se AI tools and voice cloning technologies to change your own inner voice .
Inspired by: Sarah Ciston
With so many new and fast developing AI voice cloning tools and technologies, it can feel overwhelming to think about how these tools will be used and especially misused. But can we use these tools and turn them on ourselves? This assignment is inspired by Sarah Ciston’s work Inner(voice)over, an audio sculpture and web app that asks how we might ‘rewrite’ our inner critic using natural language processing. It creates a self-compassion database using an AI speech-to-text and text-to-speech pipeline built with GPT-3 text generation, Mozilla DeepSpeech voice recognition, voice synthesis tools, and participant contributions. The work considers how our deepest thoughts regarding ourselves are social—-that is, they’re informed by our experiences in community. The work reflects on how inner voices are shaped through social training—much like language models—and how error, glitch, and misunderstanding become creative poetics. With this in mind, in this assignment we’ll learn to train our own inner voice using AI tools.
Link:
https://sarahciston.com/IVO.html
Assignment:
1. You can begin this assignment by observing your own inner critic. Spend a bit of time looking inwards and writing down some of the harsh or negative things that you say to yourself. Write these in both first and third person, so you can see how these phrases echo your own experiences and those you learned from others, in the community around you.
2. Take the lines that you have written, in the first person, and input them into ChatGPT or GPT-3 with prompts asking it to rewrite the text with tenderness or with self care.
3. Use text-to-speech tools like Uberduck, ElevenLabs, or Mac accessibility voices, to vocalize the rewritten voice. Listen to these new inner voices that you have generated.
4. How does listening to your new, AI generated inner voice, make you feel? Did the AI tools help you find more self compassion by being able to listen to an augmented version of yourself?