When I was a teenager, I had a CD player in my room, and I used to listen to fairy tales to fall asleep. The narrator’s voice would relax me and I’d fall asleep quickly. Fast forward to yesterday, I was playing with Google Text-To-Speech for an unrelated project, and had gotten one of their code samples to generate some speech for me. I had also played around with OpenAI’s GPT-3, which I had found wonderfully surrealist, and it had stuck in my mind, so I thought I should combine the two and create a podcast of nonsensical stories that you could listen to to help you fall asleep more easily.
Having already played with Google’s speech synthesis, I thought it would be pretty quick and easy to create this, as all I’d have to do is generate some text with GPT-3 and have Google speak it. GPT-3 is an AI model that can generate very convincing text from a sample. You basically give it a topic and a few sentences, and it continues in the same vein, writing very natural-sounding prose. Half an hour later, I had an AI-generated logo, AI-generated soundscapy background music, an AI-generated fairytale, and an AI-narrated audio file. A day later, I have seven:
The Deep Dreams podcast.
Here’s how I did it:
