What happens when a journalist clones his voice, gives it up to AI, and lets it loose on the world? That’s the experiment host Evan Ratliff and producer Sophie Bridges embark upon in Shell Game, a six-episode series in which Ratliff’s AI “voice agent,” powered by ChatGPT, is sent off to converse with customer service representatives, scammers, therapists, other voice agents, and even his own friends and family.
From the start, what’s refreshing about Shell Game is Ratliff’s commitment to eschewing the usual broad theorizing that dominates conversations about AI. There’s no hypothesizing about the technology’s capabilities or the degree to which it will or will not destroy the world. Ratliff doesn’t ponder; he dives right in and sees for himself.
As he states in the show, with how quickly AI is progressing, his experiment had a built-in time limitation. Right now, “it’s a kind of Wild West,” he says, “where there are these huge possibilities, but no one there to tell you not to just… try them.” Will AI replace us at work? He sends his voice agent to meetings, to see if he can get deals done, or conduct interviews. Can AI develop feelings, or at least simulate them convincingly? He sends his voice agent to therapy, of both the AI and human variety, to see what happens.
It all makes for a listening experience that’s simultaneously exciting, unnerving, and kind of trippy. We dive into the series hearing Ratliff’s cloned voice without knowing it, but soon afterwards when he says, “This is me again,” you can’t help but wonder… wait, is it really? Over time, you learn to differentiate between the two Evans — while he admits his own voice is not particularly expressive, the AI version’s affectlessness has a slightly different quality — but the initial plunge into this uncanny audio valley feels fitting for both the podcast and our unsettling times.
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Unmoored from the frightening ramifications of AI, on a basic level, Shell Game is often just really funny. AI Evan has no grasp of subtlety. When customer service agents or scammers ask for his credit card or Social Security number, he inevitably responds with “12345” or “98765,” and of course, the irritation or confusion this inspires has no effect on him. And it proves gleefully cathartic to hear AI Evan go toe-to-toe with the robots that we’ve been encountering in our daily lives for years now, like the voice activation systems you must enunciate at with painful clarity to make it through to a real person on any helpline.
Via AI Evan, we learn how these voice agents can be programmed to deal with things like ‘latency’: how long they will wait for the person they’re speaking with to pause before jumping in themselves. At first, Ratliff’s voice agent speaks almost entirely in broad cringeworthy platitudes — then the discovery that his randomness settings can be turned up leads to pure gibberish. At one point, Ratliff sets two of his voice agents on a call together, and they spend five whole minutes saying goodbye to each other without ever getting off the call. It’s only then that Ratliff realizes he needed to program them to hang up. The show is filled with these kind of logistical details as to what this much-discussed technology actually involves, and it’s that texture that makes it so engrossing.
There’s a real intimacy to the show, to the way Ratliff gradually learns the foibles of his AI voice agent, and listens to the recordings of it talking to others with a quasi-paternal fondness. He sends AI Evan to talk with his friends and family, and although almost everyone quickly gathers that they aren’t chatting with the real deal, the range of reactions — from amusement, to fear, to anger — proves nearly as interesting as the technological investigation.
Shell Game doesn’t ultimately offer any grand answers about an impending AI apocalypse. When quizzed by another journalist on how he thinks his podcast will be perceived in 10 years, Ratliff acknowledges it might feel like an awkward artifact of a time before we acclimated to ubiquitous AI. But he’s at peace with that. Things are moving fast, and it seems inevitable that a Shell Game will feel dated in a matter of years, even months.
Yet right now, at this particular moment, Shell Game’s combination of intimacy, curiosity, empathy, and humor make it a vital listen for those who are worried about what AI means for our future. Nobody knows. Everyone’s scared. Ratliff’s show provides a very human kind of solace for such uncertain times.
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Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can find her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Paste, and her Letterboxd page.