#1327 “Voice in My Head” Remixes Your Inner Monologue with AI

Voice in My Head is a provocative immersive exploration by Kyle McDonald and Lauren Lee McCarthy that takes large language models the logical extreme of remixing and modulating your inner monologue. Audience participants are invited to customize ChatGPT character that clones your voice to speak to you via an ear bud as you walk around the DocLab festival in Amsterdam and have casual conversations with festival attendees for a half hour. The AI listens to everything you and your interlocutors say, and then pipes every minute or so with feedback based upon your instructions thereby creating a new modulated voice in your head. The piece made me reflect upon my own inner dialogue, and how surprisingly compelling of a piece this is in exploring both the social, ethical, and privacy boundaries of technology but also how art contexts like this create a safe space for earnest exploration for some of the new potentials of immersive technologies and contextually-aware AI. I had a chance to unpack it all with the creators McDonald and McCarthy in Amsterdam after a few days of their world premiere exhibition at IDFA DocLab. This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon. Music: Fatality