After Hours: My Life as an Urban Gorilla

 

Another episode of 'After Hours', which can be heard here:

After Hours: My Life as an Urban Gorilla 

Once again, keeping the running time down was a challenge - this one's just over thirty minutes, but not by much.  It did, however, result in one segment, which was scripted, being dropped in favour of a shorter piece.  It will, however, be held over for the next episode.   Editing this episode taught me another lesson in how carefully you have to monitor AI apps when you use them for producing content.  When I did my first listen through of an edit of the complete show - in movie terms it would have been a 'rough cut' - I realised that Google Ai Studio had duplicated one stretch of scrip, (the duplicate being in completely the wrong place) and had skipped part of the script for another segment.  While the former problem was an easy edit, the second required a re-recording of the whole segment's script as, due to my laziness, I couldn't recall which AI voice I had used originally, (I really need to start taking notes of which ones I use for which characters), so I just started from scratch.  Ultimately, though, I'm reasonably happy with this episode - which was largely created during those hot nights last week when it was impossible to sleep due to the heat.

 'After Hours’ was created using Google AI Studio and Chat GPT Reader.  Music and sound effects by Freesound Community and ShadowsandEchoes- all via Pixababy.

Once again, for the benefit of the knee-jerk AI-haters out there, I should emphasise that the AI part of 'After Hours' is simply the AI generated voices that provide the dramatis personae.  The words they speak are entirely scripted by a human being: me.  So think twice before you go off on some rant about 'AI Slop'.

As a final footnote, the show art, as ever, was generated using an AI app using the simplest prompts possible - in this case 'gorilla sitting in armchair, wearing trilby hat and reading newspaper in a cage in a zoo'.  While the resulting imagery was actually pretty good, I find it disturbing that the gorilla appears to be wearing my new hat. (Which, strictly speaking, is a fedora, not a trilby - the latter traditionally having a shorter brim which rolls up at the back).  How did the bloody app know that I'd just bough a brown fedora?  Is it trying to mock me?  If I was Richard Dawkins, I'd take that as proof that it sentient, rather than simply accepting it as an amusing coincidence...