A recent episode of podcast.ai pairs Jobs with Joe Rogan, whose own podcast The Joe Rogan Experience has been a runaway success.
Syed Hammad Ahmed is one of the founders of podcast.ai and play.ht, which powers the podcast’s voices. He wrote to Newsweek that after recently building a “Generative AI Voice model called Peregrine,” they wanted to exhibit its proficiency in speech generation.
“So we thought it would be cool to create that podcast,” he said, along with a smiley face. “Didn’t expect to break the internet though.”
The podcast.ai episode includes a picture of Jobs posing in a shirt with Rogan’s face on it, and Hammad noted the image was also AI-generated.
“Hello, freak b**ches,” the fake Rogan said in opening. “Welcome to another episode of The Bro Jogan Experience.”
The bot-podcaster then introduced his guest, saying that he wished he “could be even like one-tenth of the genius that my friend today is.”
“Super psyched about having him in the house today, first time or—yeah, we’ve had you on before, but not for a long time,” AI-Rogan said. “You’re like Patrick Swayze and I’m Demi Moore in Ghost. You’re a memory from the past.”
Fake Jobs then laughs.
From there, the two talked topics like psychedelics, spirituality and tech.
Jobs died in 2011 at 56 after being diagnosed with a rare pancreatic cancer. The U.S. Sun reported that in real life, he was never featured on The Joe Rogan Experience, which first aired in December 2009.
The podcast apparently nailed the landing when emulating Jobs and Rogan. After the episode aired, many social media users marveled at how realistic each person sounded and how closely the transcript resembled something they might say in real life.
“This absolutely broke my brain,” Twitter user @frantzfries wrote on Tuesday.
“It’s pitch perfect and could easily pass as real,” they continued. “AI is coming for podcasts apparently.”
Other social media users joked that they wouldn’t be happy to be paired with Rogan after their death.
“If someone puts me on a podcast with Joe Rogan posthumously I’m haunting their ass,” @skstock tweeted.
Some pointed out the podcast’s potential ethical implications.
“ai generated voice of a person, who did not provide consent, in a podcast saying things that person never said—pretty straightforward evil thing to do. is there a reason we’re not all on the same page with this stuff yet?” Mike Solana, vice president of the venture capital firm Founders Fund, wrote in a tweet.
Podcast.ai describes itself as being fully fueled by artificial intelligence, and listeners are able to propose future hosts, guests and topics.
The episodes are created through “play.ht’s ultra-realistic voices,” and the dialogue is rendered via “fine-tuned language models.” For the episode in question, Jobs’ biography was examined, as were some of his old recordings to help bring his voice to life.
Ahmed added that play.ht offers a number of other AI voices, including from certain celebrities like actor Tom Hanks and comedian Kevin Hart.
Newsweek has reached out to Rogan and Jobs’ widow for comment.
Updated 10/122022, 4:53 p.m. ET: This story has been updated with comments from Syed Hammad Ahmed, one of the founders of play.ht and podcast.ai.
