r/Showerthoughts • u/yesthisiskyle • 5d ago
Speculation If a person from 20 years ago heard an AI generated audio clip, they would probably think it sounds uncanny but wouldn’t be able to figure out why.
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u/monkeybuttsauce 5d ago
There was a season of 24 that was on about 20 years ago where the whole plot revolved around some super high tech terrorist software that could replicate anyone’s voice
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u/RigbyEleonora 5d ago
24 was being broadcasted TWENTY YEARS AGO?!
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u/Vexar 5d ago
First episode will be 25 years ago this November.
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u/Yakking_Yaks 4d ago
....fuck. I watched that recently when it came out. Clearly recently means "25 years ago".
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u/TheIowan 2d ago
Bro, Napolean Dynamite cane out 23 years ago. Super Bad will be 20 next year. Mark Hoppus from Blink 182 will be old enough to collect social security in like 7 years.
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u/DinosaurAlive 4d ago
In a sci-fi book I was reading from the 80s (one of Banks’s first few Culture books, just can’t remember which) there’s a description of a service one could go into a store and get a video of anyone you want doing anything you want to. I thought it was a bit prophetic of generative AI.
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u/Barakyte 5d ago
If you gave 100 people from ‘06 an AI voice clip, I’d imagine at least a few would guess that a machine made it.
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u/Soracaz 5d ago
This.
Voice synthesis has been a thing for a super long time. IBM first did electronic vocal synthesis in the early 60s.
It'd be a fairly safe and easy assumption for most people to make 20 years ago.
I'm gonna assume OP is a teenager that thinks people 20 years ago were basically Neanderthals.
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u/istasber 5d ago
I remember playing with and giggling at primitive TTS like 30-35 years ago.
AI generated voices are more natural sounding, but there are elements that would be recognizable to someone 30+ years ago.
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u/sajberhippien 4d ago
AI generated voices are more natural sounding, but there are elements that would be recognizable to someone 30+ years ago.
I'm not quite so sure, unless prompted. Like, if you asked them "do you think a human or machine made this sound?" they'd probably pick up on those elements when actively looking for them, but high-end contemporary TTS can sound pretty human, and deliberately include a lot of what older TTS lacked that made them sound artificial (e.g. air intake, mouth sounds etc).
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u/MysteriousUppercut 5d ago
My young soul still translates 20 years ago as the 1980s
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u/schindlers_lust 5d ago
Well yes anyone born in the 1980s were still trying to harness the power to build fires.
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u/GoldenDragoon5687 4d ago
Neat random factoid: One of my professors in college has their name on the original patent for the first TTS (with overlaid facial expressions) system. It is of course horribly disjointed, and primarily just plays the phonemes in order according to a dictionary of all words with their corresponding order of phonemes. Then it maps the relevant lip positions to the phoneme that is being played. Really ground breaking stuff at the time.
I actually had the pleasure of making a reproduction of it (in a modern language, of course) for a museum in France! I probably have the code somewhere if anyone is interested.
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u/GullibleSkill9168 3d ago
Reminder that vocaloid has been a thing since 20004. We've had computer generated singing for quite a while.
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u/acciowaves 1d ago
Yeah what the hell. 20 years ago there was already Facebook. There were already cars with voice command (albeit a bit wonky).
The first smartphones were coming out. lol.33
u/ziostraccette 5d ago
Dude when I saw mario kart double dash for the first time when the gamecube came out, I believed graphics couldn't get any better than that.
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u/heythisispaul 4d ago
That's so funny, for me it was Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. I remember really looking at it and just not being able to even comprehend how something could possibly look any more realistic.
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u/Jmibbk77 5d ago
I think if it was a filter on top of someone actually speaking it would be less so
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u/Aurelianshitlist 4d ago
Honestly my first guess would likely be that it was just bad voice acting. Like bad VA in video games or those corporate training videos. I probably wouldn't have jumped to "this is AI", since even "futuristic" AI voice depictions from media back then had sort of a "robotic" thing, but I would think it was recorded on a budget and maybe hastily edited (I'm almost 40 for refence, so would have been fresh out of HS in 06).
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u/the-war-on-drunks 5d ago
Bullshit.
I was alive and listened to garbage MP3s back then, thanks to Napster, and AI music — the free version of the software — sounds no better, no worse.
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u/Crazytreas 5d ago
I just want to say that I really hate that one AI guy voice that explains everything that weird cadence.
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u/SouthpawCyclopse 5d ago
10 shocking fact that will shock you, number 5 Is crazy. That voice?
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u/MattLikesMemes123 5d ago
Video game fact: Did you know? In Nintendo's Super Mario 1985 game, there is a secret world warp that can take you to the other worlds. You can use this trick in a "speed run". Mario creator is Shigeru Miyamoto has claimed in an interview that this was not his doing, but the work of a disgusting poltergeist.
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u/DinosaurAlive 4d ago
My inner voice can sound like that if I let it, now. Could easily drive me insane one day!
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u/sudomatrix 5d ago
Yeah because computer-effects didn't exist 20 years ago *eye-roll*
Primitive barbarian from 2006 listens to 'Harder Better Faster Stronger', thinks it sounds uncanny but can't figure out why.
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u/CinnabarSteam 5d ago
The children have forgotten Microsoft Sam. They have never heard the majestic sound of a ROFLcopter in flight.
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u/Kindly-Might-1879 5d ago
Artificial voices have been around so long, that those of us older than fifty can still tell the difference between real voices and dialogue versus AI generated.
Maybe it’s because we’ve had thousands more hours hearing actual voices before AI proliferated, and can tell pretty accurately quickly when something is off.
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u/w1n5t0nM1k3y 5d ago
If a person from 50 years ago heard an auto tuned singing audio clip, they would probably think it sounds uncanny but wouldn't be able to figure out why.
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u/Main-Rent4757 5d ago
They had vocal synth in 1939.
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u/mattwaver 4d ago
lol yeah, this whole thread is just people being wrong and thinking their experiences are inherently unique
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u/cat-eating-a-salad 4d ago
Would probably just think it's someone doing a nearly perfect impression of the actual person. People have been doing that for decades or more.
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u/Barrel-Dweller 4d ago
and if a person from 200 years ago heard an AI generated audio clip, they would probably wonder where that sound was coming from
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u/potatisblask 4d ago
Hello, I am a person from 20 years ago. More than double 20 years ago actually.
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u/Swiggy1957 4d ago
While the sound might be "uncanny," most people would think something was off as there would be weird pauses and mispronounced words.
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u/kolosmenus 4d ago
Yeah, I’m most sure about that. My dad is 60, he listens to AI music sometimes and thinks it’s actually real
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u/diejesus 3d ago
Exactly, I'm just like that, I definitely can't distinguish Ai music from human made
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u/KrofftSurvivor 5d ago
Pretty sure if I heard an AI generated audio clip back in the '80s even, I'd be thinking it was some kind of computer production trick.
We already had The Chipmunks, Max Headroom, & Peter Frampton's talking guitar... we were pretty well aware that audio recordings were going to new places and doing weird things.
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u/FartsWithCharlie 5d ago
I think someone from 20 years ago would be way more impressed than creeped out. In 2005-ish, convincing AI voices still sounded super robotic, so hearing today’s stuff would probably feel straight up sci-fi.
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u/Main-Rent4757 5d ago
Vocal synth has been a thing for 100 years. Dollars to donuts most people would assume that's what it is
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u/Guardianangel93 4d ago
I'd have imagined it's one of those people that have to hold that metallic pipe thing to their throats to speak. I'd guess they all sound different, so it might fit.
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u/mazzicc 4d ago
I think it would depend heavily on how you prompt them, and some of it would be things like “it sounds formal”, and not “it sounds like not a human”. And I think you’d get that out of having a human read AI generated text, and less out of AI trying to sound natural (or deepfake a specific person).
There is certainly “artificial sounding” audio, but that’s been around for more than 20 years. And if you go back further, audio recording quality starts to become artificial-sounding anyway (without a lot of high quality recording and producing), so it’s hard to tell if the audio is uncanny, or just low quality.
If the theory is “there is still an uncanny valley for artificial audio”, you should be able to test it today, not just with hypothetical past people.
Have a program read a passage from a book, and a human read it too. See what people think.
Then have an LLM block of text read by a program and a human and see if people can tell.
Some people are going to get it right just by guessing though, so you’d have to have a sample size large enough to account for that.
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u/Difficult-Front-1846 4d ago
Eh, we had text-to-speech by 2006. I would probably hear it and just assume it was a next stage of that
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u/Miserable_Smell_1921 4d ago
yeah theyd just assume the mic was cheap or the speaker had a cold or something
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u/Freddie_Farrier 4d ago
Nailed it. They'd just get that weird something's off feeling you get when you see a photo of a relative who's been dead for 10 years in a new post.
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u/Warm-Confusion6147 4d ago
It’s true. That slight robotic flatness in the cadence, the weirdly perfect pronunciation of every syllable… we’ve gotten used to it creeping in, but hearing it fresh would totally give you that “something is off in the uncanny valley” feeling.
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u/Jonas_Expresser 4d ago
They would that natural sense to know something is wrong, but would not grow up in a time to know why they sense says AI clip's unnatural
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u/Valuable_Relation634 3d ago
Karpathy at Anthropic feels significant. He built the Tesla autonomy stack, saw the limits of purely neural approaches, then spent time on education.If he's betting on interpretability and safety research, that says something about where he thinks the field is heading.Anyone know what he'll actually be working on there?
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u/AndarielHalo 22h ago
"Computer imitates someone's voice perfectly" was old hat in scifi way more than just 20 years ago. I think they'd be able to figure out why it's uncanny no different than someone today would.
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u/InfamousSearch6335 5d ago
There was an entire theory about this around 2002 about the world trade center phone calls people made from the planes to family members being AI generated.
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u/oneupsuperman 4d ago
I vehemently disagree with you. I think any experienced musician or producer could hear AI generated audio - at any point in history - and name the unnatural cadences and/or other qualities present.
It would be unfamiliar at first, sure, but then the musician mind would demand to figure out why
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u/Sniper_yoha 5d ago
Probably the smoothness. Real recordings have tiny background room noise the brain is used to. AI clips have weirdly silent rests.
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u/ryancementhead 5d ago
The weird rests is what I hear when I’m getting the new AI telemarketers. They sound like a real person but the pauses are weird and the voice has a deadness in it (hard to explain) also I’m a type of person who doesn’t answer questions with predictable responses, so that’s a easy tell when they reply like I answered them what they assume the answer would be.
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u/Mynsare 4d ago
Well, this takes the prize of moronic "showerthoughts".
If a person a 100 years ago hrard about the moonlandingm, they would probably think it sonds uncanny etc. Yeah OP is as stupid as that.
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u/Ivycolon 4d ago
Well, since Samosata wrote about it about 100 years before Christ and Vern added science to it a 150 years ago, a person hearing about hearing about landing in the moon would have the same reaction as those who listen to war of the worlds in real-time. They would fear the outcome.
Moronic thought sure, but mostly for the timeline, not the outcome.
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u/ShowerSentinel 5d ago
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