Media outlets around the world are creating synthetic voices from the real voices of well-known journalists, so that their readers can listen to news and opinion columns. Ismael Nafría explains it very well in his newsletter Tendenci@s. This process is being called “personalizing voices.” These voices are trained from recordings of about 45,000 phrases, during 80 or 100 hours of study. In 2024, what can algorithms do well in the field of journalism? Summarize, translate, locute. Automatically. Not personally. But – first paradox – the illusion is that, through the magic of audio and the echoes of the humans who train the machine, it sounds personal.
Automatic prescription initiated the strong presence of the algorithm in our cultural lives. His desire was to get to know us better and better in order to refine himself and get his recommendations right. Their goal was to single out the advice for your next reading or audiovisual experience. Reinforce, therefore, the uniqueness of the taste of each reader. However, second paradox, what the Netflix or YouTube algorithms have done has been to go from one to the sum, establishing patterns of group convergences, of collective tastes. Generalize. Thus, the uniqueness of the works or contents, and of the profiles of their consumers, has been diluted both at the reception and at the production level. I fear that The Crown has been the last Netflix series with an artistic, literary, subtle will.
The great underlying conflict is between the digital work (book, movie, series, album, podcast) and the continuous one (playlist, algorithmic recommendation, infinite scroll). With the synthesis and automatic translation of content, with the generation of texts and videos and images and music, AI will further multiply the power of the continuum. No platform wants you to leave it: pursue continuation at all costs and at all costs: your continuity. That is why in recent years we have moved from the content platform to the aggregator as the main agent. Movistar now offers you not only football, series, movies or television channels, but also certain platforms. Spotify adds it all. And Prime Video produces Operación Triunfo because it has added TV to its catalog: in the future, will there be room in it for wonderful and experimental series like Fleabag or I love Dick?
Each human being is different, but neural networks are similar in their typologies, data sets, designs, families, corporate lineages. The famous singularity of AI means, in reality, that at some point AI will be able to be autonomous and reproduce, but not to generate singular systems. If things continue this way, the uniqueness of AI will be synonymous with uniformity. Third paradox: final.
