New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (digital file no. cph 3c27042)
Breakthroughs in how we interact with history can make for fun pedagogy. For example, consider how much more attention grabbing it could be to listen to voiced re-creations of some of our canon cases rather than just reading about them from a Con Law textbook. If you’ve ever wished you could be a fly on the wall for some of the most important Supreme Court arguments, some creative applications of AI may be just what you were looking for.
An approximation of the oral argument from Brown v. Board was recently compiled using a combination of voice actors and AI. The ABA Journal has coverage:
Oyez founder Jerry Goldman used AI to replicate the voices of the litigators and justices…Goldman worked on the “Brown Revisited” project with the Knight Lab at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and the podcast company Spooler.
To create the audio, Goldman used actors to read the argument transcript. He also found historical recordings of Marshall, Marshall’s chief opponent John W. Davis and the justices, according to the Wall Street Journal.
An AI company called Respeecher made the actors’ voices sound like the people on the historical recordings.
You can listen to some of the re-creation here:
Which cases would you like to see get respeeched? I’m partial to Regina v. Dudley and Stevens, but it’s a little harder to get audio of the participants since it was argued less than a decade after the invention of sound recording. But there’s still the low-tech solution… there must be dozens of voice actors who can manage a pretty good starving pirate impersonation out there.
Artificial Intelligence Used To Replicate Brown v. Board of Education Oral Arguments [ABA Journal]
Chris Williams became a social media manager and assistant editor for Above the Law in June 2021. Prior to joining the staff, he moonlighted as a minor Memelord™ in the Facebook group Law School Memes for Edgy T14s. He endured Missouri long enough to graduate from Washington University in St. Louis School of Law. He is a former boatbuilder who cannot swim, a published author on critical race theory, philosophy, and humor, and has a love for cycling that occasionally annoys his peers. You can reach him by email at cwilliams@abovethelaw.com and by tweet at @WritesForRent.
