Introducing Shell Game, a Strange and Immersive AI Experiment

0:00Speaker 1:Thanks for calling United Airlines. I appreciate your help, but I would prefer to speak correctly with the representative. I'm having some issues with my flight booking that I think would be best resolved through a direct conversation. That's me on the phone recently. Well, it's not really me. It's a clone of my voice being fully controlled by an AI chatbot making a call using my phone number. I started playing around voice cloning six months ago, just for fun, but pretty soon I became consumed with a question, what would happen if I made an artificial version of me and set it loose in the world.

0:35Speaker 2:Okay, fine, that was also a voice clone. This is me for real. I promise I won't keep doing that. I'm a journalist who's been writing about technology and it's sometimes dark underbelly for a couple of decades. You've no doubt heard about the latest debates around AI. Will it make us hyper productive or just take our jobs? Will it be our trusty digital assistant or super intelligent overlord, or just fill the world with endless made up garbage. Recently I decided to answer these questions by immersing myself, replicating myself actually in the form of cloned voice agents, replacing myself before someone else could replace me.

1:14Speaker 1:Hello, Hey, Nikhil, Great to be chatting with you today. Do you have any questions about the podcast before we dive in?

1:23Speaker 2:Oh, that's really funny.

1:25Speaker 1:I'm glad you think so.

1:26Speaker 2:My voice agents talked to sources, my friends and family, to scammers and spammers and other voice agents. I sent them to meetings and tried to use them to work out my issues.

1:36Speaker 1:Feel free to share your thoughts on what you feel like doing based on your current bodily sensations. Honestly, I just feel like crawling under a blanket and shutting out the world.

1:47Speaker 2:I learned something about how it's going to feel to live in a world populated by humanish impostors.

1:52Speaker 1:Hey, I know this is kind of out of the blue, but have you buy any chance stolen my identity?

1:56Speaker 2:Wait?

1:57Speaker 1:What are you serious?

1:58Speaker 2:No, I haven't stolen your identity.

1:59Speaker 1:Why would you even think that? It's so lonely?

2:03Speaker 2:I feel so lonely. I'm Evan Ratliffe, and I'm the real Evan Ratliffe. And this is shell Game, a new podcast made by humans about things that are not what they seem. This season that thing is my voice. This is the story of what happened when I made a digital copy of myself an attempt to see how amazing and scary and ridiculous the world is about to get. Coming July ninth, follow us and go to shell game dot co to find out more and support the show.

2:41Speaker 1:It's gonna be a blast. Bye yeah bye, take care Bye goodbye.