Jurgen Gravestein on LinkedIn: How AI Is Making Voice Actors Obsolete (2024)

Big announcement: I’m launching a monthly segment called AI Office Hours 🗣️So, have you been following me for a while and are you wildly curious about a certain topic that I haven’t covered yet? Shoot!Read an article in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times or somewhere else that left you with more questions than answers? Ask away!Fell in love with your AI girlfriend and don’t know how to tell your wife? Leave a comment below.Send in your questions now and I promise I’ll answer them as best as I can.The first edition of AI Office Hours will go live in April 💙Full announcement here: https://lnkd.in/e72AGYzH#conversationalai #conversationdesign #ai

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When Yuval Harari wrote inThe Economistin April 2023 that “AI has hacked the operating system of human civilisation”, many found his comments alarmist 🚨 The core of his argument, however, was that language is the most powerful tool in human history and everything in society is made up of language, from human rights to money, religion, and politics.The relationship between language and AI has fascinated me ever since I became a conversation designer. It turns out we perceive AI assistants like Anthropic's Claude, Google's Gemini or OpenAI's GPT-4 as smarter than they really are, due to their language fluency. Isn't that fascinating? As designers, working with and on these systems, we should be aware of both the upsides and downsides of that. If you want to learn more about conversational AI, consider subscribing to my newsletter here: https://lnkd.in/e_3h-C3yI promise I won't shower you with daily e-mails. One story a week. 100% human-generated. #conversationalai #conversationdesign #ai #llm #intelligence #newsletter #language #linguistics

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Does your organization struggle to get business value from generative AI? You're not the only one. Organizations are running pilots left and right, but surprisingly few LLM-powered chatbots make it to production.That's because LLMs are not the car, they are the engine. Without tires, a steering wheel, and a whole lot more, you never make it onto the road.What most people don't realize is that hybrid is the way to go. Hybrid AI assistants allow you combine the strengths of both technologies: NLU and generative AI. On top of that, you might want to answers some business-critical questions at the start:✅ Which conversations do we want to automate?✅ How much conversations do we currently fail to automate, which are suitable to be automated using an LLM?✅ What design patterns are we going to leverage, so you can roll out generative features incrementally and safely?Want to dive deeper? Feel free to book in some time here: https://lnkd.in/e4gS2dyH

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As people, we treat language fluency as a proxy for intelligence. Simply put, we judge people based on the way they talk 🗣️Because of that, we tend tounderestimatethe cognitive capabilities of people with speech impediments. People who stutter, for example, are often perceived and treated differently, just because of the way they speak. At the same time, we tend tooverestimatethe capabilities of AI systems like GPT-4, due to their linguistic fluency, and perceive them as smarter than they really are.It leads to confusion about what AI is and isn't — but the source of this confusion is not ignorance or stupidity, it's language itself. Think about the word ‘hallucinations’ for a moment. In the field of psychology, hallucinations refer to sensory experiences that feel real, but are in fact imaginary. In the field of AI, however, the term was given a new meaning entirely. This is an example of 'conceptional borrowing'. A truly fascinatingresearch articlewas published on the topic last week, by professors Luciano Floridi and Anna C. Nobre from Yale and Oxford University, in which they write: "𝘈𝘐 𝘩𝘢𝘴 𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘥 𝘶𝘱 𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘤𝘳𝘪𝘣𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘱𝘶𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘩𝘳𝘰𝘱𝘰𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘱𝘩𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺, 𝘢𝘴 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘱𝘶𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘭 𝘣𝘳𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘴 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘱𝘴𝘺𝘤𝘩𝘰𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘱𝘳𝘰𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘵𝘪𝘦𝘴, 𝘸𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘦 𝘣𝘳𝘢𝘪𝘯 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘤𝘰𝘨𝘯𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘴𝘤𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘴 𝘩𝘢𝘷𝘦 𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘥 𝘶𝘱 𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘤𝘳𝘪𝘣𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘣𝘳𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘥𝘴 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘱𝘶𝘵𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘪𝘯𝘧𝘰𝘳𝘮𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘢𝘭𝘭𝘺, 𝘢𝘴 𝘣𝘪𝘰𝘭𝘰𝘨𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘱𝘶𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘴."I cover their research article and more in my latest piece. You can read the full story here: https://lnkd.in/eMV6Sb4M#conversationalai #ai #intelligence #paradox #llms #computers #brains #minds #psychology

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Remember Andrej Karpathy's departure from OpenAI? Well, at a recent Sequoia Capital event, his first public appearance since his departure, he spoke about something he calls the LLM OS. In a way, the rabbit inc. R1, the Open Interpreter project, and to a lesser extent the Humane AI Pin, can all be seen as early attempts at it. The LLM OS could bring about a whole new wave computing: with the LLMs as the OS, AI agents as apps, and natural language as the programming interface.Sounds futuristic? Well, it's not entirely new actually. Back in the 60s, there was a strong belief that if we only we found the proper way of communicating with machines, all programming ills would be cured. COBOL — a programming language inspired by plain English — was created with this exact goal in mind.Funny enough, COBOL is still being used today, but only to maintain existing applications. So, is the language the OS of the future? Maybe. I don't know, you tell me 👀Read the full story here: https://lnkd.in/exgc5TSD#conversationalai #llms #ai #openai #programming

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Be like Fatma Nagy Sharkawy and futureproof your conversation design career with Conversation Design Institute’s newest prompt design course.

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The Dutch mathematician Edsger W. Dijkstra once said: "The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim."Dijkstra's point was that comparing computers to human minds isn't a meaningful comparison. In that light, asking ourselves whether a computer can be truly creative maybe is not the right question to ask.Instead, we should be thinking about how this technology may impact the lives of people who actually rely on their creativity for work: graphic designers, photographers, copywriters, creative directors, and more.What do you think? Is AI going to be a net-positive or net-negative for people working creative services? 💭#conversationalai #ai #automation #creative #futureofwork

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I don’t like to brag, but I believe it is important to celebrate your successes once in a while 🏆When I started my newsletter “Teaching computers how to talk”, more than a year ago, I didn’t expect it have the impact that it had.Substack has provided me with a platform to build an audience in a way that I could never have anticipated.I’ve met through this platform some of the most talented and witty writers on there, like Birgitte Rasine, Alberto Romero García and Gary Marcus who’s newsletters I can recommend to anyone to read.And it has landed me multiple publications in UX Magazine (best-read article of 2023), The Yuan (first article going online this Monday), and a recent contribution as industry expert to an article in Vrij Nederland.I also don’t like to talk about numbers so much, because numbers are never numbers. Numbers represent people. But it IS good to sometimes remind myself how many people are actually reading what I write. Visualize it. Myself, standing on a stage, in front of 2000+ people. It’s a strange honor.I enjoy every moment of it. And I’m grateful for every reader that decides I’m worth their time. Thank you 🫶!

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What if you could build a fully automated software engineer? 🛠️Cognition, emerging from stealth last week, claims to have succeeded at just that with their groundbreaking new product, Devin.Now, with this kind of stuff, you really have to see it to believe it. But only a handful of people got early access, which means it’s difficult to say exactly how big of a leap it is.At the same time, Devin looks impressive enough to take seriously, which is why I did a bit of a deep dive in my latest newsletter (I recommend you to subscribe if you want stories like these delivered straight to your inbox 📥 ).In it, I go over the details of the benchmark, discuss a demo video that shows Devin creating an interactive website inspired by the Game of Life from scratch, and the potential implications of deploying a system like Devin at scale.Read the full story here: https://lnkd.in/euMT45ND#conversationalai #ai #software #engineering #hype

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