AI Generates Fictional Joe Rogan Podcast With Steve Jobs Guesting

AI company Play.ht has generated a podcast using artificial intelligence between podcaster Joe Rogan and late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. Thanks to deep learning, the voices of the two men were copied.

The podcast of over 19 minutes is based on audio fragments by Rogan and Jobs. In Rogan’s case, there is an exceptional amount of audio material to train artificial intelligence with, as he has published over 1,800 episodes of The Joe Rogan Experience on Spotify alone. Therefore, the credibility of Rogan’s voice in particular is relatively good, apart from the moments when the podcaster laughs.

For imitating Jobs’s voice, the company has in their own words made use of ‘all possible recordings that can be found online’. Because much of the AI ​​training material consists of presentations and keynotes, it often sounds like Jobs is giving a presentation and not having an intimate conversation. “His voice was generated from a few minutes of vocals from videos of him on stage and during interviews with a lot of noise in the background, hence the glitches,” said Play.ht co-founder Syed Hammad versus Gizmodo.

Although Rogan started his popular podcast several years before Jobs passed away, the former Apple CEO was never actually a guest on the audio show in question. Nevertheless, the AI ​​podcast tackles topics that would be expected if the two met, including Mac computers and LSD.