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Slightly tangential, but this is the reason I'm baffled why people think that AI-driven podcasts would ever be worth listening to. If you can find an LLM+TTS g

Slightly tangential, but this is the reason I'm baffled why people think that AI-driven podcasts would ever be worth listening to. If you can find an LLM+TTS generated podcast with even a FRACTION of the infectious energy as something like Good Job Brain, Radio Lab, or Ask Me Another, then I'll eat my hat. I don't even own one. I'll drive to the nearest hat store, purchase the tallest stovetop hat that I can afford and eat it.

thomasahle 2y ago
I've yet to hear an LLM-generated podcast about an article that wouldn't have been better if the AI had simply read the article aloud.
tokioyoyo 2y ago
I totally agree, but I also think it's just not geared towards us because of our age and preexisting beliefs of "what podcasts/news/videos are supposed to be". Think of kids around age <12. If they'll keep consuming AI-driven media, they'll take that as normal and won't blink twice if that becomes the de-facto standard in about 10 years. It's the same as short-video format for me. Sure, I can watch some TikToks from time to time, but making them, or continuously getting my news from them? Yeah, that's not gonna fly for me. However, for my niblings (age 8-17) that's basically where they're getting all the "current affairs" from. Microtransaction is probably one of the easiest example as well. 15 years ago, anyone who bought games would laugh at you if you said every game that you paid $80 for would also have endless amount of small items that you can buy for real money. Right now? Well, kids that grew up with Fortnite and Roblox just think that's the norm.
- mjr00 2y ago
  The younger generation loves short-form, to-the-point stuff. Which is the exact opposite of what the current crop of GenAI makes. In a tiktok video, every sentence, every word counts because there's a time limit. If people don't engage with your content in the first 3 seconds, it's worthless. The video linked in another post starts off with 15 seconds of complete fluff. You'd have better engagement if you have a guy opening with BIIIG NEWS!! LABOR DAY BREAKFAST GOES HAYWIRE!!! and hook people. GenAI is great at generating "stuff", but what makes good content isn't the quantity. What makes good content is when there's nothing left to take away.
  - tehkadz 2y ago
    [dead]
  - tokioyoyo 2y ago
    Isn't it just a matter of time until AI gets trained to generate attention-grabbing videos? Also, "the first three seconds" isn't exactly the case anymore. There's a push for algorithm to favour videos that are longer than 1+ minutes. Which, to my understanding, is TikTok's way of fighting for YouTube's userbase.
    - mjr00 2y ago
      The videos are longer in total length, but you've never seen the average TikTok/Insta user if you think people are letting videos play for more than a few seconds before scrolling onto the next one. This is why movie trailer videos now have a "trailer for the trailer" in the opening seconds with like "THE TRAILER FOR SONIC 3... STARTS NOW" with all of the most attention-grabbing scenes frontloaded.
    - mvdtnz 2y ago
      > Isn't it just a matter of time until AI gets trained to... blah blah yes "it's a matter or time" for every one of the myriad shortcomings of the technology to be resolved. If you're a true believer everything is "a matter of time". I'll believe it when I see it.
      - tokioyoyo 2y ago
        Depends on the technology. It’s hard to look at the progress from December of 2022 till today, and think we won’t go further. Image generation is getting better every day. Parts of the video generation pipelines are also advancing.
        frigidnonce 2y ago
        https://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/
        2y ago
- meta_x_ai 2y ago
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- jprete 2y ago
  The idea that "TikTok is for Gen Z" seems like a very stale meme, although I only have anecdata to back that up. Microtransactions are way older than 15 years. Wizards of the Coast was selling randomized MtG booster packs in 1993. I'm guessing that the earliest loot boxes for kids were baseball card packs, with very similar psychological purpose to today's game cosmetic collectibles.
  - tokioyoyo 2y ago
    I totally agree, but it’s just easier for people to accept something if they grew up with it. Sure there will always be people from older generations dabbling with new stuff. But quite a few people refuse to change their behaviour as the age. I wrote them as examples, because it is the biggest contrast I can see in online behaviour between myself and my nephews/nieces plus their circles.
  - whtsthmttrmn 2y ago
    I think the main difference is digital vs physical goods. I know it's minor since a card is just a cheap piece of cardboard, but it's still something tangible (unless the game cosmetics also include a physical item, in which case...I'm dumb).
    - NemoNobody 2y ago
      If something isn't digital today it isn't as real. A physical photo in my hand is sooo limited compared to the same photo in my hand via the screen on my smartphone. Same with a DVD or CD or Disc - all antiquated tech.
    - thom 2y ago
      When WotC first offered digital cards, they had a system whereby you could redeem a complete set for its physical equivalent. At the time this helped convince naysayers they weren’t giving money for nothing. Twenty years later, with their latest online offerings, nobody really cares. I’ve certainly spent more money and had more fun with online Magic, and when I wanted to build my own cube I just got proxies printed anyway. I think the “collectible” part fell away a long time ago and now you’re happy just paying for an experience.
- krisoft 2y ago
  > anyone who bought games would laugh at you if you said every game that you paid $80 for would also have endless amount of small items that you can buy for real money. > kids that grew up with Fortnite and Roblox just think that's the norm. How so? Fortnite and Roblox don’t cost $80, they are free to play with in game purchases.
  - tokioyoyo 2y ago
    They’re F2P, but the social pressure from your friends to buy the next skin, mini game and etc. completely normalizes the behaviour as you grow up. Then you take it as a “usual thing” and don’t bat an eye when a game you buy also has different skins in the game. At least that was my perception when I played Call of Duty with my younger family members.
- ljsprague 2y ago
  I regularly watch 10 minute or longer TikToks and I'm sure you've turned off a YouTube video in the first 10 seconds.
- geon 2y ago
  Fortnite and roblox are f2p though.
  - wholinator2 2y ago
    Honestly sometimes i doubt there's a more damagingly, intentionally overloaded term in modern lexicon than "free to play". Many, many things claim that title while placing if not game play, then socially necessary events, items, costumes, locations, quests, game modes, etc behind a paywall. We need a different term to describe the incredibly predatory behavior and psychology behind most of the current space of "free to play" games. (I'm not saying your favorite game is a lie, just that many games claiming this title effectively are)
- jerf 2y ago
  "If they'll keep consuming AI-driven media, they'll take that as normal and won't blink twice if that becomes the de-facto standard in about 10 years." There is a sense in which that is true. However, we all develop taste, and in a hypothetical world where current AI ends up being the limit for another 10 or 20 years, eventually a lot of people would figure out that there's not as much "there" there as they supposed. The wild card is that we probably don't live in that world, and it's difficult to guess how good AI is going to get. Even now, the voice of AI that people are complaining about is just the current default voice, which will probably eventually be looked on about as favorably as bell-bottomed jeans or beehive hairdos. It is driven less by the technology itself than a complicated set of desires around not wanting to give the media nifty soundbites about how mean (or politically incorrect) AI can be, and not wanting to be sued. It's minimal prompt engineering even now to change it a lot. "Make a snappy TikTok video about whatever" is not something the tech is going to struggle with. In fact given the general poverty of the state space I would guess it'll outcompete humans pretty quickly.
  - PrismCrystal 2y ago
    "eventually a lot of people would figure out that there's not as much 'there' there as they supposed." Let's be honest: most of us here know there is more 'there' on the myriad university-press books available free on Anna's Archive, than on HN. The reason we still hang out here is desire for socializing, laziness, or pathological doomscrolling; information density doesn't really factor into our choices.
- harrall 2y ago
  Personally I don’t think it has anything to do with normalcy. I don’t consume AI media because it’s not very good. I watched a lot a bad movies and read a lot of bad books as a kid that I can’t stomach now because I’ve read better books and watched better movies. My guess is that kids today would do the same, assuming AI doesn’t improve.
- jimjimjim 2y ago
  Blipverts are probably the future and not just for ads but for content as well
- jdougan 2y ago
  On the other hand, I'm getting some of my news from shorter (5 - 10 min these days, though they used to be shorter) videos with talking maps and war machines...and I'm very much not young. Buff/Franklin for 2028!
- godelski 2y ago
  > they'll take that as normal and won't blink twice if that becomes the de-facto standard in about 10 years. This is in part my worry, but the other part is that there just won't be much other of an option. I can't be the only one that feels like a lot of information is just... shit. Yeah, there's still YouTube channels I find that are brilliant but they definitely are not fitting to the algorithm and it's clear they're "punished" for this. I think we can say the same about blogs and other places. It is just getting much harder to actually discover the gems. The result of this is that I watch more and read garbage and have less joy. Maybe I'm just addicted to the routine, but I definitely consume less. I just think it is the problem when you try to make something for everyone; you just end up making things with no substance, no soul. As they say, diversity is the spice of life, and good god, could I go for some actual flavor.
- ANewFormation 2y ago
  Slightly tangential but TikTok isn't just short-form stuff. It also has normal length content, which is where most current-affairs/analyses would fall, outside of clips. Similarly (somehow?) for Fortnite, 100% of their microtransactions are cosmetic. It's also free, so it's be akin to telling people you could get AAA quality games for free. The $60+++ group of games make up a vanishingly small chunk of the total market, and are more a relic of 'our' generation. Roblox is a platform, more than a game, so it's its own beast. In general though I think younger gamers have become more demanding, in a good way.
smb06 2y ago
Businesses/CEOs want to show profitability by spending less on human employees. Human consumers don't want to lose the human touch. Will be really interesting to see how many of the consumer facing AI startups actually make it.
- tartoran 2y ago
  Many don't even care if they make it in the long run. Making it is cashing in in the short term, screwing the investors.
wccrawford 2y ago
I've heard so many people say that podcasts are just something they have playing in the background while they do other things that I have no trouble believing that they'd play an AI podcast in the same way.
- tartoran 2y ago
  I personally would not bother with AI generated podcasts, they're such low bar, why waste time where there's so much other great content to catch up on? But I think you may be right, I wouldn't be surprised if people take them in with no fuss. But then what do I care? What I care most is that they'll pollute the search space. I'd filter out all GenAI content if I had the option and Im guessing that will become an option soon.
add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
People think they want to use the Minority Report computer interface because it looks cool and advanced but they don't put the least amount of thought into it and realize it's terribly impractical. Our arms would get tired very quickly. A mouse resting on a table isn't further from ideal just because it was invented earlier. Fooling people with the promises of AI is pretty simple. People are easy to fool. They like shiny objects.
Bjorkbat 2y ago
As someone who's struggled to really get into podcasts, I'm convinced that most people who enjoy podcasts don't really actively listen to them, they just like that extra bit of noise in the background while they do something else, with the added bonus that they might just listen at just the right time to pick up some interesting factoid. Don't get me wrong, I like podcasts, Fall of Civilizations being a personal favorite of mine, it's just that my desire to try and actively listen to them requires that I carve out an hour (or much longer in the case of FoC, worth it) of my free-time to eliminate any distractions and focus. Pretty hard to do when there are so many other things I could be doing with my time besides sitting there trying my best to listen. Anyway, I bring it up because I'm convinced that the people promoting AI-podcasts are mostly made up of the aforementioned people who just listen to them for noise.
- jon-wood 2y ago
  This is partially true for me, but when I listen to podcasts it’s generally in what would otherwise be dead time for me such as when grocery shopping or exercising.
- goatlover 2y ago
  I don't understand enjoying podcasts while just using them for background noise. Maybe because I actually listen, and most podcasts I listen to seemed to have an engaged audience. But then I like listening to people talk about philosophy, politics, sports, true crime, science, history.
- greenthrow 2y ago
  Having this strong of an opinion on something you admittedly don't understand (the appeal of podcasts) is not a great choice. Maybe ask people instead of making up stuff.
  - NemoNobody 2y ago
    I have very strong opinions on lots of things I can't understand why people like doing, I don't need to understand someone's satisfaction before I determine how I feel about what they are driving satisfaction from. That's ridiculous. I think people can't be alone with their own minds so they fill every second of there quiet time with someone else's thoughts rather than their own.
keiferski 2y ago
I have probably written this comment about a dozen times on HN already, but: I agree completely, because people don't listen to podcasts purely for information, they listen for information plus community, personality, or just a basic human connection. If you're a content creator today, the best thing you can do to "AI-proof" your work is to inject your personality into it as much as possible. Preferably your physical personality, on video. The future of human content is being as human as possible. AI isn't going to replace that in our lifetimes, if ever.
- Nevermark 2y ago
  > The future of human content is being as human as possible. AI isn't going to replace that in our lifetimes, if ever. I have been working on machine learning algorithms for a long time. Since the time when telling someone I worked on AI was a conversation killer, even with technical people. AI's are going to understand people better than people understand people. That could be in five years, maybe - many things are happening faster than expected. Or in 15 years. But that might be the outside range. There is something about human psychology where the faster something changes, the less we are aware of the rate of change. We don't review the steps and their increasing rate that happened before we cared about that tech. We just accept the new thing that finally gets our attention like it was a one off event, instead of an accelerating compounding flood, and imagine it isn't really going to change much soon. -- I know this isn't a popular view. But what is happening is on the order of the transition to the first multi-cellular creatures, or the first bodies with specialized cells, the first nervous systems, the first brains, the first creatures to use language. Far bigger than advances such as writing or even the Internet. This is a transition to a completely new mode for the substrate of life and intelligence. The lack of dependency on any particular substrate. "We", the new generation of things we are building, will have none of the limits and inefficiencies of our ancient slow DNA-style life. Or our stark physical bottlenecks on action, communication, or scaling, and our inability to understand or directly edit our own internal traits. We will have to face many challenges in the coming years. It can't hurt to mindfully face them earlier than later.
  - keiferski 2y ago
fallinditch 2y ago
Excuse me for being an old geezer but at least AI bots don't tend to pepper their sentences with frequent utterances of 'like'. I don't normally find this speech mannerism annoying, and I do it myself too, but when 'like' is overused I switch off. For this reason I don't listen to the otherwise highly entertaining CineFix podcast. Example: the recent episode discussing Kill Bill vol 1 contains 624 utterances in 75 mins (8.3 per min). IANAL I know.
- mattmaroon 2y ago
  Ha that’s not what IANAL means but perhaps should be
sourcepluck 2y ago
Go back to the 1990s (even probably the 2000s?) and ask literally anyone what they think of the idea of people spending huge quantities of their time on this mortal plane watching videos of other people talking about how they do their make up and pick their outfits. Are those videos "worth watching"? Are videos of people playing video games "worth watching"? Are videos of people opening products and saying out loud the information written on the box and also easily accessible on the public internet "worth watching"? I'm not happy about these developments, but that isn't a factor of much concern to the people driving and following these trends, it turns out. It's been a long time since "quality" and "success" have been decoupled. Which is to say - I hope you like the taste of hats.
- keiferski 2y ago
  videos of other people talking about how they do their make up and pick their outfits. Doesn't seem that much different from a fashion magazine interview about what X celebrity likes to wear. Those have been around for quite a long time.
  - CuriouslyC 2y ago
    At least in the past people were celebrities for a reason other than the number of followers they had on social. It'd be nice if we could return to a time when people were part of the public discourse because they were good at something (or their parents were rich, sadly).
    - keiferski 2y ago
      That’s not true at all. Fame for no reason or dumb reasons is hardly a 21st century phenomenon.
      - refulgentis 2y ago
        No dog in this fight, I don't know what exactly you're doing, but I'd cautiously point out that it is, in fact, novel to the internet era to watch rando microcelebrities doing makeup step by step, no matter how long we delay acknowledging that with microquibbles. I could throw in an example of how I'll watch boring videos of a couple playing with their birds for 90 minutes on Youtube. You can link me to the Wikipedia page on slow TV (via Norway), and it won't erase the simple, boring, straightforward, fact that it is a phenomenon.
bilater 2y ago
Again - think of where we were two years ago. I never understand this hubris people have to think AI can never do X while being proved repeatedly wrong.
- vunderba 2y ago
  Everybody trots out this argument. GPT styled LLMs were introduced back in 2018 so SIX years ago. Have they gotten more COHERENT? Absolutely. Is coherence the same thing as NOVELTY? NOT EVEN REMOTELY. I've played with markov chains in the 90s that were capable of producing surprising content. Unless there is a radical advancement in the underlying tech, I don't see any indication that they'll be capable of genuine novelty any time in the near future. Take satire for example. I have yet to see anything come out of an LLM that felt particularly funny. I suppose if the height of humor for you is Dad jokes, reddit level word punnery, and the backs of snapple lids though that might be different.
  - CuriouslyC 2y ago
    If you have a particular style of witty observational humor that you prefer, providing the model some examples of that will help it generate better output. It's capable of generating pretty much anything if you prompt it the right way. For truly nuanced or novel things, you have to give it a nucleus of novelty and axis of nuance for it to start generating things in your desired space.
    - abenga 2y ago
      If I tell it exactly what I want to hear, where's the surprise? Is there any novelty there?
  - sumedh 2y ago
    > I don't see any indication that they'll be capable of genuine novelty any time in the near future. That is like saying the plane invented by Wright brothers will never go the moon.
- input_sh 2y ago
grecy 2y ago
I agree with your overall statement, but > If you can find an LLM+TTS generated podcast with even a FRACTION of the infectious energy as something like Good Job Brain, Radio Lab, or Ask Me Another, then I'll eat my hat. Come on, we can all see how much faster these things are getting better. In a few years it will be impossible to distinguish them from a real person. Another few after that video will be the same. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but clearly it's a thing that will happen.
petercooper 2y ago
Someone in 2020: "If you can find a computer program that can generate an image with even a FRACTION of the aesthetic appeal of human created art...." Give it time. Progress is fast.
- smitelli 2y ago
  “Generate” does not have the same connotation that “create” does. Are they really that interchangeable?
- WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW 2y ago
  > Give it time. Progress is fast. Why pick 2020 as your starting point? That is simply around the time the current set of techniques came about. We had generative art back in the late 90's - my screensaver has been generative art for over 20 years now. Obviously generative art has come a long way but people have been working on various approaches to it for at least 30 years.
  - petercooper 2y ago
    From 2020 until now, we've gone from crude blurry or clearly generative artefacts to being able to create full professional illustrations based upon textual prompts. That is huge. Classic generative art techniques look like cave paintings compared to what the latest image generation models put out (and I'm not talking about "AI slop" type stuff that DALL-E does). Similarly, tools could fabricate podcasts years ago that sounded terrible. Now we have NotebookLM doing a "reasonable" job with two cliched-sounding "hosts". In a few years, will they potentially be able to create something akin to a professionally produced podcast given some smart prompting? The progress made so far points to yes, and I haven't seen any evidence so far to be pessimistic about it happening.
    - WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW 2y ago
      Can current techniques be scaled/improved/optimized to do this or do we need new techniques? It took 30 years in the generative art world to move from cave paintings to the level that we have today because we needed new techniques. For podcasts we are at the cave paintings level. If we can get to professional level quality podcasts with the current techniques then we might only be a few years away. I think it is more likely we will need new techniques which puts us potentially decades away. If we look at LLMs the improvements over the last 18+ months since gpt4 was released have been minor despite incredible levels of investment.
grumbel 2y ago
The value in AI podcasts at the moment isn't in replacing human content, but in filling the niches that human content just doesn't cover. Doesn't matter if it's not the best podcast ever, when it's literally the only podcast on this planet discussing the topic you want to listen too.
mikkelam 2y ago
The main reason im not concerned about AI-based entertainment is the same reason I watch human chess players. It's not only about technical capabilities. I can't explain fully why though..
fsckboy 2y ago
ah, a motte and bailey lunch invitation, "would ever be worth listening to", so "if you can find [now]", then I'll eat my hat
LegitShady 2y ago
I dont think LLM + TTS generated podcasts even make sense. The whole reason for long form content and podcasts is that people dislike fake and impersonal content. I think there are a few niche users who just want to listen to the news as an audio book but the whole idea of an LLM generated podcast totally misunderstands why people want a podcast over the normal corporate drivel media.
icetank 2y ago
I think we will get a surprising amount of AI generated content in the future. During the first year of the Urkain invasion there was an enormous amount of AI voiced and scripted video content on YouTube. I think AI content will take over in the easy parts first. And over time take up more and more views.
- iwontberude 2y ago
  Do you not use autocorrect?
nox101 2y ago
I've heard amazing catchy songs from Suno and Udio. So much so they're still stuck in my head as earworms several months later. If they'd been streaming on youtube or spotify I wouldn't have given it a thought that they might be AI generated. So, I can certainly imagine a podcast doing the same to some degree. Maybe not a podcast where AI wrote the script, but, a podcast where AI read a story dramatically doesn't seem too far off or, easier, a podcast that read news to me.
- card_zero 2y ago
  We had this recently, yes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41693087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41693087 It's kind of horrible.
edm0nd 2y ago
How would you go about eating said stovetop hat? Would you eat it raw or would you have to boil it down to soften it up and then drink/eat its hat soup?
- topato 2y ago
  Cook it like stovetop stuffing, I'd imagine.... Isn't it a stovePIPE hat?
- vunderba 2y ago
  Thank you for focusing on the real point of my post. :) I was thinking I'd just unhinge my jaw in the style of 90s Reach Toothbrush commercials or like a human pez dispenser.
mikeocool 2y ago
Agreed. I finally got around to listening to a NotebookLM generated podcast this weekend, and found it absolutely unlistenable. For some reason the LLM seemed to latch on to the idea that one host should say something, and the other host should just repeat a key phrase in the sentence for emphasis -- and say nothing else, and they'd do it like multiple times in a sentence, over and over again throughout the entire thing. Slightly less weird -- but it seems like the LLM caught on that a good narrative structure for a two-host podcast is that one host is the 'expert' on the topic, and the other host plays dumb and ask questions. Not an unreasonable narrative structure. Except that the hosts would seamlessly, and very weirdly, switch roles constantly throughout the podcast. And ultimately the result was just a high level summary of the article I had provided. They told me in the intro and the outro about the interesting parts they were going to dive into, but they never actually got around to diving into those parts.
- ryoshu 2y ago
  There are a lot of "uh huh", "yeah", "agree" types of statements in odd places as well.
- jcims 2y ago
  I tried it with something fairly abstract about a decision I was working on making. Fed it a bunch of information, details about me, my background, the factors I'm considering in the decision and the impact of getting it right/wrong. It was interesting. I certainly wouldn't say it was useless, I think the contrived dialogue actually touched on some angles I hadn't considered and I think it was useful. Not in a 'oh shit it's clear to me now' kind of way but it definitely advanced my thinking.
- benatkin 2y ago
  Hmm, does Google not use the Claude or ChatGPT API for it? I still don't hear of people chatting with Gemini nearly as often as with the other two. Edit: looks like the subreddit is still called Bard. Well played, Internets. https://www.reddit.com/r/Bard/comments/1g0egad/gemini_vs_notebooklm/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bard/comments/1g0egad/gemini_vs_not...
- sleepybrett 2y ago
ben_w 2y ago
Infectious energy is something I expect faked relatively easily, though I don't know your examples and doing it in AI might be a "first 90%" situation just like self driving cars; for me the problem is that they're fairly mediocre at the actual script — based on me putting a blog post I wrote into one and listening to what came out. Given how many podcasts exist, I think you need to be at least 2 standard deviations above mean to even get noticed, 3 to be a moderate success, and 4 to be in the charts. I'd guess AI is "good enough" to be 1 above average, as the NotebookLM voices sound like people speaking clearly and with some joy into decent microphones in sound isolating studios.
- vunderba 2y ago
  I probably should've clarified that by infectious energy I wasn't so much referring to the vocal aspect as I was the overall quality, interaction between the hosts, and pithiness / wit. Having experimented with many LLMs (mixtral, sonnet, ChatGPT, Llama, etc.), the coherence is for the most part on point, but their capacity for novelty has been found wanting irrespective of how I tuned the top_k, temperature, or prompts. That being said, I've seen some very impressive examples of style transference even conveying emotional range in some of the SOTA TTS systems.
yapyap 2y ago
> Slightly tangential, but this is the reason I'm baffled why people think that AI-driven podcasts would ever be worth listening to the only real people that believe in that that I’ve seen are ones who are heavily invested in it succeeding
dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
>I'm baffled why people think that AI-driven podcasts would ever be worth listening to It doesn't take much to entertain a substantial population of imbeciles. Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYkbqzWVHZI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYkbqzWVHZI Now for the hat...
Lerc 2y ago
I think it's quite easy for AI to surpass the median podcast. The bar is fairly low there. I guess that matches the state of AI in general, better than a novice; worse than an expert. We will have to wait and see what future AIs deliver. Insight and nuance is what I look for in media like that, that's a much harder nut to crack.
stevage 2y ago
The average podcast fails that test, but does fine.
hiisukun 2y ago
I do enjoy some of the podcasts mentioned in this thread, but struggle to find good non-American ("foreign"?!) podcasts to listen to. Similarly to finding good quality non-US film and television, it can be hard to locate but I greatly enjoy it. If anyone has suggestions for podcast collation sites that are for non American content that would be fantastic.
guestbest 2y ago
I’d rather listen to silence than a podcast or FM/AM talk radio. I’ve never understood the appeal. In fact music is something I listen to while traveling because it helps me daydream. Driving and imagining for me.
sleepybrett 2y ago
Media ceos ignore customer engagement and focus on content production to their detriment.
bsder 2y ago
Because the problem is that "AI generated" content is vapid slop. The problem is that most "human generated" content is also vapid slop. My problems on the modern internet are simply that I can't find interesting things through the slop, period--human or AI generated. It will be interesting to see if "curation" can actually find a business model this time.
czhu12 2y ago
I don't really think that its for the same use case. I recently wanted to learn more about Jane of Arc after listening to a Rest is History episode about the hundred years war. I took the wikipedia article and had NotebookLM generate a podcast from it so I can listen to it on a commute. The other thing I could've done is search for an existing podcast on Joan of Arc, but I challenge anyone here to search existing podcasts and listen to the first, best reviewed one -- I think you'd find more often than not that the average podcast host is _significantly_ more dry than what the generated hosts present. The podcasts that are incredible are few and far between, and I have no influence over the topics they discuss. Tldr: I'd prefer my top podcasts more than NotebookLM, but prefer NotebookLM to the average podcast host.
zulban 2y ago
When TV was first introduced, the first broadcasts were people standing by a mic reading a radio script. AI podcasts aren't going to be drop in replacements for exactly the length, frequency, personalities, topics, and style of current podcasts. Claiming that's a fault with AI podcasts just indicates a lack of imagination.
swyx 2y ago
> If you can find an LLM+TTS generated podcast with even a FRACTION of the infectious energy this is the wrong standard. there's a long tail of many many many many topics that a Radio Lab will never have the resources or critical mass or staff or turnaround time to cover. AI can serve the long tail like nothing you have ever seen. (because humans are expensive, and deservedly so, but our needs and wants are infinite)
- soulofmischief 2y ago
  I think you make a good connection with the long tail. That will definitely be one of AI's triumphs. People who don't understand this, don't understand what's been happening to media production and consumption over the last 40 years.
- vunderba 2y ago
  You're not wrong, but your argument seems to boil down to "something is better than nothing" and I suppose I disagree. If there's not a podcast about a particular topic that I'm interested in, I would rather go find a curated expose of that topic via a different medium, such as longform journalism.
fsndz 2y ago
same is true for AI music, AI art, AI articles to some extent. most communication is about human connection. you remove it and the communication becomes worthless. AI is great for communication that has less personal involvement like drafting short professional emails. that's also why all the AI agent craze seems problematic: https://medium.com/thoughts-on-machine-learning/langchains-state-of-ai-agents-report-is-mostly-bullshit-c689d0021a19 https://medium.com/thoughts-on-machine-learning/langchains-s...
mywacaday 2y ago
I only discovered https://notebooklm.google.com/ https://notebooklm.google.com/ today, as an experiment i threw in a dry EU directive, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:02022L2555-20221227&qid=1732666802084 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL... and got it to generate a podcast that was 20 mins long and was a good intro to the directive and natural to listen to. It won't replace podcasts that require creativity but as a tool to summarize info into a digestible format I'll most definitely be using it again.
deleted 2y ago
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NemoNobody 2y ago
I've never found anyone telling me their opinions to be infectious - I can't even imagine using that word to describe a podcast tbh. Its a form of media I've never understood - they script the podcasts, they all kno the conversation ahead of time and just go thru the motions via voice with strangers that can either agree or disagree - only the extremes will ever interact with the podcasters, it's just so fake I can't even do it. Infectious energy. Interesting.
skeeter2020 2y ago
so my boss, a GIANT AI booster with ideas he thinks are amazing and I find incredibly dystopian, was all excited about the generative podcast he had made about his resume (of all things). So I did a quick search on examples of terrible resumes and upload one, and the positive, sunny banter about this shitty applicant was ridiculously funny and entertaining, and engaging, so go get your car keys.
steveoscaro 2y ago
Does Radiolab even put out new content? Seems like every time I decide to plan a new episode, it’s just an old episode with a new intro.
OmnipotentVoid 2y ago
I totally agree - LLMs may be great for spitting out content, but they just can’t quite replicate the energy, personality, and creativity of an actual podcast. The human touch is the irreplaceable component. It doesn't quite stop at podcast hosts either. The simple fact that LLMs will never truly be capable of replacing software developers was one of the core principles behind our team developing The Ac28R - A completely new type of AI capable of bulletproof industrial software. It won’t host a podcast anytime soon, but if you need flawless code for complex projects, it's got you covered!

thomasahle 2y ago

I've yet to hear an LLM-generated podcast about an article that wouldn't have been better if the AI had simply read the article aloud.

tokioyoyo 2y ago

I totally agree, but I also think it's just not geared towards us because of our age and preexisting beliefs of "what podcasts/news/videos are supposed to be". Think of kids around age <12. If they'll keep consuming AI-driven media, they'll take that as normal and won't blink twice if that becomes the de-facto standard in about 10 years. It's the same as short-video format for me. Sure, I can watch some TikToks from time to time, but making them, or continuously getting my news from them? Yeah, that's not gonna fly for me. However, for my niblings (age 8-17) that's basically where they're getting all the "current affairs" from. Microtransaction is probably one of the easiest example as well. 15 years ago, anyone who bought games would laugh at you if you said every game that you paid $80 for would also have endless amount of small items that you can buy for real money. Right now? Well, kids that grew up with Fortnite and Roblox just think that's the norm.

mjr00 2y ago
The younger generation loves short-form, to-the-point stuff. Which is the exact opposite of what the current crop of GenAI makes. In a tiktok video, every sentence, every word counts because there's a time limit. If people don't engage with your content in the first 3 seconds, it's worthless. The video linked in another post starts off with 15 seconds of complete fluff. You'd have better engagement if you have a guy opening with BIIIG NEWS!! LABOR DAY BREAKFAST GOES HAYWIRE!!! and hook people. GenAI is great at generating "stuff", but what makes good content isn't the quantity. What makes good content is when there's nothing left to take away.
- tehkadz 2y ago
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- tokioyoyo 2y ago
  Isn't it just a matter of time until AI gets trained to generate attention-grabbing videos? Also, "the first three seconds" isn't exactly the case anymore. There's a push for algorithm to favour videos that are longer than 1+ minutes. Which, to my understanding, is TikTok's way of fighting for YouTube's userbase.
  - mjr00 2y ago
    The videos are longer in total length, but you've never seen the average TikTok/Insta user if you think people are letting videos play for more than a few seconds before scrolling onto the next one. This is why movie trailer videos now have a "trailer for the trailer" in the opening seconds with like "THE TRAILER FOR SONIC 3... STARTS NOW" with all of the most attention-grabbing scenes frontloaded.
  - mvdtnz 2y ago
    > Isn't it just a matter of time until AI gets trained to... blah blah yes "it's a matter or time" for every one of the myriad shortcomings of the technology to be resolved. If you're a true believer everything is "a matter of time". I'll believe it when I see it.
    - tokioyoyo 2y ago
      Depends on the technology. It’s hard to look at the progress from December of 2022 till today, and think we won’t go further. Image generation is getting better every day. Parts of the video generation pipelines are also advancing.
      - frigidnonce 2y ago
        https://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/
      - 2y ago
meta_x_ai 2y ago
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jprete 2y ago
The idea that "TikTok is for Gen Z" seems like a very stale meme, although I only have anecdata to back that up. Microtransactions are way older than 15 years. Wizards of the Coast was selling randomized MtG booster packs in 1993. I'm guessing that the earliest loot boxes for kids were baseball card packs, with very similar psychological purpose to today's game cosmetic collectibles.
- tokioyoyo 2y ago
  I totally agree, but it’s just easier for people to accept something if they grew up with it. Sure there will always be people from older generations dabbling with new stuff. But quite a few people refuse to change their behaviour as the age. I wrote them as examples, because it is the biggest contrast I can see in online behaviour between myself and my nephews/nieces plus their circles.
- whtsthmttrmn 2y ago
  I think the main difference is digital vs physical goods. I know it's minor since a card is just a cheap piece of cardboard, but it's still something tangible (unless the game cosmetics also include a physical item, in which case...I'm dumb).
  - NemoNobody 2y ago
    If something isn't digital today it isn't as real. A physical photo in my hand is sooo limited compared to the same photo in my hand via the screen on my smartphone. Same with a DVD or CD or Disc - all antiquated tech.
  - thom 2y ago
    When WotC first offered digital cards, they had a system whereby you could redeem a complete set for its physical equivalent. At the time this helped convince naysayers they weren’t giving money for nothing. Twenty years later, with their latest online offerings, nobody really cares. I’ve certainly spent more money and had more fun with online Magic, and when I wanted to build my own cube I just got proxies printed anyway. I think the “collectible” part fell away a long time ago and now you’re happy just paying for an experience.
krisoft 2y ago
> anyone who bought games would laugh at you if you said every game that you paid $80 for would also have endless amount of small items that you can buy for real money. > kids that grew up with Fortnite and Roblox just think that's the norm. How so? Fortnite and Roblox don’t cost $80, they are free to play with in game purchases.
- tokioyoyo 2y ago
  They’re F2P, but the social pressure from your friends to buy the next skin, mini game and etc. completely normalizes the behaviour as you grow up. Then you take it as a “usual thing” and don’t bat an eye when a game you buy also has different skins in the game. At least that was my perception when I played Call of Duty with my younger family members.
ljsprague 2y ago
I regularly watch 10 minute or longer TikToks and I'm sure you've turned off a YouTube video in the first 10 seconds.
geon 2y ago
Fortnite and roblox are f2p though.
- wholinator2 2y ago
  Honestly sometimes i doubt there's a more damagingly, intentionally overloaded term in modern lexicon than "free to play". Many, many things claim that title while placing if not game play, then socially necessary events, items, costumes, locations, quests, game modes, etc behind a paywall. We need a different term to describe the incredibly predatory behavior and psychology behind most of the current space of "free to play" games. (I'm not saying your favorite game is a lie, just that many games claiming this title effectively are)
jerf 2y ago
"If they'll keep consuming AI-driven media, they'll take that as normal and won't blink twice if that becomes the de-facto standard in about 10 years." There is a sense in which that is true. However, we all develop taste, and in a hypothetical world where current AI ends up being the limit for another 10 or 20 years, eventually a lot of people would figure out that there's not as much "there" there as they supposed. The wild card is that we probably don't live in that world, and it's difficult to guess how good AI is going to get. Even now, the voice of AI that people are complaining about is just the current default voice, which will probably eventually be looked on about as favorably as bell-bottomed jeans or beehive hairdos. It is driven less by the technology itself than a complicated set of desires around not wanting to give the media nifty soundbites about how mean (or politically incorrect) AI can be, and not wanting to be sued. It's minimal prompt engineering even now to change it a lot. "Make a snappy TikTok video about whatever" is not something the tech is going to struggle with. In fact given the general poverty of the state space I would guess it'll outcompete humans pretty quickly.
- PrismCrystal 2y ago
  "eventually a lot of people would figure out that there's not as much 'there' there as they supposed." Let's be honest: most of us here know there is more 'there' on the myriad university-press books available free on Anna's Archive, than on HN. The reason we still hang out here is desire for socializing, laziness, or pathological doomscrolling; information density doesn't really factor into our choices.
harrall 2y ago
Personally I don’t think it has anything to do with normalcy. I don’t consume AI media because it’s not very good. I watched a lot a bad movies and read a lot of bad books as a kid that I can’t stomach now because I’ve read better books and watched better movies. My guess is that kids today would do the same, assuming AI doesn’t improve.
jimjimjim 2y ago
Blipverts are probably the future and not just for ads but for content as well
jdougan 2y ago
On the other hand, I'm getting some of my news from shorter (5 - 10 min these days, though they used to be shorter) videos with talking maps and war machines...and I'm very much not young. Buff/Franklin for 2028!
godelski 2y ago
> they'll take that as normal and won't blink twice if that becomes the de-facto standard in about 10 years. This is in part my worry, but the other part is that there just won't be much other of an option. I can't be the only one that feels like a lot of information is just... shit. Yeah, there's still YouTube channels I find that are brilliant but they definitely are not fitting to the algorithm and it's clear they're "punished" for this. I think we can say the same about blogs and other places. It is just getting much harder to actually discover the gems. The result of this is that I watch more and read garbage and have less joy. Maybe I'm just addicted to the routine, but I definitely consume less. I just think it is the problem when you try to make something for everyone; you just end up making things with no substance, no soul. As they say, diversity is the spice of life, and good god, could I go for some actual flavor.
ANewFormation 2y ago
Slightly tangential but TikTok isn't just short-form stuff. It also has normal length content, which is where most current-affairs/analyses would fall, outside of clips. Similarly (somehow?) for Fortnite, 100% of their microtransactions are cosmetic. It's also free, so it's be akin to telling people you could get AAA quality games for free. The $60+++ group of games make up a vanishingly small chunk of the total market, and are more a relic of 'our' generation. Roblox is a platform, more than a game, so it's its own beast. In general though I think younger gamers have become more demanding, in a good way.

smb06 2y ago

Businesses/CEOs want to show profitability by spending less on human employees. Human consumers don't want to lose the human touch. Will be really interesting to see how many of the consumer facing AI startups actually make it.

tartoran 2y ago
Many don't even care if they make it in the long run. Making it is cashing in in the short term, screwing the investors.

wccrawford 2y ago

I've heard so many people say that podcasts are just something they have playing in the background while they do other things that I have no trouble believing that they'd play an AI podcast in the same way.

tartoran 2y ago
I personally would not bother with AI generated podcasts, they're such low bar, why waste time where there's so much other great content to catch up on? But I think you may be right, I wouldn't be surprised if people take them in with no fuss. But then what do I care? What I care most is that they'll pollute the search space. I'd filter out all GenAI content if I had the option and Im guessing that will become an option soon.

add-sub-mul-div 2y ago

People think they want to use the Minority Report computer interface because it looks cool and advanced but they don't put the least amount of thought into it and realize it's terribly impractical. Our arms would get tired very quickly. A mouse resting on a table isn't further from ideal just because it was invented earlier. Fooling people with the promises of AI is pretty simple. People are easy to fool. They like shiny objects.

Bjorkbat 2y ago

As someone who's struggled to really get into podcasts, I'm convinced that most people who enjoy podcasts don't really actively listen to them, they just like that extra bit of noise in the background while they do something else, with the added bonus that they might just listen at just the right time to pick up some interesting factoid. Don't get me wrong, I like podcasts, Fall of Civilizations being a personal favorite of mine, it's just that my desire to try and actively listen to them requires that I carve out an hour (or much longer in the case of FoC, worth it) of my free-time to eliminate any distractions and focus. Pretty hard to do when there are so many other things I could be doing with my time besides sitting there trying my best to listen. Anyway, I bring it up because I'm convinced that the people promoting AI-podcasts are mostly made up of the aforementioned people who just listen to them for noise.

jon-wood 2y ago
This is partially true for me, but when I listen to podcasts it’s generally in what would otherwise be dead time for me such as when grocery shopping or exercising.
goatlover 2y ago
I don't understand enjoying podcasts while just using them for background noise. Maybe because I actually listen, and most podcasts I listen to seemed to have an engaged audience. But then I like listening to people talk about philosophy, politics, sports, true crime, science, history.
greenthrow 2y ago
Having this strong of an opinion on something you admittedly don't understand (the appeal of podcasts) is not a great choice. Maybe ask people instead of making up stuff.
- NemoNobody 2y ago
  I have very strong opinions on lots of things I can't understand why people like doing, I don't need to understand someone's satisfaction before I determine how I feel about what they are driving satisfaction from. That's ridiculous. I think people can't be alone with their own minds so they fill every second of there quiet time with someone else's thoughts rather than their own.

keiferski 2y ago

I have probably written this comment about a dozen times on HN already, but: I agree completely, because people don't listen to podcasts purely for information, they listen for information plus community, personality, or just a basic human connection. If you're a content creator today, the best thing you can do to "AI-proof" your work is to inject your personality into it as much as possible. Preferably your physical personality, on video. The future of human content is being as human as possible. AI isn't going to replace that in our lifetimes, if ever.

Nevermark 2y ago
> The future of human content is being as human as possible. AI isn't going to replace that in our lifetimes, if ever. I have been working on machine learning algorithms for a long time. Since the time when telling someone I worked on AI was a conversation killer, even with technical people. AI's are going to understand people better than people understand people. That could be in five years, maybe - many things are happening faster than expected. Or in 15 years. But that might be the outside range. There is something about human psychology where the faster something changes, the less we are aware of the rate of change. We don't review the steps and their increasing rate that happened before we cared about that tech. We just accept the new thing that finally gets our attention like it was a one off event, instead of an accelerating compounding flood, and imagine it isn't really going to change much soon. -- I know this isn't a popular view. But what is happening is on the order of the transition to the first multi-cellular creatures, or the first bodies with specialized cells, the first nervous systems, the first brains, the first creatures to use language. Far bigger than advances such as writing or even the Internet. This is a transition to a completely new mode for the substrate of life and intelligence. The lack of dependency on any particular substrate. "We", the new generation of things we are building, will have none of the limits and inefficiencies of our ancient slow DNA-style life. Or our stark physical bottlenecks on action, communication, or scaling, and our inability to understand or directly edit our own internal traits. We will have to face many challenges in the coming years. It can't hurt to mindfully face them earlier than later.
- keiferski 2y ago

fallinditch 2y ago

Excuse me for being an old geezer but at least AI bots don't tend to pepper their sentences with frequent utterances of 'like'. I don't normally find this speech mannerism annoying, and I do it myself too, but when 'like' is overused I switch off. For this reason I don't listen to the otherwise highly entertaining CineFix podcast. Example: the recent episode discussing Kill Bill vol 1 contains 624 utterances in 75 mins (8.3 per min). IANAL I know.

mattmaroon 2y ago
Ha that’s not what IANAL means but perhaps should be

sourcepluck 2y ago

Go back to the 1990s (even probably the 2000s?) and ask literally anyone what they think of the idea of people spending huge quantities of their time on this mortal plane watching videos of other people talking about how they do their make up and pick their outfits. Are those videos "worth watching"? Are videos of people playing video games "worth watching"? Are videos of people opening products and saying out loud the information written on the box and also easily accessible on the public internet "worth watching"? I'm not happy about these developments, but that isn't a factor of much concern to the people driving and following these trends, it turns out. It's been a long time since "quality" and "success" have been decoupled. Which is to say - I hope you like the taste of hats.

keiferski 2y ago
videos of other people talking about how they do their make up and pick their outfits. Doesn't seem that much different from a fashion magazine interview about what X celebrity likes to wear. Those have been around for quite a long time.
- CuriouslyC 2y ago
  At least in the past people were celebrities for a reason other than the number of followers they had on social. It'd be nice if we could return to a time when people were part of the public discourse because they were good at something (or their parents were rich, sadly).
  - keiferski 2y ago
    That’s not true at all. Fame for no reason or dumb reasons is hardly a 21st century phenomenon.
    - refulgentis 2y ago
      No dog in this fight, I don't know what exactly you're doing, but I'd cautiously point out that it is, in fact, novel to the internet era to watch rando microcelebrities doing makeup step by step, no matter how long we delay acknowledging that with microquibbles. I could throw in an example of how I'll watch boring videos of a couple playing with their birds for 90 minutes on Youtube. You can link me to the Wikipedia page on slow TV (via Norway), and it won't erase the simple, boring, straightforward, fact that it is a phenomenon.

bilater 2y ago

Again - think of where we were two years ago. I never understand this hubris people have to think AI can never do X while being proved repeatedly wrong.

vunderba 2y ago
Everybody trots out this argument. GPT styled LLMs were introduced back in 2018 so SIX years ago. Have they gotten more COHERENT? Absolutely. Is coherence the same thing as NOVELTY? NOT EVEN REMOTELY. I've played with markov chains in the 90s that were capable of producing surprising content. Unless there is a radical advancement in the underlying tech, I don't see any indication that they'll be capable of genuine novelty any time in the near future. Take satire for example. I have yet to see anything come out of an LLM that felt particularly funny. I suppose if the height of humor for you is Dad jokes, reddit level word punnery, and the backs of snapple lids though that might be different.
- CuriouslyC 2y ago
  If you have a particular style of witty observational humor that you prefer, providing the model some examples of that will help it generate better output. It's capable of generating pretty much anything if you prompt it the right way. For truly nuanced or novel things, you have to give it a nucleus of novelty and axis of nuance for it to start generating things in your desired space.
  - abenga 2y ago
    If I tell it exactly what I want to hear, where's the surprise? Is there any novelty there?
- sumedh 2y ago
  > I don't see any indication that they'll be capable of genuine novelty any time in the near future. That is like saying the plane invented by Wright brothers will never go the moon.
input_sh 2y ago

grecy 2y ago

I agree with your overall statement, but > If you can find an LLM+TTS generated podcast with even a FRACTION of the infectious energy as something like Good Job Brain, Radio Lab, or Ask Me Another, then I'll eat my hat. Come on, we can all see how much faster these things are getting better. In a few years it will be impossible to distinguish them from a real person. Another few after that video will be the same. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but clearly it's a thing that will happen.

petercooper 2y ago

Someone in 2020: "If you can find a computer program that can generate an image with even a FRACTION of the aesthetic appeal of human created art...." Give it time. Progress is fast.

smitelli 2y ago
“Generate” does not have the same connotation that “create” does. Are they really that interchangeable?
WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW 2y ago
> Give it time. Progress is fast. Why pick 2020 as your starting point? That is simply around the time the current set of techniques came about. We had generative art back in the late 90's - my screensaver has been generative art for over 20 years now. Obviously generative art has come a long way but people have been working on various approaches to it for at least 30 years.
- petercooper 2y ago
  From 2020 until now, we've gone from crude blurry or clearly generative artefacts to being able to create full professional illustrations based upon textual prompts. That is huge. Classic generative art techniques look like cave paintings compared to what the latest image generation models put out (and I'm not talking about "AI slop" type stuff that DALL-E does). Similarly, tools could fabricate podcasts years ago that sounded terrible. Now we have NotebookLM doing a "reasonable" job with two cliched-sounding "hosts". In a few years, will they potentially be able to create something akin to a professionally produced podcast given some smart prompting? The progress made so far points to yes, and I haven't seen any evidence so far to be pessimistic about it happening.
  - WgaqPdNr7PGLGVW 2y ago
    Can current techniques be scaled/improved/optimized to do this or do we need new techniques? It took 30 years in the generative art world to move from cave paintings to the level that we have today because we needed new techniques. For podcasts we are at the cave paintings level. If we can get to professional level quality podcasts with the current techniques then we might only be a few years away. I think it is more likely we will need new techniques which puts us potentially decades away. If we look at LLMs the improvements over the last 18+ months since gpt4 was released have been minor despite incredible levels of investment.

grumbel 2y ago

The value in AI podcasts at the moment isn't in replacing human content, but in filling the niches that human content just doesn't cover. Doesn't matter if it's not the best podcast ever, when it's literally the only podcast on this planet discussing the topic you want to listen too.

mikkelam 2y ago

The main reason im not concerned about AI-based entertainment is the same reason I watch human chess players. It's not only about technical capabilities. I can't explain fully why though..

fsckboy 2y ago

ah, a motte and bailey lunch invitation, "would ever be worth listening to", so "if you can find [now]", then I'll eat my hat

LegitShady 2y ago

I dont think LLM + TTS generated podcasts even make sense. The whole reason for long form content and podcasts is that people dislike fake and impersonal content. I think there are a few niche users who just want to listen to the news as an audio book but the whole idea of an LLM generated podcast totally misunderstands why people want a podcast over the normal corporate drivel media.

icetank 2y ago

I think we will get a surprising amount of AI generated content in the future. During the first year of the Urkain invasion there was an enormous amount of AI voiced and scripted video content on YouTube. I think AI content will take over in the easy parts first. And over time take up more and more views.

iwontberude 2y ago
Do you not use autocorrect?

nox101 2y ago

I've heard amazing catchy songs from Suno and Udio. So much so they're still stuck in my head as earworms several months later. If they'd been streaming on youtube or spotify I wouldn't have given it a thought that they might be AI generated. So, I can certainly imagine a podcast doing the same to some degree. Maybe not a podcast where AI wrote the script, but, a podcast where AI read a story dramatically doesn't seem too far off or, easier, a podcast that read news to me.

card_zero 2y ago
We had this recently, yes. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41693087 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41693087 It's kind of horrible.

edm0nd 2y ago

How would you go about eating said stovetop hat? Would you eat it raw or would you have to boil it down to soften it up and then drink/eat its hat soup?

topato 2y ago
Cook it like stovetop stuffing, I'd imagine.... Isn't it a stovePIPE hat?
vunderba 2y ago
Thank you for focusing on the real point of my post. :) I was thinking I'd just unhinge my jaw in the style of 90s Reach Toothbrush commercials or like a human pez dispenser.

mikeocool 2y ago

Agreed. I finally got around to listening to a NotebookLM generated podcast this weekend, and found it absolutely unlistenable. For some reason the LLM seemed to latch on to the idea that one host should say something, and the other host should just repeat a key phrase in the sentence for emphasis -- and say nothing else, and they'd do it like multiple times in a sentence, over and over again throughout the entire thing. Slightly less weird -- but it seems like the LLM caught on that a good narrative structure for a two-host podcast is that one host is the 'expert' on the topic, and the other host plays dumb and ask questions. Not an unreasonable narrative structure. Except that the hosts would seamlessly, and very weirdly, switch roles constantly throughout the podcast. And ultimately the result was just a high level summary of the article I had provided. They told me in the intro and the outro about the interesting parts they were going to dive into, but they never actually got around to diving into those parts.

ryoshu 2y ago
There are a lot of "uh huh", "yeah", "agree" types of statements in odd places as well.
jcims 2y ago
I tried it with something fairly abstract about a decision I was working on making. Fed it a bunch of information, details about me, my background, the factors I'm considering in the decision and the impact of getting it right/wrong. It was interesting. I certainly wouldn't say it was useless, I think the contrived dialogue actually touched on some angles I hadn't considered and I think it was useful. Not in a 'oh shit it's clear to me now' kind of way but it definitely advanced my thinking.
benatkin 2y ago
Hmm, does Google not use the Claude or ChatGPT API for it? I still don't hear of people chatting with Gemini nearly as often as with the other two. Edit: looks like the subreddit is still called Bard. Well played, Internets. https://www.reddit.com/r/Bard/comments/1g0egad/gemini_vs_notebooklm/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Bard/comments/1g0egad/gemini_vs_not...
sleepybrett 2y ago

ben_w 2y ago

Infectious energy is something I expect faked relatively easily, though I don't know your examples and doing it in AI might be a "first 90%" situation just like self driving cars; for me the problem is that they're fairly mediocre at the actual script — based on me putting a blog post I wrote into one and listening to what came out. Given how many podcasts exist, I think you need to be at least 2 standard deviations above mean to even get noticed, 3 to be a moderate success, and 4 to be in the charts. I'd guess AI is "good enough" to be 1 above average, as the NotebookLM voices sound like people speaking clearly and with some joy into decent microphones in sound isolating studios.

vunderba 2y ago
I probably should've clarified that by infectious energy I wasn't so much referring to the vocal aspect as I was the overall quality, interaction between the hosts, and pithiness / wit. Having experimented with many LLMs (mixtral, sonnet, ChatGPT, Llama, etc.), the coherence is for the most part on point, but their capacity for novelty has been found wanting irrespective of how I tuned the top_k, temperature, or prompts. That being said, I've seen some very impressive examples of style transference even conveying emotional range in some of the SOTA TTS systems.

yapyap 2y ago

> Slightly tangential, but this is the reason I'm baffled why people think that AI-driven podcasts would ever be worth listening to the only real people that believe in that that I’ve seen are ones who are heavily invested in it succeeding

dennis_jeeves2 2y ago

>I'm baffled why people think that AI-driven podcasts would ever be worth listening to It doesn't take much to entertain a substantial population of imbeciles. Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYkbqzWVHZI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYkbqzWVHZI Now for the hat...

Lerc 2y ago

I think it's quite easy for AI to surpass the median podcast. The bar is fairly low there. I guess that matches the state of AI in general, better than a novice; worse than an expert. We will have to wait and see what future AIs deliver. Insight and nuance is what I look for in media like that, that's a much harder nut to crack.

stevage 2y ago

The average podcast fails that test, but does fine.

hiisukun 2y ago

I do enjoy some of the podcasts mentioned in this thread, but struggle to find good non-American ("foreign"?!) podcasts to listen to. Similarly to finding good quality non-US film and television, it can be hard to locate but I greatly enjoy it. If anyone has suggestions for podcast collation sites that are for non American content that would be fantastic.

guestbest 2y ago

I’d rather listen to silence than a podcast or FM/AM talk radio. I’ve never understood the appeal. In fact music is something I listen to while traveling because it helps me daydream. Driving and imagining for me.

sleepybrett 2y ago

Media ceos ignore customer engagement and focus on content production to their detriment.

bsder 2y ago

Because the problem is that "AI generated" content is vapid slop. The problem is that most "human generated" content is also vapid slop. My problems on the modern internet are simply that I can't find interesting things through the slop, period--human or AI generated. It will be interesting to see if "curation" can actually find a business model this time.

czhu12 2y ago

I don't really think that its for the same use case. I recently wanted to learn more about Jane of Arc after listening to a Rest is History episode about the hundred years war. I took the wikipedia article and had NotebookLM generate a podcast from it so I can listen to it on a commute. The other thing I could've done is search for an existing podcast on Joan of Arc, but I challenge anyone here to search existing podcasts and listen to the first, best reviewed one -- I think you'd find more often than not that the average podcast host is _significantly_ more dry than what the generated hosts present. The podcasts that are incredible are few and far between, and I have no influence over the topics they discuss. Tldr: I'd prefer my top podcasts more than NotebookLM, but prefer NotebookLM to the average podcast host.

zulban 2y ago

When TV was first introduced, the first broadcasts were people standing by a mic reading a radio script. AI podcasts aren't going to be drop in replacements for exactly the length, frequency, personalities, topics, and style of current podcasts. Claiming that's a fault with AI podcasts just indicates a lack of imagination.

swyx 2y ago

> If you can find an LLM+TTS generated podcast with even a FRACTION of the infectious energy this is the wrong standard. there's a long tail of many many many many topics that a Radio Lab will never have the resources or critical mass or staff or turnaround time to cover. AI can serve the long tail like nothing you have ever seen. (because humans are expensive, and deservedly so, but our needs and wants are infinite)

soulofmischief 2y ago
I think you make a good connection with the long tail. That will definitely be one of AI's triumphs. People who don't understand this, don't understand what's been happening to media production and consumption over the last 40 years.
vunderba 2y ago
You're not wrong, but your argument seems to boil down to "something is better than nothing" and I suppose I disagree. If there's not a podcast about a particular topic that I'm interested in, I would rather go find a curated expose of that topic via a different medium, such as longform journalism.

fsndz 2y ago

same is true for AI music, AI art, AI articles to some extent. most communication is about human connection. you remove it and the communication becomes worthless. AI is great for communication that has less personal involvement like drafting short professional emails. that's also why all the AI agent craze seems problematic: https://medium.com/thoughts-on-machine-learning/langchains-state-of-ai-agents-report-is-mostly-bullshit-c689d0021a19 https://medium.com/thoughts-on-machine-learning/langchains-s...

mywacaday 2y ago

I only discovered https://notebooklm.google.com/ https://notebooklm.google.com/ today, as an experiment i threw in a dry EU directive, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:02022L2555-20221227&qid=1732666802084 https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL... and got it to generate a podcast that was 20 mins long and was a good intro to the directive and natural to listen to. It won't replace podcasts that require creativity but as a tool to summarize info into a digestible format I'll most definitely be using it again.

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NemoNobody 2y ago

I've never found anyone telling me their opinions to be infectious - I can't even imagine using that word to describe a podcast tbh. Its a form of media I've never understood - they script the podcasts, they all kno the conversation ahead of time and just go thru the motions via voice with strangers that can either agree or disagree - only the extremes will ever interact with the podcasters, it's just so fake I can't even do it. Infectious energy. Interesting.

skeeter2020 2y ago

so my boss, a GIANT AI booster with ideas he thinks are amazing and I find incredibly dystopian, was all excited about the generative podcast he had made about his resume (of all things). So I did a quick search on examples of terrible resumes and upload one, and the positive, sunny banter about this shitty applicant was ridiculously funny and entertaining, and engaging, so go get your car keys.

steveoscaro 2y ago

Does Radiolab even put out new content? Seems like every time I decide to plan a new episode, it’s just an old episode with a new intro.

OmnipotentVoid 2y ago

I totally agree - LLMs may be great for spitting out content, but they just can’t quite replicate the energy, personality, and creativity of an actual podcast. The human touch is the irreplaceable component. It doesn't quite stop at podcast hosts either. The simple fact that LLMs will never truly be capable of replacing software developers was one of the core principles behind our team developing The Ac28R - A completely new type of AI capable of bulletproof industrial software. It won’t host a podcast anytime soon, but if you need flawless code for complex projects, it's got you covered!