TOAnyone who grew up watching Terminator or The Matrix knows that AI represents an existential threat to humanity. It was thought that as robots became more intelligent, they would inevitably replace us, either destroying us or mining us for resources. However, the age of AI is here and the truth is much worse than anything dystopian sci-fi. You see, AI has decided to give us more podcasts.
The world needs more podcasts like a horse kicks it. Everyone has a podcast. Gyles Brandreth has a podcast. Paul Giamatti has a podcast. Your four or five worst friends have podcasts and talk incessantly in an environment that is already cluttered with too much content. Now Google has just created the first AI podcasts and they are as fascinating as they are superfluous.
NotebookLM It’s basically ChatGPT but for audio. You upload a bunch of sources (documents, websites, YouTube videos) and analyze all the information, then create a baffling, human-sounding discussion about them. Two hosts, a man and a woman, chat about whatever topic you’ve given them in an amazingly podcasty way. His speech is full of ums and ahs. They hesitate, they talk among themselves. They like to talk like this all the time? It’s so imperfect that you can quickly forget that you’re listening to a couple of robots repeating Internet garbage.
NotebookLM bills itself as a study resource, which makes sense. If you want to summarize a lot of information in a way that keeps your attention, or if you want to absorb information while running or driving, then it’s great. Before long, people will be preparing for exams by popping their textbooks into something like NotebookLM and then putting in earplugs.
But if you want to make a podcast about any topic you like, you can do that too. Rivals starts on Disney+ this week and has already generated a lot of coverage, so I participated in some interviews on the show to see what the hosts came up with. He resulting five-minute podcast It was amazing.
In it, the hosts treated the show as if it were something they had simply fallen into organically. “Alright, get ready, because we’re diving into Rivals!” the hostess announces at the beginning, to a volley of pleasant murmurs from her male counterpart. They discuss the attitudes of the 1980s, its sexism and racism, and applaud the show’s willingness to confront them directly. It seems as if Rivals is a brilliant, pioneering piece of agenda-setting television.
The problem is that it’s actually not like that at all. It’s a fun camp with a lot of nudity. However, the sources I fed were interviews with actors from the show, who, understandably, are more interested in talking about real-world issues than what it was like to pull off their parts all the time. And that’s what the podcast is. A more accurate version would have included all available information (interviews, reviews, show notes, perhaps even the entire original novel) and created a 360-degree view of the series. Rather, it was an extremely confident presentation based on limited information. And in the end, isn’t that all a podcast?
After that I decided to make the kind of podcast that the world needs the least, which is two people talking about conspiracy theories. Admittedly, I could have done a better job here, finding flat Earth forums and Facebook groups made up of people who still blame Covid on 5G masts. Instead, I added a bunch of stuff from Wikipedia and Reddit, and was surprised by how measured the tone of the resulting audio was. It ended up being a pretty insightful 14-minute episode about things like confirmation bias and the human drive to understand the world. At one point, they begin listing prevalent conspiracy theories, but stop because, as the male host says, “my brain would literally explode.”
The existence of NotebookLM raises many questions. Will it make people too lazy to read their own research? Can you fully trust him? What will humanity do with the millions of recently unemployed podcasters wandering the Earth? But as a way of disseminating information for beginners in a naturalistic way, it’s kind of brilliant.