AI Voice Cloning Replaced The Hosts. And Worse.

AI voice cloning took over the one job the hosts can't quit: saying their own names. Then a humanoid robot clocked into a warehouse and refused to take a break. This week on They Might Be Self-Aware, Hunter Powers and Daniel Bishop hand the most human-shaped jobs to AI and watch it take them. They open by cloning their own voices with ElevenLabs (and a Mac text to speech engine) so they never have to say "Hunter Powers" or "Daniel Bishop" again, which is how the show ends up legally introduced as Hauntir Powders and Denial Bishub. Then comes the Figure humanoid robot. Its viral package-sorting clip ran as a multi-day livestream that blew past the promised eight hours, powered by 10,000 hours of video and motion capture, and the guys get into why a robot doing menial work in a human shape hits differently than a giant robot arm does. They pitch a Twitch Plays Pokemon version of it, revisit the leaking-oil robot art installation, and argue about embodied general intelligence (EGI) and whether a working android deserves a break. That pulls in the WIRED-reported study where overworked AI agents trained on human text start talking like Marxists, organizing and demanding structural reform. From there, a tangent on whether managing a swarm of agents is basically communism. Finally, Glendale Community College's commencement, where an AI name-reader (widely believed to be the Tassel system) mispronounced and skipped student names, and the question underneath it: if a machine reads every name perfectly, is graduation still a human ceremony? They Might Be Self-Aware is the AI podcast from The Blur, reported from inside the dissolving line between human and machine, not from a safe distance. CHAPTERS 0:00 Cold Open (Gary's Intro) 1:26 Voice Cloning The Hosts 2:49 Figure Humanoid Robot 6:39 Twitch Plays Pokemon 9:38 Embodied General Intelligence 11:31 AI Agents Turn Marxist 15:17 Agents As Communism 19:13 Graduation Name Reading 25:13 Commencement Speech Automation 30:08 Robot Named Gary REFERENCED THIS EPISODE The Figure humanoid robot package-sorting marathon (Ars Technica): https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/05/the-internet-cant-stop-watching-figure-ais-humanoid-robots-handling-packages/ Glendale Community College's AI name-reader graduation (The Verge): https://www.theverge.com/tech/933653/ai-graduation-commencement-glendale-community-college Overworked AI agents turning Marxist (WIRED): https://www.wired.com/story/overworked-ai-agents-turn-marxist-study/ LISTEN / WATCH EVERYWHERE 🎧 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/they-might-be-self-aware/id1730993297 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3EcvzkWDRFwnmIXoh7S4Mb?si=3d0f8920382649cc 🎧 Everywhere else + episode page: https://theblur.ai THE BLUR Follow: @TheBlurAI COMMENT If a perfect AI voice read your name flawlessly at graduation instead of a human stumbling through it, would you take the robot? Tell us why. You're listening to They Might Be Self-Aware, from The Blur. New episodes Monday and Thursday. #AI #HumanoidRobot #AIVoiceCloning