues that the AI version is within 2% of sameness to his own sound. A Vanity Fair interview reported “Micheals suggesting the voice was “Michaels was left in awe of the nuance—the way it captured his intonations and verbal subtleties.”
So here we are.
As I race to create my novel about AI, the technology itself is marching ahead with blistering speed, making what I thought to be predictive sci-fi, a relic of what already happened. This story of mine comes with a question and a warning. This reality does not seem to offer either, instead it is being openly embraced by those who would (and are) being coopted by its services. I continue to speculate about AI replacements, but that speculation hits hardest in the arts, where performers are paid very well by executives who are often very very greedy and lack functional skills beyond the management of those with exploitable skills.
How soon before those executives remove the middle man and just move directly to the part where they pimp AI created material directly to a content hungry audience who, given the growing lack of human mobility outside of ones community in a non-virtual experience, readily accept that AI feed as their new reality.
Are we so far removed from the sugar-coated horrors of Wall-E?