Aanyone who grew up watching The Terminator or The Matrix knows that AI poses an existential threat to humanity. As the robots get smarter, it was thought, they will inevitably replace us, either by destroying us or exploiting us for resources. However, the age of AI is here now, and the truth is so much worse than anything from a dystopian sci-fi. You see, AI decided to give us more podcasts.
The world needs more podcasts like it needs to be kicked by a horse. Everyone has a podcast. Gyles Brandreth has a podcast. Paul Giamatti has a podcast. Your four or five worst friends all have podcasts, endlessly scrolling through an environment already cluttered with too much content. Now Google has just created the first AI podcasts, and they’re as fascinating as they are redundant.
NotebookLM is basically ChatGPT but for audio. You upload a bunch of sources—documents, websites, YouTube videos—and it parses all the information and then creates a confusingly human-sounding discussion about it. Two hosts, one male and one female, talk in an amazing podcast way about whatever topic you gave them. Their speech is full of ums and ahs. They hesitate, they talk over each other. They, like, kind of talk like this all the time? It’s so imperfect that you can quickly forget you’re listening to some robots repeating crap from the internet.
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 take in information on a run or a drive, then this is great. Before long, people will be preparing for exams by cramming their textbooks into something like NotebookLM and then plodding around with earplugs in them.
But if you want to make a podcast about any topic you like, it can do that too. Adversaries debuts this week on Disney+, and it’s already generated acres of coverage, so I pulled in a few interviews about the show to see what the hosts would come up with. The resulting five-minute podcast was strange
In it, the hosts treated the show as if it were something they had just fallen on organically. “Alright, get ready, because we’re diving into Rivals!” announces the female host at the start, with a burst of pleasant mumbling from her male counterpart. They discuss the attitudes of the 1980s, its sexism and racism, and praise the show’s willingness to confront them head-on. It makes it sound like Rivals is a brilliant, groundbreaking piece of television on the agenda.
The problem is that it’s not really like that at all. It’s camp fun with loads of nudity. However, the sources I brought in were interviews with actors from the show, who are understandably more keen to talk about real issues than what it was like to whip out their bits all the time. And so that’s what the podcast is. A more accurate version would have entered every available scrap of information – interviews, reviews, show notes, maybe even the complete source novel – and created a 360-degree view of the series. Instead, it was an extremely confident presentation based on limited information. And in the end, isn’t that what a podcast is all about anyway?
After that, I decided to make the type of podcast the world needs the least of, ie two people quivering over conspiracy theories. Admittedly, I could have done a better job here of finding flat-earth forums and Facebook groups made up of people who still blame Covid on 5G masts. Instead, I just threw in a bunch of stuff from Wikipedia and Reddit and surprised myself at how measured the tone of the resulting sound was. It ended up being a pretty obvious 14 minute episode about things like confirmation bias and the human impulse to understand the world. At one point, they start listing common 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 it be fully trusted? What will humanity do with all the millions of newly unemployed podcasters roaming the earth? But as a way of disseminating information for beginners in a naturalistic way, it’s kind of, like, brilliant.
