Well, I’ll be danged. This thing is still on.
(I know it’s covered in dust but now I’m wondering if this blog is also covered in chipmunks, squirrels, rabbits and deer.)
The good folks of the Reclaim Hosting Blogging Community of Practice made me feel better about having a neglected blog, and that the difference between having a neglected blog and an un-neglected one is just hitting publish on something so…
I’ve been making bumpers (those little Station Identification messages) for DS106 Radio. This is a fun little audio editing exercise, and a reason to make cheap jokes. And then it occurred to me that I could use oblivion.university to get someone else’s voice involved.
Dr Oblivion Christmas DS106 Radio Bumper
This was the first big experiment with an AI-enabled bumper, in December ’23. The prompt was “Could you make a christmas parody for DS106 radio?” And sure enough, Dr. Oblivion rewrote Jingle Bells in one take. (Note that I didn’t actually specify what to parody!) Then I found a suitable goofy open-licensed copy of Jingle Bells by Mystery Mammal on Free Music Archive, and cut the two together in GarageBand with just a wee little bit of volume adjustment. I picked a copy of the song that was fast enough to almost match Dr Oblivion’s speaking rate; I no longer remember if that was intentional or good luck. I did have to add some breaks to let the music in, but within a line the Doctor doesn’t get too terribly far ahead of the beat.
There were a couple of lessons involved here. Maybe the biggest one is that I’d heard that AI can’t be funny, but I think this is funny enough. I did like it better with some of the lines re-arranged from the original, but I didn’t do any re-prompting, just re-ordering. Dr. Oblivion kind of botched the bridge by putting it at the end; I had to splice it between the verses and honestly only half of it was funny, which is why you only get half a bridge.
DS106 Disclaimer – Dr Oblivion and Dr Jekyll
Bryan Alexander was good enough to tell me about VOID 1680, the solo role-playing game where you create a playlist and the rulebook tells you about the callers to your radio station who might be requesting a song or telling you their story. (It feels very Welcome to Night Vale, at least the way I play it.)
Hat tip also to Pilot Irwin who played a game about the radio advice show at the end of the world (called “Long Time Listener, Last Time Caller“) on the Reclaim Hosting/DS106 Radio Summer Camp, which gave me a little more spine about radio roleplaying games.
This bumper was for my Valentine’s Day show, which I decided would be VOID 1680’s romantic advice for the paranormally inclined. In the tradition of the great radio and TV doctors of unclear qualification… I bring you Doctor Jekyll.
Also in the tradition of stations that want the attention of a celebrity host but not the legal liability, I figured we needed a disclaimer. I was going to write and record it myself, but then I figured it might sound better to have another voice entirely.
I didn’t screenshot my prompt for this one, though I know I included the part about not being accredited in any “scientific or pseudoscientific” field. (I probably did say accredited; I probably didn’t say “realm”.)
The editing was just finding a suitably spooky track to lay the voice over; “Romantic” by Serge Quadrado fit the bill.
Dr. Oblivion’s Lullaby
This was the week when I just didn’t have any inspiration for a playlist, so I decided to throw an album on. I really enjoy doing whole-album playthroughs; it’s a good reminder that song order isn’t necessarily algorithmically generated and some songs really were intended to be juxtaposed.
My prompt for this one was “Please make a bumper for the Friday Night Tunes show on DS106 Radio. This should be a sarcastic but sympathetic announcement that Joe is too tired or frazzled to do a proper playlist, so tonight’s show is an album playthrough.” Again, the AI plucked the details out of the prompt pretty well. “Sarcastic but sympathetic” seemed to be an emotional target that was easy to hit… it remains to be seen whether that reflects on generative AI or the good folks behind Oblivion University.
Again, the audio was ready to go out of the box, so I just had to pick a nice sleepytime song. Brahms’ Lullaby by Howie Mitchell and Ruth Meyer was just right.
Níl sé in ann Gaeilge a labhairt
I attempted to get Dr. Oblivion to speak in Irish for my St. Patrick’s Day bumper. It attempted to apply English phonetics and failed miserably at producing recognizable Irish, even to my ears only trained on Duolingo. More surprisingly, it complained first about being asked to speak in another language when it has perfectly good English to use. I was ready for the snark but not the ethnocentrism. Presented only as an example of AIs going in unexpected and undesirable ways.
I don’t quite know what, if anything, to make of all this. I think it’s telling that I have little interest in using a generic AI voice. It’s meaningful to me to have Jim Groom’s voiceprint as part of my hobby, even if he didn’t have any relationship to the words coming out of his “mouth”. If I didn’t have some connection to the voice, I’d probably rather figure out how to filter my own into a new “character”.
It’s also fair to say that any of these could have been accomplished with a note to Jim asking him to record something, and (given time and energy) he probably would have done it. Is it cool to use technology to have a parasocial interaction with someone I actually do know? In this case, of course, Jim put the tool out there for use, and he’s liked my Mastodon posts about these bumpers, so yeah, it’s cool. But there’s some point at which this joke would feel old and kind of weird, and it’s not hard to extrapolate out from there.
Featured image “2014/365/351 On The Air At CFBX” by Alan Levine.
Meme of Disney’s Snow White found on Yarn (without credit)
