There will be no follow-up to that AI-generated George Carlin comedy special released by the podcast Dudesy. Now, the two sides have reached a settlement agreement, which includes the permanent removal of the comedy special from Dudesy's archive. Sasso and Kultgen have also agreed never to repost it on any platform and never to use Carlin's image, voice or likeness without approval from the estate again, according to The New York Times. The AI algorithm that Dudesy used for the special was trained on thousands of hours of Carlin's routines that spanned decades of his career. It generated enough material for an hour-long special, but it did a pretty poor impression of the late comedian with basic punchlines and very little of what characterized Carlin's humor.

ChatGPT is getting some significant updates that will enable the chatbot to deal with voice commands and image-based queries. Users will be able to have a voice conversation with ChatGPT on Android and iOS and to feed images into it on all platforms. OpenAI is rolling out the features now. They'll be available to Plus and Enterprise users at first, with other folks gaining access to the image-based features later. You'll need to opt in to voice conversations in the ChatGPT app (go to Settings then New Features) if you'd like to try them out.

An AI-powered technology called Podium is intended to speed up the post-production of podcasts significantly. It lets you quickly create transcripts, highlights, chapters, and show notes with episode summaries. The application is simple to use and doesn't need to create an account; all required is to submit an audio file. The AI in Podium will swiftly find quotable passages, develop chapters and titles, and provide a summary of the episode that can be easily shared on social media. Also, it offers a superb transcript for enhanced accessibility and search engine optimization. The application is initially free but will soon change to a cheap pay-per-use fee or bespoke pricing if you need to handle a big volume of episodes at once. AI tool is intended to improve the post-production of podcasts via the creation of AI-powered show notes, titles, and descriptions.

Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter may have capped the opening chapter in the Information Wars, where free speech won a small but crucial battle. Full spectrum combat across the digital landscape, however, will only intensify, as a new report from the Brookings Institution, a key player in the censorship industrial complex, demonstrates. Reams of internal documents, known as the Twitter Files, show that social media censorship in recent years was far broader and more systematic than even we critics suspected. Worse, the files exposed deep cooperation – even operational integration – among Twitter and dozens of government agencies, including the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, DOD, CIA, Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Department of Health and Human Services, CDC, and, of course, the White House. Government agencies also enlisted a host of academic and non-profit organizations to do their dirty work.

One of the best ways outside of AI books to learn about AI and machine learning is to follow podcasts. I have compiled my personal list of the 5 best podcasters to follow along with a recommendation of 3 great interviews for each in order to get your started. Sam Charrington is the most underappreciated podcaster on our list and we are still waiting for Sam to get the recognition that he deserves. He brings together the top minds and ideas from AI researchers, data scientists, engineers, and tech-savvy business and IT leaders. Sam does an impressive job asking the right questions, and it is undeniable that he fully understands and grasps AI concepts better than most podcasters.

The voice-first community on social media continues to grow almost as quickly as the adoption of voice AI technology itself. In 2018, we identified 15 voice AI influencers to follow on Twitter and heard from a lot of our readers on how much they loved the list--an inspiring mix of engineers, entrepreneurs, academics, linguists and journalists. Two years later, we're updating our list to include 40 experts we recommend you follow to keep up with the latest in voice AI news, trends, predictions, and successes. As we are all in planning mode for 2021, we thought this would be a good time to publish a new list to help inspire you. If you know someone who should be included in our next list, please let us know.)

Back in 2015, when creative director Clint Hocking and his team began crafting the near-future world of Watch Dogs: Legion, some of the biggest technology companies in the world were confidently describing skies buzzing with package-delivery drones and streets alive with autonomous vehicles. Into the game they went. For a speculative fiction game about mass surveillance, that creates some problems. "Technology companies--Tesla, Amazon--had started talking publicly about pretty aggressive timelines, schedules, and regulations," Hocking said in an interview with WIRED. On October 29, Watch Dogs: Legion will release as both a game and a time capsule from 2015, back when a couple of big, stock-inflating daydreams painted a picture for 2020 that's still far from materializing.

The boom in popularity for podcasting has given a new voice to the world of spoken word content that had been largely left for dead with the decline of broadcast radio. Now riding the wave of that growth, a startup called Descript that's building tools to make the art of creating podcasts -- or any other content that involves working with audio -- a little easier with audio transcription and editing tools, has a trio of news announcements: funding, an acquisition, and the launch of a new tool that brings some of the magic of natural language processing and AI to the medium by letting people create audio of their own voices based on text that they type. Descript, the latest startup from Groupon founder Andrew Mason, created as a spinoff of his audio-guide business Detour (which got acquired by Bose last year), is today announcing $15 million in funding, a Series A for expanding the business (including hiring more people) that's coming from Andreessen Horowitz (it also funded the startup's seed round in 2017) and Redpoint. Along with that, the company has acquired a small Canadian startup, Lyrebird -- which had, like Descript, also built audio editing tools. Together, the two are rolling out a new feature for Descript called Overdub: people will now be able to create "templates" of their voices that they can in turn use to create audio based on words that they type, part of a bigger production suite that will also let users edit multiple voices on multiple tracks.

Say hello to Joe Rogan: podcaster, entertainer of problematic views, and man who believes that feeding his all chimp hockey team a diet of bone broth and elk meat will give them the power to rip your balls off. Or, at least that's what the unaware listener might believe after listening to an entirely AI-generated clip of the popular podcaster. Unlike Rogan's typical totally coherent rants, this one is a total fabrication. "The replica of Rogan's voice the team created was produced using a text-to-speech deep learning system they developed called RealTalk," explained the researchers behind the clip in a blog post, "which generates life-like speech using only text inputs." This obviously calls to mind deepfakes, the video editing tech that can convincingly edit videos to make it look like people did or said things they in fact did not.