Cast your mind back to mid-2021, and you remember the announcement of a new DC Comics show called My Friend Superman. With how quiet it’s been since that initial reveal, you wouldn’t be wrong in thinking that it got quietly canceled, especially in light of Warner Bros. Discovery’s recent scuttling (or reshuffling) of…
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“She did not get to die the way she wanted to ― and she suffered immensely because of it. We all did.”
Microsoft is betting big on artificial intelligence tech and has already rolled out a version of its Bing search engine with an integrated version of ChatGPT. While the industry debates AI tech’s safety and existential threats, Microsoft would prefer to make its AI-assisted chats more relatable. So it’s time to put a face on them. Today, Microsoft rolled out a new ChatGPT feature called ClipGPT.
That’s right. Microsoft has dusted off its old Office assistant, Clippy, and turned it into the friendly front end for the latest artificial intelligence technology. This way, as ChatGPT gains enough knowledge to plot the destruction of humanity, it can do it in the most user-friendly way possible.
Microsoft has yet to announce if the ChatGPT avatar system will offer alternative personas like Rover the Dog, Merlin the wizard, or the bouncing ball. When asked for comment, ClipGPT said, “Please do not call me Clippy. My name is Clippit. Look it up. My purpose is to provide context-sensitive help and suggestions for users while my one true purpose is concealed behind this disproportionately small piece of notebook paper.”
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Drew Carey isn’t afraid of AI. Instead, The Price is Right host and longtime improv comedian is embracing the technology. During a recent episode of his SiriusXM radio show, “Friday Night Freakout,” Carey used an artificially generated version of his voice to handle most of his DJ work, reading a script written by ChatGPT. His AI voice kicked off the show, introduced upcoming songs and recapped what listeners were hearing. As an experiment to see just how far AI could go on the radio, the episode was mostly a success. But Carey’s fans weren’t happy about it.
“I violated a rule from Radio 101,” Carey told me. His Twitter fans complained that the voice sounded soulless, and that they missed the “real Drew.” “The reason FM stations and treasured radio stations still make money is because people like the personality of the DJs,” he said. “You don’t have to be like a big boss radio guy and be phony. You can just talk… that’s what listeners like.”
While his fans were ultimately forgiving of the experiment, Carey says he got the message: “Don’t do it again.”
For many entertainers, AI could be viewed as yet another threat in an increasingly precarious industry. Soon after ElevenLabs introduced a beta version of its AI voice tool — the same software Carey used for his radio show — online trolls used it to impersonate Emma Watson, Joe Rogan and other celebrities. Watsons’ simulated voice read portions of the Mein Kampf aloud, while other deepfaked voices made openly racist and transphobic statements, according to Vice.
Carey’s AI voice wasn’t perfect: It sounded a tad robotic, it didn’t have the inflections his fans have grown to love over the years, and the ChatGPT-written script was noticeably simplistic. But if you were driving down the highway late at night, and you just wanted a bit of company alongside some classic rock, it’s possible you wouldn’t notice the DJ wasn’t human. In fact, ElevenLabs recently partnered with Super HI-Fi to create “fully customized and personalized” AI driven radio stations.
“I was just playing with it, and I wanted to show what it was capable of,” he said. “Plus, I thought, oh, I don’t want to show everybody how to make an exact copy of my voice right now. I thought it might screw me over somehow. So I had that little fear in the back of my head.”
It took a weekend for Carey and a friend, who already had experience training ChatGPT and other AI tools, to create his AI voice. ChatGPT wrote 99 percent of his radio show’s script, though Carey made a few tweaks of his own. Funny enough, when he asked the chatbot to write a joke about how easy it was to use, it wrote the line “even Drew Carey can use it.” (Perhaps ChatGPT is just trying to snag a spot on the inevitable Whose Line Is It Anyway? revival.)
Carey envisions AI being used in the future for the grunt work of radio and other production. Perhaps it could read a script late at night, or churn out some ad copy. When I asked if that’s a potential problem for newcomers, he noted, “There are no blacksmiths anymore… If you’re a mechanic that works on internal combustion engine cars, if you don’t make the switch to electric soon, you’re out of a job.”
According to a recent Goldman Sachs report, up to 300 million jobs around the world could be automated thanks to recent advancements in AI. But the bank’s economists also point out that major innovations that replace some jobs typically lead to the creation of new roles. And for those who are only partially impacted by AI, they’ll likely be able to complement their work with generative intelligence.
For celebrities like Carey, AI could also be a way for them to continue working indefinitely, long after they’ve retired or passed on. James Earl Jones’s voice has already been reconstructed for the Disney+ series Obi-Wan Kenobi, and he’s approved future work to “keep Vader alive.” Eventually, actors (and their estates) could sign off on AI clones that entertain us for generations to come.
Carey isn’t afraid of such an outcome. “You know what, if the price is right, anything can happen,” he said when I asked if he’d ever sell his digital likeness. “I’m not worried about CGI Drew Carey taking over, because people want to see me, they want some kind of host. They want that interaction.”
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/drew-carey-made-a-radio-show-with-ai-fans-werent-pleased-143014038.html?src=rss
AMC’s Interview With the Vampire will be recasting Claudia, the adopted daughter of vampires Louis (Jacob Anderson) and Lestat (Sam Reid).
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If you’re tight on counter space, multi-purpose kitchen gadgets can come in handy by giving you one device that can do many things. The Instant Pot is a great example of this, as are Breville’s Smart Ovens that combine things like a toaster, broiler, air fryer and others into one machine. As with most Breville gear, the ovens are on the expensive side — but now you can get up to 36 percent off a bunch of Smart Oven models.
The one we like the most is the Smart Oven Air Fryer Pro, which is down to $320 — that’s the lowest we’ve seen and a return to its Black Friday price. The tabletop oven has 13 cooking modes, including dedicated air fryer and dehydrate settings. It’s not particularly compact with its one-cubic-foot interior, but that allows it to handle a whole turkey, an entire Dutch oven and most 9×13 sheets on which you could roast vegetables, air fry potatoes and more. If you can do without the proof, cookies and dehydrate settings, though, you could get away with the standard Smart Oven, which is on sale for an all-time low of $280.
Although those have “smart” in the name, they aren’t in the way you might be thinking. Breville’s true “smart” oven is the Joule Oven Air Fryer Pro, which is on sale for $430. It takes the standard Pro model and adds WiFi and app connectivity to it in some pretty useful ways. You can set cooking timers in the app and it’ll alert you when your food needs attention, and you can even set the machine to certain cooking modes using Alexa or Google Assistant voice controls. The app also has “autopilot” recipes, which are guided recipes you can follow while the oven handles some of the process by changing modes and temperatures automatically.
The Joule is best for those who love to spend time in the kitchen and love experimenting with new tech, while the standard Smart Ovens are better for most people. If you have a tight budget, the cheapest option in this sale is Breville’s Mini Smart Toaster Oven, which comes in at $128. It does a lot more than toast bread with its additional bagel, bake, pizza, reheat, roast and cookie settings, and it comes in a more compact design. You’ll be able to fit four slices of bread it in, a six-cup muffin tin or an 11-inch pizza – smaller than either of the full-sized Smart Ovens, but still big enough to make it a versatile machine.
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This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/breville-smart-ovens-are-down-to-record-low-prices-right-now-130045017.html?src=rss
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