I hope you will forgive me, Professor Harrison, and not take it as too much of a violation to put some words into your voice.

Changes in artificial intelligence come quickly, and what I had done with a generic voice a few weeks ago can now be done with any voice you wish to wield.

This technology has been with us for some years already, but now requires only 60 seconds of a person's voice to replicate it to this...

Yeah, it really does sound like me.

This is KZSU, Stanford.

Welcome to entitled opinions.

My name is Robert Harrison.

We're coming to you from the Stanford Canvas.

When I hear that synthetic replication of my voice, I get a better sense of how the Greeks

envisioned the afterlife, a shadow world where the full-bodied person is reduced to his

or her idolon, or disembodied image.

In the old days, the shades in Hades required the blood of a black ram to animate their voices.

These days, it only requires code.

Hold tight, everyone.

A synthetic Hades coming our way.

Music I'm joined in the studio today by Anna Ilyvska, a brilliant young scholar who thinks and writes about technology and the humanities.

She listened to our most recent show with Brian Chong on artificial intelligence and large language models.

And she suggested that we do a follow-up show on the same topic from other points of view.

And that's what's on tap for today.

But before we get started, let me repeat the Heidegger quote I invoked in the intro to that show. It's well known to the entitled

Opinions Brigade. The most thought-provoking thing about our thought-provoking age is that we are

still not thinking.

...