The Athletic reports that NBC’s NBA coverage will be using the fake voice of a dead person on their broadcasts. They described it as follows:
“During the 1990s, Jim Fagan’s voice narrated the promos for NBC’s coverage of Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’Neal and Hakeem Olajuwon. Now, he will do so again when NBC promotes its NBA coverage that begins again next season. However, the setup is rather unique because Fagan died in 2017. In an agreement between the network and Fagan’s family, NBC will use Fagan’s AI-generated voice to create modern promos with an old-time feel.”
I have been out on AI for a while. The one purpose I’ve been able to find for it is to make really detailed, bad visual jokes really quickly. At its best, from what I can tell, AI is an extremely high-end meme generator. I’m not sure it’s worth burning a lake to dust for laughs, though.
As far as pictures of Elon Musk as a superhero or Donald Trump as the Pope, I just kind of get angry. Like, what are you doing, man? Is this really how you think of yourself? Is this really how you want other people to view you? What the hell is your problem?
Stay focused. Jim Fagan. Dead guy voice. Ew
I will note one thing. I am happy NBC got the family’s permission to do this. During the Kendrick v. Drake one-sided beatdown, one of the many inciting factors was an AI voice of Tupac being used in one of Drake’s song. That did not go down well. The forces of good won, in my mind.
The bad thing still happened though.
I’m not sure care can really be taken in situations like this. Not in the completely money-soaked, restriction/punishment-free world of AI. AI will show up everywhere. Apps will suddenly push it as their next big feature. Phones will turn on during meetings and suddenly start taking notes for you even though, uh, you didn’t tell it to. Things like that.
I don’t see worth in most of the output. I don’t trust the ethics. I don’t trust the claims made about it. I think it’s far less advanced in most cases than people make it out to be. I think there’s too much value in the act and art of thinking and creating for the existence of this shortcut to justify itself on so many different levels.
Maybe this is what people felt about the internet as a whole at one point. I don’t know.
There’s also this weird feeling that hangs over me that once you die, certain parts of you are to stay at rest. Creating new things with the ideas a person who has passed developed, or carrying on the knowledge they bestowed, or honoring their memory by telling and embellishing stories. When someone dies, they’re not gone. They just take a different shape.
But using a digital device to study and try and emulate a dead person’s voice for the purposes of profit or nostalgia just seems so… icky. Again, it’s great the family gave the go ahead, but I don’t want this! It’s not real! It’s artificial emotion coming through an artificial voice describing real human acts of passion and competition. It’s the definition of uncanny valley. I don’t want to replace anyone with an application’s imitation.
I really, really, don’t want this!
It’s happening anyway, though. I plan to avoid it. I wish there was a practical way to flip a slider in life and opt out of all of this. But there’s not. The next program will push their version of grok. The next forest will be cut down. Dead voices will be raised as zombies.
How fun.