Ask anyone who regularly interviews people and they’ll tell you that few things are stranger than when the tables turn and you’re the one being interviewed. This is especially true when the person interviewing you has been dead for a year and a half. But here we are. Virtually Parkinson is a new podcast in which celebrities are interviewed by an AI model trained to speak and act like the late Michael Parkinson. The announcement of the podcast last year prompted a flurry of vaguely apocalyptic reactions. It was sacrilegious, some said, tantamount to digging up and reanimating a national treasure against his will. It was pointless, others said – of all the transformative ways to use AI, you’re blowing it on a podcast? Then there were folks like me, quietly nervous that Robot Parky was coming for our jobs.
On that last grumble, at least, I don’t need to worry yet. Primarily, this is because running Virtually Parkinson is a gargantuan operation. A normal interview traditionally only needs two participants. This, however, requires a small army. There’s the subject and interviewer, plus an engineer, a researcher and a clutch of producers holed up in a control room whose roles include making sure the AI sounds like Parkinson, that it asks the sort of questions he would ask, has an encyclopaedic knowledge of both the subject and Parkinson, doesn’t glitch, doesn’t repeat itself, doesn’t interrupt anyone in the middle of an answer and – most importantly – doesn’t overuse the word “fascinating”.
