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AI Is a Mass-Delusion Event - The Atlantic

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Sign up for Work in Progress, a newsletter about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. It is a monday afternoon in august, and I am on the internet watching a former cable-news anchor interview a dead teenager on Substack. This dead teenager—Joaquin Oliver, killed in the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida—has been reanimated by generative AI, his voice and dialogue modeled on snippets of his writing and home-video footage. The animations are stiff, the model’s speaking cadence is too fast, and in two instances, when it is trying to convey excitement, its pitch rises rapidly, producing a digital shriek. How many people, I wonder, had to agree that this was a good idea to get us to this moment? I feel like I’m losing my mind watching it. Jim Acosta, the former CNN personality who’s conducting the interview, appears fully bought-in to the premise, adding to the surreality: He’s playing it straight, even though the i

Listen − 1.0 x + Seek 0:00 19:05 Sign up for Work in Progress , a newsletter about work, technology, and how to solve some of America’s biggest problems. I t is a Monday afternoon in August, and I am on the internet watching a former cable-news anchor interview a dead teenager on Substack. This dead teenager—Joaquin Oliver, killed in the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida—has been reanimated by generative AI, his voice and dialogue modeled on snippets of his writing and home-video footage. The animations are stiff, the model’s speaking cadence is too fa

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