In this episode, Ian and Ash delve into the complexities of managing IT service providers, exploring the challenges and strategies of working with consultancies and independent contractors. They also discuss the cutting-edge topic of AI voice cloning, examining its potential uses and ethical implications. From historical pirate accents to futuristic technology, join them for a thought-provoking discussion on how these technologies impact our work and the broader implications they hold for society.

Our shiny new email address, as promised in this episode, is... technologyeeyores@whatalotofthings.com

Links

• OpenAI, and the not particularly relevant to this episode but still oft-mismentioned OpenAPI.
• Be More Pirate, the book where Ian found out why we think pirates all had British West Country accents
• Pigeon Keeping – Wikipedia
• Diagram Industries blog, where Ash documented his learnings from the Ministry of Testing's "30 Days of AI In Testing" event.
• NaNoWriMo (National Novel-Writing Month)
• LinkedIn is experimenting with a TikTok-like video feed in its app – TechCrunch, 27th March 2024
• hachyderm.io, the Mastodon server that Ian fruitlessly recommended to Ash
• Navigating the Challenges and Opportunities of Synthetic Voices, OpenAI Blog, 29th March 2024
• Free Software: Freedom and Cooperation - speech providing an early overview of the Free Software movement, delivered by Richard Stallman on 29th May 2001.
• Crack Version 4.1: A Sensible Password Checker for Unix [PDF], white paper by Alec Muffett (estimated date, November 1991)
• Open LLMs – Wikipedia, a list of open source LLMs, including Meta's Llama 2 as mentioned.
• How one developer just broke Node, Babel and thousands of projects in 11 lines of JavaScript, The Register, 23rd March 2016
• Everything I know about the XZ backdoor, a rather heroic and very detailed explanation last updated (at the time of writing) on 8th April 2024
• AI Voice Cloning news links
  • OpenAI deems its voice cloning tool too risky for general release – The Guardian, 31st March 2024
  • OpenAI’s voice cloning AI model only needs a 15-second sample to work – The Verge, 29th March 2024
  • OpenAI is pitching Sora to Hollywood. Creatives are fighting back – Mashable, 25th March 2024
  • Resemble AI Creates Synthetic Audio Watermark to Tag Deepfake Speech – voicebot.ai, 2nd February 2023
  • Your Scientists Were So Preoccupied With Whether Or Not They Could, They Didn’t Stop To Think If They Should – Know Your Meme