John Gruber: It’s Game Over on Vocal Deepfakes

Now come this: a Twitter thread from John Meyer, who trained a clone of Jobs’s voice and then hooked it up to ChatGPT to generate the words. The clips he posted to Twitter are freakishly uncanny. It really sounds like Jobs. The only hitch is that it sounds like Jobs reading from a script, not speaking extemporaneously. But damned if it doesn’t sound like him.

I watched the conversations in the tweet Gruber links to, and yeah, it sounds like Steve Jobs, but if I may be so bold, this is the cringiest thing going on right now with these "A.I." tools.

"But Matt, wouldn't it be so interesting to hear what Steve Jobs thought about COVID-19 or anything else going on today? Wouldn't you love to hear Aristotle and Christopher Hitchens argue about philosophy?"

Sure, but this isn't that…it's nothing. Do these people think that the value in hearing a digitized voice of Steve Jobs reciting the (sometimes useful) ramblings of ChatGPT? Based on the liberal use of 🤯 in his tweets, apparently!

I'm with Gruber, this tech has very dangerous downsides, and dufuses like John Meyer gushing over the most inane, vapid nothingness of a Steve Jobs robot saying things he never said is one of the cringiest things I've seen in a while.