In the eternal words of venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya, “We’re definitely on this ‘fuck around and find out’ curve” when it comes to the pace of progress in AI. If you need an example, you only need to listen to the first few minutes of this fake AI podcast episode that nearly perfectly recreates the Joe Rogan Experience, except it was entirely generated with the help of ChatGPT.
Unsurprisingly, its release has left the world’s most popular podcaster a little bit worried, tweeting “This is going to get very slippery, kids,” with a link to the episode that has already been listened to nearly half a million times. The podcast channel Joe Rogan AI Experience wastes no time in telling the listener it isn’t really Rogan interviewing Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI that developed ChatGPT, but if you didn’t know any better you’d be hard-pressed to realise what you were listening to wasn’t the real thing.
“Let me tell you folks, this is some next-level stuff we’ve got going on here today,” the AI-generated Joe Rogan says. “Every single word of this podcast has been generated with the help of ChatGPT…I am not the real Joe Rogan… this is purely fiction.”
The YouTube channel has more recently published another AI-generated episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, this time interviewing Donal Trump, with equally impressive accuracy in mimicking the vocal cadence and the kinds of words you’d expect from the former President, which reminded listeners, “Nobody builds walls better than me, believe me.” Again, the podcast begins with a disclaimer about its origins, but without that context, it’d be close to impossible to realise exactly what you were hearing.
When you consider that ChatGPT (which has already been superseded by GPT-4) was only released publicly four and a half months ago, we’ve already we’ve seen everything from South Park episodes and Slack integrations to the story of the AI hiring a human to help solve a CAPTCHA test. Things are moving at warp speed in the AI industry at the moment and just as there will be great things that come from it, you can’t help but be increasingly aware of how such powerful technology could be used by bad actors.
Both the best and worst examples of what this technology can do are around the corner and if AI can create a believable Joe Rogan podcast episode, as Palihapitiya said, we’re all about to find out exactly what it looks like.
