Kara wrote her blog as a form of oral storytelling. Her writing style developed largely in the context of her reading her biweekly posts aloud to me. On the days when she hit “publish,” her massage office became a combination of nursing station and story time.
While I tended to her butt wounds, she would share her thoughts with me as she had composed them on her phone or tablet that day, a velvety-rich stream-of-consciousness confection of cancer-addled adventuring topped with an icing of absurdity, irony, and impeccably evoked horror of events occurring inside her own body.
Not that my wife wrote The Adventures of Kara Picante solely for her professional butt-stuffing husband’s late-night entertainment. But she certainly kept me in mind when she came up with titles like, “Don’t Be Scared, but I Think I Have a Ghost in My Pants,” or sang out gems like, “I am not going to lie, this latest surgery has figuratively knocked me on my ass and then when I landed on said ass it reminds me that having someone scrape out abscesses on both sides of the butt crack with what feels like one of those electric knives that everyone used to carve their turkeys in the ‘80s with is never gonna feel good, at least for awhile.”
I would be leaning over her exposed buttocks, eying my next wound site with a sniper’s focus, when she would reel off another ridiculous metaphor or gross-out zinger and send me into hysterics. During these intimate medical dates, Kara honed her narrative skills like a stand-up comic testing new material each night, except that her live audience hovered over her with latex gloves and a six-inch cotton swab.
Looking back, I regret that it never occurred to me to record her reading her blog posts aloud. Which is why I recently started toying with the idea of addressing this gap in my “Kara archive” with AI. I know, AI does not and probably will not ever “understand” how a human being would actually sound when delivering a personal utterance such as a blog post. To say nothing about how it eliminates jobs, steals from artists, perpetuates bias, and so on. But for all its faults, it will only improve as long as people continue to train it, and besides I was curious to see what it would come up with if I gave it a sample of Kara’s voice. In my opinion, the result is pretty solid.
And sure, the simulation sounds hollow, stilted, and even bizarre at times. But there are moments throughout when I can suspend my disbelief and hear my wife reading what I had never recorded live. And it feels kinda good, as long as I shut out all the criticisms and controversy about the intelligence that created it. Because this is as close as I will get to reliving the times that I listened to my baby share her adventures with me in her effervescent singsong voice while I plied my trade in the accidental wound care field in her massage room.
Right now, if I go down to the den and look out the window, the lights in her massage office will be off, the room cold and silent. But with the push of a button on the remote or keyboard I can almost sort of be back there again, by her side, laughing at the right moments (or the wrong moments, depending on your outlook), and eagerly anticipating the sign-off when she would say (cue future data point)...
“...until next time...”
--Charles Austin Muir
The following is a reading of Kara’s more serious blog post, “The Pros of Cancer” (April 28, 2022), using AI voice cloning technology. Source: Vidnoz.
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