I created a public service announcement based on something my course character would put out to the world. Here is the script:
This is a public service announcement. I repeat, this is a public service announcement. In approximately the next 5 years, our lord and savior Hwei will be bestowing upon this world, a new life form. To prepare for the coming of the new civilization, please remain calm and accept these new beings into your lives. In the meanwhile, please boycott the Aggressive Technologies corporation, as they are actively working towards the downfall of mankind. Again, please do not support their corruption, and welcome the new civilization with open arms.
I used a few basic tools we’ve used already in this course to create this audio. I first went to freesound.org to find an eerie robot backtrack that would aid in the atmosphere of this PSA. Then I did a quick search for a robot AI voice generator that would read out the script for me. Finally, I spliced it all together using Audacity and exported the file to upload into SoundCloud. All of these tasks were pretty easy to put together, since all of this work was practiced during the audio focused segment of DS106, which helped out a ton.
For context on the PSA, my course character Hwei sent out one of his robot creations to signal the coming of his new civilization of perfect automated beings. As he prefers to avoid being in the spotlight as of yet, he programmed one of his loyal servants to be his messenger. The script almost feels like the coming of Christ and Christianity, and the background noise gave it an eerie twist.
The denouncing of Aggressive Technologies and the reasoning behind it is a reflection of Hwei’s delusions and blind hatred towards the megacorporation. It’s quite ironic that he is calling out the megacorporation for corruption and the potential detriment to humanity, while he himself is actively working to replace humankind altogether. In essence, he believes that the robot civilization is the greater of the two evils, although he might not actually believe that what he is doing is evil at all. If this was a real PSA, I wonder how seriously it would be taken by the world. As more of Hwei’s robots assert their presence in the real world, the opinion of the world may just might change out of fear.