Radiolab - Shell Game

One man secretly hands off more and more of his life to an AI voice clone. Today, we feature veteran journalist Evan Ratliff who - for his new podcast Shell Game - decided to slowly replace himself bit by bit with an AI voice clone, to see how far he could actually take it. Could it do the mundane phone calls he’d prefer to skip? Could it get legal advice for him? Could it go to therapy for him? Could it parent his kids? Evan feeds his bot the most intimate details about his life, and lets the bot loose in high-stakes situations at home and at work. Which bizarro version of him will show up? The desperately-agreeable conversationalist, the crank-yanking prank caller, the glitched out stranger who sounds like he’s in the middle of a mental breakdown, or someone else entirely? Will people believe it’s really him? And how will they act if they don’t? A gonzo journalistic experiment for the age of AI, that’s funny and eerie all at the same time. We have some exciting news! In the “Zoozve” episode, Radiolab named its first-ever quasi-moon, and now it's your turn! Radiolab has teamed up with The International Astronomical Union to launch a global naming contest for one of Earth’s quasi-moons. This is your chance to make your mark on the heavens. Submit your name ideas now through September, or vote on your favorites starting in November: https://radiolab.org/moon EPISODE CREDITS: Reported by - Evan Ratliff Produced by - Sophie Bridges and Simon Adler With help from - Evan Ratliff Fact-checking by - Emily Krieger EPISODE CITATIONS: Audio: If you want to listen to more of Evan’s Shell Game, you can do so here, https://www.shellgame.co/ Sign up for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected]. Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Duration: 57m
Broadcast on: 06 Sep 2024
Audio Format: other

One man secretly hands off more and more of his life to an AI voice clone.

Today, we feature veteran journalist Evan Ratliff who - for his new podcast Shell Game - decided to slowly replace himself bit by bit with an AI voice clone, to see how far he could actually take it. Could it do the mundane phone calls he’d prefer to skip? Could it get legal advice for him? Could it go to therapy for him? Could it parent his kids? Evan feeds his bot the most intimate details about his life, and lets the bot loose in high-stakes situations at home and at work. Which bizarro version of him will show up? The desperately-agreeable conversationalist, the crank-yanking prank caller, the glitched out stranger who sounds like he’s in the middle of a mental breakdown, or someone else entirely? Will people believe it’s really him? And how will they act if they don’t? A gonzo journalistic experiment for the age of AI, that’s funny and eerie all at the same time.

We have some exciting news! In the “Zoozve” episode, Radiolab named its first-ever quasi-moon, and now it's your turn! Radiolab has teamed up with The International Astronomical Union to launch a global naming contest for one of Earth’s quasi-moons. This is your chance to make your mark on the heavens. Submit your name ideas now through September, or vote on your favorites starting in November: https://radiolab.org/moon

EPISODE CREDITS:
Reported by - Evan Ratliff
Produced by - Sophie Bridges and Simon Adler
With help from - Evan Ratliff
Fact-checking by - Emily Krieger

EPISODE CITATIONS:
Audio:
If you want to listen to more of Evan’s Shell Game, you can do so here, https://www.shellgame.co/

Sign up for our newsletter!! It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)!

Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today.

Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected].

Leadership support for Radiolab’s science programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation Initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. Foundational support for Radiolab was provided by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

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RIDILEB is supported by AT&T. We all love to connect via video calls or texts. Right now, at AT&T, you can get the new iPhone 18 Pro for $0 with iPhone trade-in. Any condition. It has the ultimate pro camera system and big leap in battery life, so you can turn this deal into a long-lasting connection. Learn how you can trade in your iPhone for the new iPhone 18 Pro requires trade-in of iPhone 14 or higher, excluding iPhone 16E, and eligible plan. Terms and restrictions apply, subject to change, visit an AT&T store for details. This is RadioLab, and I am the real lot of Nasser. Now, it doesn't sound like it, but this interview you're hearing, I was so nervous to do this interview, like more nervous than I've been to do an interview in years, because I wasn't sure that the person who showed up was really a person. I feel like I was expecting you to come camera off. I had to come camera on otherwise you would not trust that it was me. That was part of the thing. I was like, "Paradise, who's going to show up here?" I mean, I can bring him on if you want. But after a bit of time scrutinizing the video screen, I figured, "Okay, this really is Evan." Anyway, "Oh, introduce yourself for me." I'm Evan Ratliff, the host of Shell Game. So Evan Ratliff is a top-shelf journalist, longtime contributor to Wired, co-host of the Long Form podcast, helped found a magazine called The Adivest, which I highly recommend if you haven't heard of it. But the reason I was skittish was because of his latest opus, a podcast called Shell Game, which features not only the Evan I was looking at that you just heard, but also this Evan. I'm Evan Ratliff, and I'm a journalist who's been covering technology, and particularly the darker places where humans and technology intersect for a couple of decades. This, as you probably guessed, is my cloned voice. It's a little wooden, maybe, but better when you add some of my more annoying speaking habits. So for the first season of Shell Game, Evan found a company that would take recordings of his voice and make a voice clone of him, which is what you just heard. Then he hooked up his voice clone to chat GPT so that it could talk and it could converse and have a back and forth. And then he took that amalgam, a bizarro version of himself, and just let it loose into the world. Yes. Yeah. Just for fun. That's your idea of fun. Well, for the main reason is, well, first of all, I'm not saying that this is a good idea, like this is, of course, like the most terrifying thing for my career, but I did want to know. I wanted to know like if I could do it. So he started his whole thing by just having to make a bunch of phone calls. Thank you for calling Discover. My name is Kristi out of Chicago. May I have your full name, please?

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