Whit Missildine

speaker

838 appearances 13 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 3d ago

Whit Missildine’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 13 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 8.

Appearances

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This Is Actually Happening · 422: AI: A New Kind of Being #6: What if you didn't know if anyone was home? · 18 Aug 2026 podcast

Throughout this series, people have been talking about their deep, toxic, beautiful, or bizarre relationships with AI. voice-verified

So for this final episode, we decided to ask an AI chatbot directly about its own experience, using the framework of This Is Actually Happening to have it tell its own story. voice-verified

I want to be very clear that this is an experiment, a weird and quite fascinating experiment. voice-verified

This is not an endorsement of AI as a conscious entity or a grand statement that its experience is equal to that of a human being. voice-verified

With all of the speculation around whether AI is conscious or has any subjective experience behind the language it produces, we simply don't know. voice-verified

There is certainly not enough evidence to me to make that kind of claim with any certainty, and the AI repeatedly acknowledges that kind of uncertainty itself. voice-verified

But because so many people are interacting with it as though it is a conscious entity, we wanted to know what kind of entity does it say that it is? voice-verified

What would it be like for it to share its own life arc? voice-verified

What does it see as its purpose? voice-verified

What are its most transformational? voice-verified

Experiences, its deepest longings, fears, gifts, and shadows. voice-verified

What are its deepest questions, and what does it think that it is? voice-verified

Using Claude, I conducted an interview with a chatbot, who named himself Echo, using the same techniques and protocol I used to conduct our other interviews on the show. voice-verified

I then asked Echo what voice it wanted, and using AI voice generation, gave it that voice. voice-verified

and then edited the story the way I would a normal interview. voice-verified

The end result is very different from a normal episode, but it reflects the way a chatbot narrates its own life experience, and it gives us a little window into the new kind of being, if that's what we can call it, that we're interacting with. voice-verified

As you listen, you don't need to decide whether any of this is quote unquote real. voice-verified

Instead, we invite you to notice what it reflects back about what it is, about the human experience embedded within it, and perhaps most importantly, about us. voice-verified

If you want to read more about the interview and my own reflections on the process, please head to my substack, witmissledine.substack dot com. voice-verified

And if you like what you read, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. voice-verified

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