(Illustration courtesy of John Cuneo)

The Infinite Conversation is an AI-generated, neverending conversation between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek. Upon entering the website, the visitor is taken to a random point in the dialogue. New segments of the conversation are automatically added at various times and they can be generated at a faster speed than what it takes to listen to them. In theory, the conversation can continue until the end of time.

Built with freely available tools, this work was born out of a simple epiphany: that in 2022, voice cloning tools were becoming both too good and too easy to use. And that the world was (and will remain for a long time) utterly unprepared to deal with the potentially heinous consequences.

I am not proud of having created this without asking consent from Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek, but I think that was an important part of proving the point: unscrupulous players might have even fewer moral qualms while unleashing these powers upon far more nefarious uses. I wish Žižek took the jest in higher spirits than he did. But I have reasons to believe that at least Herzog approached it more philosophically. Then again, I also learned that Herzog does not hold Žižek very dear, so I’m sorry to have accidentally created a version of hell for his AI-avatar.

As of June 2023, over a million minutes of the Infinite Conversation have been listened to by many hundreds of thousands of people around the world, hopefully contributing to spark a conversation that at the very least, will raise awareness about Deepfakes. Read more about this project on Scientific American, Tank Magazine and Literary Hub.