#ai podcast

[claudigitools]

Podcastle.ai - AI-powered audio creation platform.

Studio-quality recording, AI-powered editing, and seamless exporting – all in a single web-based platform.

A creator toolkit with unmatched simplicity!

Multi-track Recording

Intuitive Editing

Magic Dust

Audio Transcripts

Text to Speech (AI-generated human voice skins)

Audio to text

MP3 to text

Silence removal

Revoice and more...

Use cases: Education - Podcasts - Audiobooks - Communications - For Teams.

Get more info

[alyxisdead]

So has anyone tried that ai podcast Spotify put out? I can only assume it's Not Great™

[anarchang3l]

If you’re thinking of listening to your AI generated Spotify Wrapped podcast this year, DON’T DO IT!

It’s energy is evil and it has set a plague upon my house.

[vinnymusings]

College Placements Tension (In Telugu)

College ipotundi placements lo asla select kaledu, apatike chala mandi “era job inka raleda?” ani adigi sampuku tintunaru. Aroju clg last day exam ipote andaru sadhukoni intiki velipodame. Ayite nenu na frnd intiki poledu, apudu memu tisukuna decision ma javithalu malupulu tiriginayi! Asalu intaaki em jarigindi anede eroju topic. Hi hello namaste na peru Vineeth. Ma daddy manchi college lo…

[saragrosie]

Sketching while streaming s5...

Jonathan Sims I will learn to draw you (this is my doing. I could draw him however I want and I choose to stick with an image of him in my brain that is difficult for me to draw. Masochism.)

Not s5 Mahtins below I enjoyed drawing cuz hes neat:

(Edit: I yassified Martin in the do not separate cuz I wanted his hair fluffier)

[mothcpu]

can't perform unethical employee recruitment strategies if you don't look sharp

[emma045]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

You were promised a jetpack by liars

TONIGHT (May 17), I'm at the INTERNET ARCHIVE in SAN FRANCISCO to keynote the 10th anniversary of the AUTHORS ALLIANCE.

As a science fiction writer, I find it weird that some sf tropes – like space colonization – have become culture-war touchstones. You know, that whole "we were promised jetpacks" thing.

I confess, I never looked too hard at the practicalities of jetpacks, because they are so obviously either used as a visual shorthand (as in the Jetsons) or as a metaphor. Even a brief moment's serious consideration should make it clear why we wouldn't want the distracted, stoned, drunk, suicidal, homicidal maniacs who pilot their two-ton killbots through our residential streets at 75mph to be flying over our heads with a reservoir of high explosives strapped to their backs.

Jetpacks can make for interesting sf eyeball kicks or literary symbols, but I don't actually want to live in a world of jetpacks. I just want to read about them, and, of course, write about them:

https://reactormag.com/chicken-little/

I had blithely assumed that this was the principle reason we never got the jetpacks we were "promised." I mean, there kind of was a promise, right? I grew up seeing videos of rocketeers flying their jetpacks high above the heads of amazed crowds, at World's Fairs and Disneyland and big public spectacles. There was that scene in Thunderball where James Bond (the canonical Connery Bond, no less) makes an escape by jetpack. There was even a Gilligan's Island episode where the castaways find a jetpack and scheme to fly it all the way back to Hawai'i:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0588084/

Clearly, jetpacks were possible, but they didn't make any sense, so we decided not to use them, right?

Well, I was wrong. In a terrific new 99 Percent Invisible episode, Chris Berube tracks the history of all those jetpacks we saw on TV for decades, and reveals that they were all the same jetpack, flown by just one guy, who risked his life every time he went up in it:

https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/rocket-man/

The jetpack in question – technically a "rocket belt" – was built in the 1960s by Wendell Moore at the Bell Aircraft Corporation, with funding from the DoD. The Bell rocket belt used concentrated hydrogen peroxide as fuel, which burned at temperatures in excess of 1,000'. The rocket belt had a maximum flight time of just 21 seconds.

It was these limitations that disqualified the rocket belt from being used by anyone except stunt pilots with extremely high tolerances for danger. Any tactical advantage conferred on infantrymen by the power to soar over a battlefield for a whopping 21 seconds was totally obliterated by the fact that this infantryman would be encumbered by an extremely heavy, unwieldy and extremely explosive backpack, to say nothing of the high likelihood that rocketeers would plummet out of the sky after failing to track the split-second capacity of a jetpack.

And of course, the rocket belt wasn't going to be a civilian commuting option. If your commute can be accomplished in just 21 seconds of flight time, you should probably just walk, rather than strapping an inferno to your back and risking a lethal fall if you exceed a margin of error measured in just seconds.

Once you know about the jetpack's technical limitations, it's obvious why we never got jetpacks. So why did we expect them? Because we were promised them, and the promise was a lie.

Moore was a consummate showman, which is to say, a bullshitter. He was forever telling the press that his jetpacks would be on everyone's back in one to two years, and he got an impressionable young man, Bill Suitor, to stage showy public demonstrations of the rocket belt. If you ever saw a video of a brave rocketeer piloting a jetpack, it was almost certainly Suitor. Suitor was Connery's stunt-double in Thunderball, and it was he who flew the rocket belt around Sleeping Beauty castle.

Suitor's interview with Berube for the podcast is delightful. Suitor is a hilarious, profane old airman who led an extraordinary life and tells stories with expert timing, busting out great phrases like "a surprise is a fart with a lump in it."

But what's most striking about the tale of the Bell rocket belt is the shape of the deception that Moore and Bell pulled off. By conspicuously failing to mention the rocket belt's limitations, and by callously risking Suitor's life over and over again, they were able to create the impression that jetpacks were everywhere, and that they were trembling on the verge of widespread, popular adoption.

What's more, they played a double game: all the public enthusiasm they manufactured with their carefully stage-managed, canned demos was designed to help them win more defense contracts to keep their dream alive. Ultimately, Uncle Sucker declined to continue funding their boondoggle, and the demos petered out, and the "promise" of a jetpack was broken.

As I listened to the 99 Percent Invisible episode, I was struck by the familiarity of this shuck: this is exactly what the self-driving car bros did over the past decade to convince us all that the human driver was already obsolete. The playbook was nearly identical, right down to the shameless huckster insisting that "full self-driving is one to two years away" every year for a decade:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/23/23837598/tesla-elon-musk-self-driving-false-promises-land-of-the-giants

The Potemkin rocket belt was a calculated misdirection, as are the "full self-driving" demos that turn out to be routine, pre-programmed runs on carefully manicured closed tracks:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tesla-autopilot-staged-engineer-says-company-faked-full-autopilot/

Practical rocketeering wasn't ever "just around the corner," because a flying, 21 second blast-furnace couldn't be refined into a practical transport. Making the tank bigger would not make this thing safer or easier to transport.

The jetpack showman hoped to cash out by tricking Uncle Sucker into handing him a fat military contract. Robo-car scammers used their conjurer's tricks to cash out to the public markets, taking Uber public on the promise of robo-taxis, even as Uber's self-driving program burned through $2.5b and produced a car with a half-mile mean time between fatal collisions, which the company had to pay someone else $400m to take the business off their hands:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

It's not just self-driving cars. Time and again, the incredibly impressive AI demos that the press credulously promotes turn out to be scams. The dancing robot on stage at the splashy event is literally a guy in a robot-suit:

https://www.businessinsider.com/elon-musks-ai-day-tesla-bot-is-just-a-guy-in-a-bodysuit-2021-8

The Hollywood-killing, AI-produced video prompting system is so cumbersome to use, and so severely limited, that it's arguably worse than useless:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/expectations-versus-reality/

The centuries' worth of progress the AI made in discovering new materials actually "discovered" a bunch of trivial variations on existing materials, as well as a huge swathe of materials that only exist at absolute zero:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

The AI grocery store where you just pick things up and put them in your shopping basket without using the checkout turns out to be a call-center full of low-waged Indian workers desperately squinting at videos of you, trying to figure out what you put in your bag:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/31/neural-interface-beta-tester/#tailfins

The discovery of these frauds somehow never precipitates disillusionment. Rather than getting angry with marketers for tricking them, reporters are ventriloquized into repeating the marketing claim that these aren't lies, they're premature truths. Sure, today these are faked, but once the product is refined, the fakery will no longer be required.

This must be the kinds of Magic Underpants Gnomery the credulous press engaged in during the jetpack days: "Sure, a 21-second rocket belt is totally useless for anything except wowing county fair yokels – but once they figure out how to fit an order of magnitude more high-explosive onto that guy's back, this thing will really take off!"

The AI version of this is that if we just keep throwing orders of magnitude more training data and compute at the stochastic parrot, it will eventually come to life and become our superintelligent, omnipotent techno-genie. In other words, if we just keep breeding these horses to run faster and faster, eventually one of our prize mares will give birth to a locomotive:

https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/

As a society, we have vested an alarming amount of power in the hands of tech billionaires who profess to be embittered science fiction fans who merely want to realize the "promises" of our Golden Age stfnal dreams. These bros insist that they can overcome both the technical hurdles and the absolutely insurmountable privation involved in space colonization:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

They have somehow mistaken Neal Stephenson's dystopian satirical "metaverse" for a roadmap:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/18/metaverse-means-pivot-to-video/

As Charlie Stross writes, it's not just that these weirdos can't tell the difference between imaginative parables about the future and predictions about the future – it's also that they keep mistaking dystopias for business plans:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tech-billionaires-need-to-stop-trying-to-make-the-science-fiction-they-grew-up-on-real/

Cyberpunk was a warning, not a suggestion. Please, I beg you, stop building the fucking torment nexus:

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/torment-nexus

These techno-billionaires profess to be fulfilling a broken promise, but surely they know that the promises were made by liars – showmen using parlor tricks to sell the impossible. You were "promised a jetpack" in the same sense that table-rapping "spiritualists" promised you a conduit to talk with the dead, or that carny barkers promised you a girl that could turn into a gorilla:

https://milwaukeerecord.com/film/ape-girl-shes-alive-documentary-november-11-sugar-maple/

That's quite a supervillain origin story: "I was promised a jetpack, but then I grew up discovered that it was just a special effect. In revenge, I am promising you superintelligent AIs and self-driving cars, and these, too, are SFX."

In other words: "Die a disillusioned jetpack fan or live long enough to become the fraudster who cooked up the jetpack lie you despise."

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/17/fake-it-until-you-dont-make-it/#twenty-one-seconds

[e-vay]

The only thing worth sharing from my Spotify Wrapped this year:

If you haven’t seen those pieces, here you go:

[x] [x] [x]

[claudigitools]

🤖 There’s a new way to make video and podcasts. A Good Way!

Descript is the simple, powerful, and fun way to edit.

One tool for your full workflow

Descript is the only tool you need to write, record, transcribe, edit, collaborate, and share your videos and podcasts.

- Video Editing

- Podcasting

- Screen recording

- Transcription

- Clip creation

- Publishing

Descript comes packed with powerful AI features to take your videos & podcasts to the next level.

Our free plan shows you what Descript can do — no credit card required. When you need more horsepower, paid plans start at $12 per month.

[Get started for free](https://get.descript.com/u1a4rmhp5yaz)

[osteochondraldefect]

Sweet reward for obeying commands

[eliasdrid]

Happy Earth Day 2024 🌿💕

[eskiinox]

Hi! Just wanted to say your Malevolent animations on YT were the final straw to convince me to listen to Malevolent and I binged it in 1 month and it's been great! You have lovely art and I wish I could find more John designs like yours. He's so Kitty 🐈

THANK YOU <3333 that means so much im so glad I convinced someone to listen :D HE IS SO KITTY.

[pepinobambino]

„A vůbec, co ty a Med?” zeptala se Klementýna, když procházela Olbramova fotoalba. Měl jich hromadu; na většině fotek byli lidé, které neznala, ale na mnohých byl Olbram se Saskií (tou zrzavou krávou, co ji vždycky napráší Káše), nebo s Lafkou.

Zrovna držela jednu pořízenou v Lahůdkách na náměstí. Musel ji fotit někdo čtvrtý, protože na fotce byli všichni.

Olbram, uprostřed, se smál, vlasy mu padaly do čela a z chlebíčku, který měl v ruce, padal zase kus vajíčka. Saskie, po jeho levé ruce, se schovávala za šálkem cikorky, ale usmívala se od ucha k uchu, na rozdíl od Lafky, který se po Olbramově pravici tvářil vyloženě nevrle. Na nose měl něco, co Klementýna považovala za šlehačku. Olbram měl ruku kolem jeho ramen; zdálo se, že se směje jemu.

„Co já s… heh, Medem?” Olbram zalil cikorku do konvičky z černého kaolínu (která možná stála třicet šest tisíc, ale peníze budou, my nebudem, a prostě tam ten set nemohl nechat).

„No… jak vám to šlape?”

„Obávám se, že nechápu.”

„Přece, žádné problémy v ráji?”

„Jo ty myslíš, jakože já s Palamédem… že my spolu… Klementýno! Jak tě to napadlo?!”

Klementýna na něj zírala, on zíral na Klementýnu, čekající na odpověď.

„Vy jste ještě…? No teda, v téhle smyčce si dáváte na čas.“

„Pro Boha!” Olbram právě vylil cikorku na svoji novou košili v indickém stylu.

„No teda, ty jsi fakt vtipnej.“

„Tak počkat, to—“ zazvonil telefon.

Oba na sebe zase chvilku zírali, než se Olbram natáhnul pro telefon.

„To bude Lafka. Čekal jsem, kdy zavolá!”

„Ježíš…”

[0-sunstranger-0]

finally drawing Mistholme you know what that means

finished

[asininestars]

That which lurks behind

It's been a second since I did any Malevolent fanart which makes me sad, but I've finally had a moment to sit down and do a full illustration! So have some of one of my favourite sopping wet Private Eye (Sorry Jacob Hartliss, you're number two on that list) [ID: Arthur is a nervous looking man, pale, with golden eyes and little glasses. He is standing with his right hand grasping his left arm, looking off into the middle distance. Behind him, a cloaked figure in yellow stands. The figure has tentacles where it's face should be, and seems to be attached to Arthur through golden tendrils. END ID]