I was sitting at dinner to usher in the eighth day of Lunar New Year, an auspicious time in Penang, when immediately after the first course of tossing “yusheng” and shouting for prosperity, the conversation turned to AI.
I mean, we had just witnessed the most elaborate and magnificent ceremony to honour the Jade Emperor – a magnificent altar, bursting with offerings to the gods, complete with a glistening roast suckling pig, followed by firecrackers and a dragon dance weaving through the corridors and spaces of the Seven Terraces hotel (see video) – and I had expected the conversation to take a more celestial turn.
But there it was, that two-letter word that is dominating every dinner conversation including this annual feast, hosted by Chris Ong, owner of Georgetown Heritage & Hotels, as part of his mission to bring “intangible heritage to life”.
It turned out that one of the guests was an actress from Los Angeles, who does voiceovers for a living. She spoke about the actors’ strike and how now with voice AI, she feared losing her livelihood.
I felt for her. Here’s a young woman, just making it in the tough, competitive world of Hollywood, and now along comes AI that could literally up-end everything she’s ever known and thought she knew about the life she wanted to build for herself.
I listened and mostly kept mum.
I felt a sense of shame, guilt actually. I had just spent the last three days, experimenting with an audio story I wanted to create and had cloned my voice on Eleven Labs to test the results.
The first clone made me sound like part-English and part-Australian, the second American. I could hear bits of my tone in it, and it caught my inflections quite well. It’s probably not as trained in Malaysian Chinese neutral English accents yet.
(Listen and tell me what you think)
What impressed me most was when I prompted me to speak Mandarin and Japanese, two languages I don’t speak. These two versions sounded more like me and according to my friends who speak both languages, they were shocked by how well “I” spoke. One however said I sounded like a “dominatrix with no humour in Mandarin”.
(Listen and see what you think – first version, Mandarin; second version, Japanese.)
Brushing that aside, my mind reeled at the possibilities of what this technology could do, what I could do with it. It’s still such early stage but it’s already really good. I don’t know if it’s naïve of me but I feel strangely liberated – reminiscent of the early days of the Internet, which moved me to forsake print media to start up WiT.
And then in the same week comes Sora, OpenAI’s new text-to-video technology, that lets you create videos with word prompts. Ever since ChatGPT came out in November 2022 and excited and terrified the world, the capability to convert text to video was clearly next – and here it is.
It’s not yet open to the public but imagine the possibilities – what anyone could create with it, the jobs it will displace, the videos it will spit out, the movies it could churn out …
Around the dinner table that night were lawyers, authors, bankers, actors, restauranteurs – of different ages and backgrounds. We had come together to celebrate an auspicious occasion, the rise of the Wood Dragon, but we are also united at this moment in time by the prospect of AI changing the world and impacting each of us individually.
“The pandemic also united us, as a world and as individuals,” said Chris Ong solemnly, in an attempt to perhaps take the conversation to a more celestial plane. “It took away the shroud of mystery from death. Now we talk about it more openly.”
Ditto with AI – we need to talk about it more openly because we are all going through it together. There’s anxiety and fear over job loss and irrelevance, there’s concern that it will cause an even bigger divide between the have and the have-nots, there’s real terror that it will lead to a proliferation of fake content – AI combined with social media is a terrifying combination in the hands of bad people.
At the same time, there’s real excitement at what it could do for travel, how it could bring the long tail of the dragon to life, empowering millions and millions of small and micro-businesses to find their own sustainable place in the sun.
I, for one, can’t wait to get started on the yellow brick road to AI-dom. What about you?
Listen to the full article here:
4 minutes. This audio is generated by an AI tool.
