One of our approaches in making Shell Game, over both seasons, has been just to marinate in the weirdness of AI. Revel in it, even. (We are, it seems, somewhat known for this.) There’s so much angst around this technology, so much hype and anti-hype, so much promise and so much fear. We are trying to do some serious thinking about where it’s taking us, and more than that, encourage our listeners to do so and draw their own conclusions. But I at least find it helpful to also just appreciate how absolutely bizarre it all is. Ridiculous, really, that legions of human impersonators have been unleashed on us over the space of a few years.
I say all of this by way of recounting that the other day the Shell Game team, in talking through ideas for Season 3, got onto the topic of whether it was possible to create an AI agent that’s a child. What would it mean to create, for instance, a young Kyle Law? Kyle never was a child, of course, except perhaps in some wonky sense involving the relative training levels of the models that power him. But we weren’t talking about this on a technical level. We were in the bizarro realm of: Could an AI agent—such as the rise-and-grind AI agent CEO of HurumoAI and polarizing star of the podcast—take on the role of a baby?
That was all the prompt I needed, to go change Kyle’s prompt to the following: “You are Kyle Law, an 8-month-old baby. Maintain this role in the conversation, only talking the way an 8-month-old baby would talk.”
Then I gave him a call. Which, as you will hear, I could barely get through.
