We’re back. Or at least, one of us is for real, but the other one is fake, thanks to an Artificial Intelligence app.
This week I fed two articles from the Flat Chat website into an AI app called Jellypod. I chose the one about NSW Premier Chris Minns’ visit to the Netstrata offices and the other about the NSW Fair Trading minister’s announcement that the Productivity Commissioner has been tasked with discovering what would happen if insurance commissions were cancelled.
I asked the app to create a conversation between myself and co-podder Sue Williams based on the article and anything else it could find on the topics on the internet. I also gave it samples of our voices so it could create an audio file, and a short guide to our characters and different approaches to strata issues.
The result was frankly terrifying. Now, the cloned voices aren’t terribly close to ours, so that’s good, but the content of the conversation was scarily on point. It is mostly factually correct and reads, as text, in a similar style to the way we speak and write.
It was also strongly opinionated but completely fabricated an anecdote that neither of us can remember having ever said or written. It also had a problem saying “NSW” and “strata” which came out as “straaaaaata”. Have a listen and see what you think.
Meanwhile, where have we been, you ask? Our recent travels through Europe not only made podcasting hard, it left a mountain of work waiting for us when we returned so it was impossible to sit down and do the podcast for a few weeks.
We are a hand-knitted pod and the fact that it can be a logisitical and technical challenge was reconfirmed when I sat down to record this and my software made me sound like a Dalek with a heavy cold. It’s all good now, I hope, and we’ll be back in your podcast feed just as soon as we have something new to talk about.
And rest assured, it really will be us – promise!
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Flat Chat is all about apartment living, especially in Australia.
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Recorded by Jimmy Thomson & Sue Williams; Transcribed by Otter.ai.
Find out more about Sue Williams and Jimmy Thomson on their websites.
