Digital Voicework

It's been remarkable—in the literal and figurative sense (as I'm remarking upon it now, and have remarked upon it to others a lot recently)—how rapidly pretty much all discussion about technology and business has shifted from a collection of diverse, interconnected topics to almost entirely orbiting around artificial intelligence.

I understand why this is happening.

The technologies underpinning what we currently call AI (some would argue this is a misnomer, and I tend to agree—we're not talking about artificial general intelligence or AGI capable of consciousness and broad-scale "artificial life") have become very impressive very rapidly, that impressiveness predicated on decades of work that suddenly came to a public head when a company called OpenAI released a chatbot project called ChatGPT to the public.

You could argue that the beginning of this current wave of AI interest was actually earlier than this (I've been writing and making podcasts about it since the emergence of earlier GPT models, which powered gobsmackingly cool projects like AI Dungeon), but the rough timeline is that ChatGPT landed in November of 2022, folks went bonkers over it, and we've all had to learn a collection of new acronyms and other terminology (generative pre-trained transformer, prompting, supervised and reinforcement learning) since—if we've wanted to understand what's happening, why, and which companies will collapse / whose jobs will disappear in the next year or two.

On that latter point, I think it's possible this current generation of fancy, software-empowered tools (which we're casually calling AI) will have an impact more akin to Photoshop’s impact than that of the internal combustion engine or the deployment of residential electricity infrastructure; though there is a chance it truly will introduce a new paradigm that changes everything, and upon which all future technology is fundamentally reliant.

That said, there's a chance it will upend a lot of our communication-related expectations (images can be easily faked now!) and the responsibilities of folks working across many fields (can you remove this person from this image, spin-up a convincing video filled with fake people, and write a human-sounding book-length manifesto about our company's philosophy on our chosen industry? If not, we'll find someone who can) whether or not it proves to be disruptive on the scale of earlier, (eventually) fundamental, effort-amplifying innovations.

Lots of changes, in other words, but probably not the end of the world (or the end of the current paradigm)—at least not with this current generation of such tools (I'm leaving a lot of wiggle-room here, though, as it's hard to say from one's mono-focal standpoint in history how such tools will evolve and what effects their next, or next-next, or next-next-next iteration will have).

All of which is to say: I've been watching this space with interest, have been impressed and surprised and bowled-over alongside everyone else, and like many other people I’m also trying to figure out how I can wield these tools appropriately—maybe in the process getting ahead of the tide that will wash away some jobs and responsibilities—and seeing if I can harness that movement for my own purposes.

One of my first experiments in this space, which I jumped into several years ago (well before this fresh spark of enthusiasm for this space and new round of tools), involved trying to replicate my voice.