The world seems to be getting stranger day by day. You keep seeing all these things being invented and developed that would require even a savvy person some time to get their head around them.
I mean I am a technology enthusiast myself and I have read quite a bit about the evolution of technology and how it can make possible things that we can't even imagine, and even so, every now and then, some or the other development has me perplexed.
The most recent one comes from Canada where researchers from a startup called Dessa have created an AI system capable of producing speech that sounds exactly like Joe Rogan.
If you don't know who Jogan Rogan is, I suggest you check out his YouTube channel. He is a popular stand up comedian and podcaster where he discusses a variety of interesting matters with guests.
Creepy AI Clone
In simple words, what has happened is that, researchers created an AI system (called RealTalk), that uses text inputs to produce a synthetic speech that can sound exactly like anyone you would like. In this case, it was Joe Rogan. It is essentially a recreation of someone's voice.
The scary part is that, the system can be used to make the voice say whatever you want which is evident from the video above. Yes, if you listen really, really hard, you can tell here and there that the sound clip could be an artificial one but it is creepy how similar the voice sounds to Joe's and how naturally it says things.
We are already habituated with human sounding softwares, now that we have natural sounding AI assistants like Siri and Alexa but to have any person's voice do that takes it to the next level in my opinion.
This could end up being really dangerous and it is exactly the reason the team is not going to release the technicals behind the software. Anybody could use it to sway political leanings or be misused as evidence in court or more any number of other nefarious purposes.
Even though the team decided not to share their software, I can't help but think, once a technology is out there, can it truly be stopped? What if some bad actors try to recreate this from scratch and are successful? We truly are progressing into a really bizarre world.