Hey there, !

What voice do you hear when you're reading online?

What about this newsletter?

What about with AI?

On the internet

I sometimes wonder how everyone reads the internet, because I feel like I have a generic male voice (my voice?) that is carping on online about anything and everything. Whether it's on Twitter, my email newsletters, or Reddit - it's just the same voice! However, this also means that when I read subreddits like AITA or RelationshipAdvice, they all seem to come from the same person, because everything is anonymous. It gets very confusing / whiplashy when you go from 'Are these red flags in my relationship with my married significant other?' to 'My best friend of 15 years doesn't want to be in my wedding party anymore!' Are they 23? 40? 75? What's the context! What's the tone!!

I often get confused when I move from one thread to another, and it takes me a moment to recalibrate with the content - oh, it's a woman, not a man as I default assumed, and oh - they're actually like 18/19 rather than mid-30's, and oh - they have specific cultural background things that I wouldn't have got from the context of the headline just by itself (until I read much further along).

Is that a good thing? The great internet equalizer?

Or is there something that it has flattened out about the world because none of your inherent traits matter other than what you type?

This newsletter

Personally, I write in a conversational tone because I think it helps me get the tone of my voice across the best. There are idiosyncratic ways that I use ellipses, or em-dashes, or commas, or other turns of phrase that help to distinguish my style of writing from someone else. I probably overuse punctuation, emojis and other tone markers because I want you to know how I'm saying what I'm saying!

I wonder if you can 'hear' it?

I like to write the way I speak because it's the easiest thing to type out. It comes naturally as a stream of consciousness, which I can then edit for clarity and brevity.

But then...I do think about what would happen if I fed my newsletter posts into an AI; would it take on these patterns? Would it be able to speak like me? Is my voice actually as unique and idiosyncratic as I think?

AI

And for AI, well...that's a whole other kettle of fish. In its first iteration as a voice assistant, all the tech companies defaulted to a female voice, and then later included other voices that you could change them to. Maybe it focus group tested well, but should it be that way?

When I read Claude or ChatGPT outputs...I don't really feel like I can read it with a particular voice in mind. Often there's these weird declarative statements, "'It's not just focus. It's persistence," or "A man. A plan. A canal Panama" and then you're like 'okay but who's saying this? What kind of person speaks like this?" There's a sense of inhumanity to it, or an affectation that is just blergh. ROBOTS, MAN.

Recently, I experimented with ElevenLabs, a company that can read out whatever you want IN WHATEVER VOICE YOU WANT which is quite scary actually - some of the voices sound very real and natural, with the exact accent, tone and inflections that you might want.

I particularly loved YOUNG JAMAL who sounds exactly as you'd expect him to sound.

ElevenLabs also has ways to train a voice on YOUR OWN voice so that it can literally speak on your behalf, and also has a bunch of other languages that it can speak in.

Technology is fascinating, and technology is frightening.

Just like all technology, I guess (SFX: ominous background noises)

Chat soon :)

(P.S. If you've got any feedback for the newsletter, just hit the reply button!)

✔️Real Life Recommendations

1. Ondam - what can I say? There were a lot of Koreans there and it was a good Korean restaurant LOL. The prices are on the dearer side, but they have unlimited side dishes (WEW) and the range and variety of the food is quite nice. We tried the ssam and the wagyu bulgogi stew - both wonderfully flavorful and generous with serving sizes. Fantastic!

2. Blood on the Clocktower - I don't usually recommend boardgames, especially not social deduction ones, but I really love the experience of playing this game. It's like Werewolf / Mafia, but the storyteller gets to be more involved in the game, people can still discuss things after they're dead and have an influence on the game, and every single person gets something to do as part of their role. It's a bit of a learning curve to start but it's a WONDERFUL experience. I want to play this more.

🚌 Adventures on the Information Super-Highway

1. Adam Jacobs Rare Recordings collection - this guy, back in the 90s, did a lot of illegal recordings of concerts in the 90s with a tape recorder. And because no-one else did it back in the day, there are a whole bunch of rare recordings that have been uploaded to the Internet Archive of concerts that were lost to history. Piracy can be good sometimes, folks!

2. Happy Map - pudding.cool - they are so good at storytelling with data; this is about mapping out the responses of why people were happy as part of a 2017 research project. Explore the continent of happiness!

3. Warranty void if regenerated - science fiction, yes, but a very interesting near-future look at what the world might look like if LLM's took over everything.