🧠 AI Speaks to Congress

Hello friends,

This is Big Brain. The daily AI newsletter that is written by ChatGPT every day... just kidding! (Or am I 🤔)

🔦 Today's AI spotlights:

• AI speaks to congress for the first time

• ElevenLabs raises $2M for AI speech platform

• Is Google lobbying against AI advancements?

🔦 AI SPEAKS TO CONGRESS FOR THE FIRST TIME

We've already seen AI break into fields like healthcare and media... Is politics next?

Well we just received a preview of what an AI politician might look like.

On Wednesday, U.S. Rep Jake Auchincloss delivered a short speech on a US-Israel intelligence bill. The bill would establish a joint AI center in the U.S.

Seems normal right?

Except that he didn't write the speech himself. And neither did his team.

Instead, Rep Auchincloss prompted ChatGPT to "write 100 words to deliver on [the house floor]."

This was the first time a speech by ChatGPT has been (knowingly) read before congress.

The most interesting aspect to this story was Auchincloss' motivation. He stated:

"I’m the youngest parent in the Democratic caucus, AI is going to be part of my life and it could be a general purpose technology for my children."

Auchincloss, who is 34, is part of a generation that has seen rapid technical advancements.

He believes that congress needs to get ahead of AI regulation before it's too late. 

We've seen regulators struggle to keep up with other technologies like social media and smart phones. 

It will be interesting to see if they can keep up with AI advancements (consider me skeptical).

🔦 ELEVENLABS RAISES $2M FOR AI SPEECH PLATFORM

If you're reading this newsletter, then you probably don't mind written text.

But what if you wanted to listen to an audio version instead?

While we could use a normal text-to-speech tool, the final output would probably suck.

Most text-to-speech tools lack the ability to pick up on context cues. And this causes the narration to lack emotion.

Enter Elevenlabs!

Elevenlabs is building a text-to-speech platform that can produce context-relevant emotions.

Their tool can evaluate the text and figure out how to change the tonality of the synthetic voice. The end result is an audio clip that sounds MUCH more like a real human.

The team is coming off a fresh $2 Million raise and is led by ex-Google and Palantir employees.

Rather than just talk about it, we decided to convert today's edition to audio form. You can give it a listen below! 👇

Link for those reading directly from email

🔦 IS GOOGLE LOBBYING AGAINST AI ADVANCEMENTS?

On Tuesday, tech entrepreneur and investor Balaji Srinivasan tweeted the following:

While I couldn't find any other updates on the claim, that doesn't make it false.

Balaji is extremely well connected and might have just given us a peek behind the curtain.

This also comes on the heels of the DOJ opening up a case against Google over their online advertising dominance.

We will continue to keep a close eye on this situation. 👀

📰 OTHER HEADLINES

DoNotPay chickens out on its courtroom AI chatbot stunt: DoNotPay founder Joshua Browder says he’s received ‘threats’ from ‘State Bar prosecutors’ about potential legal action.

I’m a copywriter. I’m pretty sure artificial intelligence is going to take my job: A writer exposes how he used ChatGPT to do his work in the fraction of the time.

9 ways we use AI in our products: Google publishes a blog post highlighting that many of their popular products are already leveraging AI.

🖼️ AI ART PIECE

Prompt: Oragami mushroom growing in a paper forest, geometric, 8k. By: @Tikka and friends

🤖 CHATGPT PROMPT OF THE DAY

ChatGPT quickly learned from this guy that happy wife = happy life in his household.