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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Bad TV is a lot older than that. It probably seems weird nowadays to watch “I Dream of Jeanie” and “Gilligan’s Island” reruns because that’s what was on TV. Or how about game shows and soap operas? Daytime TV was the worst. But people watched.
I'm pretty sure humans have been finding ways to unproductively waste time for millenium...
I'm not sure how watching lightweight videos on subjects you're curious about is any worse than how people wasted time in the past?
Personally I waste time watching videos on outdoor gear, coffee making equipment and PC hardware. I certainy don't regret it because I had no plans to do anything productive with that time either.
Ahh, you e touched on a big problem with our society rn - nothing is worth doing.
I've been really thinking about lawns lately and how much time men and women spend maintaining them, how much pride many of them have in such activity... lawns aren't real tho, it's just a personal park nobody ever uses that we all thought we wanted bc rich ppl had them. Front lawns especially, just for looks, nobody normal ever sits on them even.
Case in point is all the people that live in an apartment - they don't do lawns. They might think they want to and some might even enjoy up keeping a lawn but it's not an activity that's "worth it" in fact there are many reasons not have a lawn, it isn't an activity that justifies itself as so many pretend.
Everything is like that. Almost nothing any of us do adds to humanities' general progress or improves our own situations even.
Mowing a lawn and watching TV are incredibly similar activities if you have a nice lawnmower.
I'm not disputing that people waste inordinate amounts of time running out the clock before they shuffle off this mortal coil. (cough every X demograph reacts to Y video cough).
Agreement to eat said head apparel is predicated upon "infectious energy" (i.e. quality) - NOT success. I'll draft up a more officious document later.
Note: I am the sole arbiter of what constitutes quality.
> It's been a long time since "quality" and "success" have been decoupled.
I think so, too.
I guess quality was a property of interest in the old days, because the path e.g. for commercial music was: Maximize profit -> Maximize sales -> Maximize what the target audience likes -> Maximize quality.
For TikTok etc. they bypass the market sales stuff and replace it by an 'algorithm', that optimizes for retention, which is tightly coupled to ad revenue. I imagine the algorithm as a function of many arguments.
Just relying on quality is an inefficient approximation in contrast to that.
Good point. I absolutely abhorred reaction videos until I found a channel that works for me. A guy who reacts to videos about ultra luxury mansions. I find it interesting hearing an expert in the field point out things that most of us wouldn't think of. Plus he's got a great sense of humor.
What blew my mind was that there would be a market to watch other people play video games. You never know what catches on.
> 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.
So like supermarket magazines in video form? I think people would get it.
To me, unboxing videos are documentation, not entertainment. When I need to know exactly what's in a box and how it's packaged, an unboxing video is the only source of that information.
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.
I used to listen to podcasts during my commute, when they took the place of listening to NPR or talk radio. Now that I work from home full time, I listen to them when I'm doing dishes or similar chores, going on walks around the city, and when I'm doing any significant amount of driving. I listen to a combination of comedy/history (love The Dollop), politics, and sci-fi commentary.
For the most part, I'm listening pretty actively, but if I'm just sitting there listening without a fairly mindless activity going on, I'll get distracted pretty quickly and find myself looking at my phone...
I don't get them either since the hosts are typically "regular people" talking about often complicated subjects that they are by no means domain experts in.
I find the format of "Dumdum Host A read some articles about something last night and Dumdum Host B asks questions about it" especially grating, unless it's purely opinion-driven and then I still probably won't care unless I read about the hosts and find out they are probably people with opinions worth listening to.
I'd rather read a book or be with my own thoughts without having them be even more crowded by some randos telling me stuff they think they know
> 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.
I don't see why that should be true. Podcasts are great when coupled with mindless work like mowing the lawn, weeding the garden, stacking firewood, walking to the shop, driving etc. You can get virtually 100% out of a podcast while performing tasks like this.
I figured people listened to them while commuting. It seemed the best fit: lots of time, mostly little attention needed (except when you alight or are driving in adverse conditions).
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.
I agree. I think I listen to podcasts just for a bit of "social noise" when I'm doing something by myself and for occasionally picking up on something new I hadn't heard of before. For pure information content, I think they're actually very poor. It's not unlike listening to an old AM radio talk show. Hosts repeat themselves, engage in banter, and often oversimplify topics for the sake of a narrative.
I also think AI podcasts could become popular one day for people who just want some background noise and bits of trivia every once in a while. I would argue that a lot of YouTube channels I sometimes have in the background just summarize Wikipedia articles and don't have much of a personal touch anyway, so an AI could do the same thing.
I switched to improvised pods for this reason. Podcasts are for doing the dishes and mowing the lawn and playing factorio. I don't turn on anything with 'meat' unless I have a long car trip ahead of me. I just am not able to sit still and only listen without feeling like I could be doing something else, and when I'm doing something else I'm gonna start tuning out eventually.
Hey Riddle Riddle, Hello from the magic tavern, Artists on artists on artists on artists are my picks for now.
There is nothing you are supposed to be doing with free time, hence free time.
Tbh tho, there is nothing that we are supposed to be doing in this world rn anyways, nobody was born to work any of these jobs, we didn't evolve to flip burgers.
This is the old world, don't place too much stake in it, everything will change and then what?
If you want to listen to a podcast, do it. If you want to do something else, do that.
Don't do what you don't want to do, that's all there is too worry about.
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.
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.
> I'm convinced that most people who enjoy podcasts don't really actively listen to them,
Or you know not everyone is the same. Just because you struggle with something doesn’t mean that it is not easy and effortless for others.
I can’t dribble a basketball and walk at the same time, still I won’t make the claim that everyone who claims to enjoy playing basketball is somehow fudging it.
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.
> 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.
I just took a poll about art that had 50 examples and you had to choose which were human and which were not - I did very well, bc I'm awesome but apparently it shook the art world to its core, many of the professionals have no idea how to tell the difference/can't tell the difference.
The elements that identified a painting as human to me had nothing to do with appearance but everything to do with feeling.
Be passionate about what you present - if you can't be, don't bother. Passion is what will distinguish us from the AI - stuff like personality is almost immediately replicated, vocal inflections, funny comments, unusual spoken delivery - that's all within the realm of AI capability. Talking about micro blogging like it's God's gift to the world, not so much an AI thing, it won't feel right with AI.
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.
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.
I find it as listenable as the podcasts the people I'm around play in their cars during roadtrips
To me that's absolutely unlistenable, but to them its interesting and engaging. I find NotebookLM replicates that perfectly. Its not at all the issue that the OP encountered with the Hawaii news service, as those lacked tone and pronounciation, which NotebookLM would not.
Regarding the outcome being a long winded summary, yeah thats what I see about the aforementioned 2 hour podcasts as well. They take the intro paragraph of a wikipedia article, pretend that the topic is a novel mystery they just discovered through hours of scouring microfilm at a municipal library, and then interject each other every other word with nonsense, before getting back to the point for just one sentence.
> 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.
> 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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
I only discovered 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=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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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-s...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Incredibly, no videos linked in an article about a video newscast. I think this is an example. The AI doesn't even pronounce "AI" correctly. Interestingly, it looks slightly offscreen just the way real newsreaders do when they're on prompter.
They do a lot right. There's interaction between the bots. They look kind of professional but not Los Angeles/New York quality, which is what you'd expect from a smallish market. Their movement is also kind of stiff and amateurish, which I believe is intentional.
Newscast teleprompters are directly in front of the camera lens specifically to not have them looking away from the lens. This has been a solved technology for decades. Perhaps you're thinking of cue cards or the teleprompters speakers use in a speech live audience type of setting?
Well you got me. I haven't watched broadcast TV for decades. I do see that phenomenon a lot with vloggers at present.
Am I also incorrect that they appear not to be looking directly at the camera? Looking back after your comment I still think it feels like they aren't.
I could only find this video. James' arms go up and down in an alarming manner. Rose has more natural movements but the voice you hear when her mouth moves is worse than the worst foreign film voice-over. Somehow the person and the voice mismatched in "tone" in a way that's hard to describe.
Love this so much, not in the way intended. Its just so strange! I can't put my finger on it, but feels like something Tim and Eric, or Tim Robinson, or even Alan Resnick would have a hand in.
There is a kind of aesthetic immanence to whole thing, everything is right on the surface. The voices are only just embodied "enough," their unearned confidence, their "affectations." The deadpan delivery on an absurd stage. The colors all feel like a cake that is too sweet. Like approximating a memory of a broadcast.
Yeah I can see all of it, but the problem with me is that I bet I would have watched it a few seconds and clicked off out of boredom, never suspecting they were AI. I really want to claim I would have figured it out instantly, but I can't. If I were a regular consumer I think I'd notice.
They mention right up front they're "powered by AI" but to me that implies they had help with article writing. I would not immediately assume from that statement that the actual newsreaders themselves were AI.
I was surprised at how game the AI was to pronounce the Hawaiian place names, it was confident enough that I assumed the pronunciation was correct. The article notes that it is butchering the placenames though.
To me this illustrates a common cognitive mismatch when evaluating AI, it can be confident in a way that most humans can't, and that misleading social cue is another reason we trust its output.
I've seen plenty of human newsreaders be confidently incorrect about place names. And some pronunciations aren't necessarily "wrong" so much as contested.
The first thing I thought of when I saw this is that some mid-tier dictatorships could replace a lot of their newscasters with this approach. Can always guarantee they’ll say what they need to say, and a lack of emotion is a plus maybe? Except with the dear leader passes then you bring out a real person for the emotions.
Looks like they're using something like motion matching to recover fragments of the presenter's motion that match the pronounced phonemes. The actors were probably instructed to avoid almost all movement to make sure it was blendable. That would explain why the guy's hand have such erratic and non-natural movement.
The problem with such "videocasts" (as opposed to "podcasts") is that there is another channel that the AI has to control: the video. Generating convincing video is much harder than generating convincing audio.
Watching this, I'm left wondering why my brain doesn't want to blend the visual and the audio. I don't think it's the bad lip sync. I have this weird feeling that these persons, were they real, wouldn't have these voices. But I can't quite put my finger as to why. I haven't watched movies dubs in a while, but maybe that's the same kind of phenomenon that makes dubs sound bad. Or maybe we grow an intuitive sense of what a person's voice might sound like based on the appearance of their face's bone structure and muscles?
The way the mouths move are so far off from the words they're speaking that my first impressions would be they're just playing a video loop of these people talking about other random things and dubbing over it.
The male host’s hands are literally on a loop, it is disturbing. And the female host had several nonsensical sentence fragments. The script isn’t even up to par with what you would see in a college news show.
"James began his tenure as lead anchor, at which point he was unable to blink and his hands were constantly vibrating. He was demoted to second anchor in mid-October, where he began blinking more regularly and his odd hand vibration was replaced by a single emphatic gesture."
Ooh wow I hate this. Totally soulless appearance and delivery - and the robot fidgeting the dude is doing with his hands completely distracts from everything else. It’s totally normal to do that movement while speaking for emphasis - but whatever he’s doing does not look normal. (The mouths look nightmarish as well)
While I enjoyed the article, it’s just another in a line of the same article with different flavors and authors that all have the same fundamental error.
The prevailing counterargument against AI consistently hinges on the present state of AI rather than the trajectory of its development: but what matters is not the capabilities of AI as they exist today, but the astonishing velocity at which those capabilities are evolving.
We've been through this song and dance before. AI researchers make legitimately impressive breakthroughs in specific tasks, people extrapolate linear growth, the air comes out of the balloon after a couple years when it turns out we couldn't just throw progressively larger models at the problem to emulate human cognition.
I'm surprised that tech workers who should be the most skeptical about this kind of stuff end up being the most breathlessly hyperbolic. Everyone is so eager to get rich off the trend they discard any skepticism.
This is confusing. We've never had a ChatGPT-like innovation before to compare to. Yes, there have been AI hype cycles for decades, but the difference is that we now have permanent invaluable and society-changing tools out of the current AI cycle, combined with hundreds of billions of dollars being thrown at it in a level of investment we've never seen before. Unless you're on the bleeding edge of AI research yourself, or one of the people investing billions of dollars, it is really unclear to me how anyone can have confidence of where AI is not going
Two things can both be true. I keep arguing both sides because:
1 Unless you’re aware of near term limits you think AI is going to the stars next year.
2 Architectures change. The only thing that doesn’t change is that we generally push on, temporarily limits are usually overcome and there’s a lot riding on this. It’s not a smart move to bet against progress over the medium term. This is also where the real benefits and risks lie.
Is AI in general more like going to space, or string theory? One is hard but doable. Other is a tar pit for money and talent. We are all currently placing our bets.
One problem is that people assume the end goal is to create a human-cognition-capable AI. I think it' pretty obvious by this point that that's not going to happen. But there is no need for that at all to still cause a huge disruption; let's say most current workers in roles that benefit from AI (copilot, writing, throwaway clipart, repetitive tasks, summarizing, looking up stuff, etc.) lead not even to job loss but fewer future jobs created - what does that mean for the incoming juniors? What does that mean for the people looking for that kind of work? It's not obvious at all how big of a problem that will create.
I think the mistake is that in the media it is extrapolating linear growth but in practice it is a wobbly path. And this wobbly path allows anyone to create whatever nearrative they want.
It reminds me of seeing headlines last week that NVDA is down after investors were losing faith after the last earnings. Then you look at the graph and NVDA is only like 10% off its all times high and still in and out of the most valuable company in the world.
Advancement is never linear. But I believe AI trends will continue up and to the right and even in 20 years when AI can do remarkably advanced things that we can barely comprehend, there will be internet commentary about how its all just hype.
There's a reason why so many of the people on the crypto grift in 2020-2022 have jumped to the AI grift. Same logic of "revolution is just around the corner", with the added mix of AGI millenarianism which hits a lot of nerds' soft spots.
> The prevailing counterargument against AI consistently hinges on the present state of AI rather than the trajectory of its development: but what matters is not the capabilities of AI as they exist today, but the astonishing velocity at which those capabilities are evolving.
No, the prevailing counter argument is that the prevailing argument in favor of AI taking over everything assumes that the acceleration will remain approximately constant, when in fact we don't know that it will do so and we have every reason to believe that it won't.
No technology in history has ever maintained an exponential growth curve for very long. Every innovation has followed the same pattern:
* There's a major scientific breakthrough which redefines what is possible.
* That breakthrough leads to a rapid increase in technology along a certain axis.
* We eventually see a plateau where we reach the limits of this new paradigm and begin to adapt to the new normal.
AI hypists always talk as though we should extrapolate the last 2 years' growth curve out to 10 years and come to the conclusion that General Intelligence is inevitable, but to do so would be to assume that this particular technological curve will behave very differently than all previous curves.
Instead, what I and many others argue is that we are already starting to see the plateau. We are now in the phase where we've hit the limits of what these models are capable of and we're moving on to adapting them to a variety of use cases. This will bring more change, but it will be slower and not as seismic as the hype would lead you to believe, because we've already gotten off the exponential train.
AI hypists come to the conclusion that general intelligence is inevitable because they know the brain exists and are materialists. Anyone who checks those two boxes will come to the conclusion that an artificial brain is possible and therefore AGI is as well. With the amount of money being spent then its only a matter of when
Moore's law is still going as far I'm aware - there may have been clarification of sorts recently but that's kept up exponentially rather well despite everyone knowing that it can't do that.
But we don't know if AI development is following an exponential or sigmoid curve (actually we do kind of, now, but that's beside the point for this post.)
A wise institution will make decisions based on current capabilities, not a prognostication.
If investors didn't invest based on expected future performance, the share market would look completely different than it actually does today. So, I can't understand how anyone can claim that.
It was unclear if the current wave of AI would be an exponential, or for how long, or if it would end up just being another S-curve. The potential upside hooked a lot of people into action on the VC-maths of "it doesn't matter if it's unlikely, because the upside is just too good".
It is now becoming clear however that we aren't getting AGI. What we have now is fundamentally what we're likely to have in 5-10 years time. I do think we'll find better uses, figure our shit out, and have much more effective products in that time, I think we're entering the "LLM-era" in much the same way as the 2010s were the smartphone era that redefined a lot of things, but in still the same way, a phone of ~2010 isn't materially different to a phone of ~2020, they're still just internet connected, location aware, interfaces to content and services.
But you could also say: the prevailing argument for AI consistently hinges on the (imagined, projected based on naive assumptions) trajectory of AI rather than the present state.
> the astonishing velocity at which those capabilities are evolving.
This is what is repeated ad nauseam by AI companies desperate for investment and hype. Those who’ve been in the game since before this millennium tend not to be so impressed — recent gains have mostly been due to increased volume of computation and data with only a few real theoretical breakthroughs.
Laymen (myself included) were indeed astonished by ChatGPT, but it’s quite clear that those in the know saw it coming. Remember that those who say otherwise might have reasons (other than an earnest interest in the truth) for doing so.
I honestly believe this specific case is a Pareto situation where the first 80% came at breakneck speeds, and the final 20% just won't come in a satisfactory way. And the uncanny valley effect demands a percentage that's extremely close to 100% before it has any use. Neural networks are great at approximations, but an approximate person is just a nightmare.
What is your time horizon? We're already at a date where people were saying these jobs would be gone. The people most optimistic about the trajectory of this technology were clearly wrong.
If you tell me AI newscasters will be fully functional in 10 or 15 years, I'll believe it. But that far in the future, I'd also believe news will be totally transformed due to some other technology we aren't thinking about yet.
AI allows us to see everything we track the data of rn - and see in a useful way and in real time. It also allows all the tedious and repetitive tasks done by everyone, no longer needs to be done by anyone - creating a static webpage or graphics for a mobile app, a mobile app, or game development - a of those are the easiest to do they ever have been.
AI isn't for millennials or even Gen z - it's for Alpha, they will be the first to truly understand what AI is and to use it as it will be used forever after. Til they adopt it, none of this really matters.
the prevailing argument in favor of investing in AI is its potential.
the prevailing argument against using AI is its current lack of potential.
Those things are inherently in tension, think of it as hiring a new employee straight out of undergrad. You are hiring them based largely on the employee they will become...with increasing expectations over time balanced against increasing variability in outcomes over time. However, if one year in that employee continues to suck at their current job, their long term potential doesn't really matter. Moreso, the long term potential is no longer credibly evidenced by the inability to progress at doing the current job.
This is an investment gone bad in the current state of things. It doesn't matter what might happen it matters what did. The investment was made based on the perception of astonishing velocity, and it seems that we may need to calibrate our spedometers.
Isn't this essentially the same argument as "there are only 10 covid cases in this area, nothing to worry about"?
It's really missing the point, the point is whether or not exponential growth is happening or not. It doesn't with husbands, it does with covid, time will tell about AI.
It amazes me how excited people are to see their livelihoods destroyed. I'm retired, but people designing AI in their 20's will be unemployed in a decade. Good luck dudes and dude-ettes, you're fucking yourselves.
Unfortunately, I see this as only a small temporary setback in the unstoppable quest to replace humans with AI to cut corporate costs.
The aspect of AI that isn't discussed enough is not what are those formerly employed going to do next, but rather that it will potentially represent the largest transfer of wealth in history as money which was going into employees' salaries is instead going to shareholders via those large companies who have the ability to produce the AIs (even if there are a host of small companies who act as an intermediate layer, such as the Israeli firm in this case).
I do think there is going to be a backlash because of our need for and desire for human connections, which AI won't provide. But that will become more expensive, and not the norm. Just like we can still buy farmer-fresh food but only a minority segment of the population can afford it because it costs 3x what is pushed as "food" at Walmart.
Give it time y'all. This is the first inning, and I'm already terrified.
I encourage you to have a conversation with ChatGPT's advanced audio for a taste of what's to come. If you can, have someone talk to it in a relatively unpopular language like Afrikaans or even Icelandic--they will shit their pants.
I'm not so convinced. A lot of people have been noting the rapid development of ML systems in the past few years and projecting continued exponential improvements based on previous growth rates, but unbounded exponential improvement doesn't happen. This is an S curve and I think we're already well into the diminishing returns part of the curve. I think future growth is going to require increasingly impractical amounts of hardware for ever smaller levels of improvement.
People saying that this version is flawed but still amazing, so the next version is going to be perfect and mind blowing are going to be disappointed I think. The next version will be slightly better but still flawed. The version after that will be a touch better but annoyingly still not quite there. Constantly teasing you that full success is just around the corner while never quite getting there.
I don't know, I may be old fashioned, but if I find out that a podcast I like is just audio generated by an AI it's going into the digital garbage bin. I think a lot of people think like me, as I'm not -that- weird. Maybe I'm wrong, and the younger generations are going to welcome in AI as a replacement for humans on something as person as a podcast. It all just seems so fake to me, I have no interest in it.
Is there an open source GPT? I have LM studio and Qwen 2.5 which is basically as good as leading models in Nov 2024, but haven't found the software to run audio or video generation.
This has the feeling of smugly declaring victory too early. The objection to AI in journalism has to be something other than that the technology is janky. Because it will improve. The people selling this AI product to news stations are counting on that. Assume that it will one day do a human presenter's job as well as they do, at a fraction of the cost. The argument against this use of AI technology needs to be able to survive after that happens, so the argument has to be based on something that won't change any time soon, like ethics, or morality, or even epistemology. Something like that. I'm telling you, don't just rely on AI being this bad forever, or you'll lose the argument in the long run.
It doesn't help that the value of the news has been so thoroughly diminished by the news industry itself already. The trend lines of AI performance going up, and trust in journalism going down, are going to cross sooner than you think, and that's the point at which James and Rose will be back to stay.
hmm no one has discussed this "carpenter group", who appear to be on a spree in 2024 of snatching up smaller news orgs, and cutting 50% of the staff. seems like a pretty big gamble on AI.
> Carpenter Media Group announced earlier this month it had acquired another group of newspapers, Pamplin Media Group, in Oregon. The company now owns and manages 180 newspapers in the United States and Canada.
> “We are committed to Everett, The Herald and all who have a stake in its success,” Chairman Todd Carpenter said. “We have deep sympathy for those affected by these changes and will work hard with each of them to see they are well-compensated through a transition period that helps them move forward in a positive way.
“Our responsibility to the community and our readers requires us to make difficult business decisions, and then invest in and organize our team to move forward to produce a product that continues to improve and serve. Our track record in this process is good."
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Buff/Franklin for 2028!
Dead Comment
> 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.
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.
I'm not sure how watching lightweight videos on subjects you're curious about is any worse than how people wasted time in the past?
Personally I waste time watching videos on outdoor gear, coffee making equipment and PC hardware. I certainy don't regret it because I had no plans to do anything productive with that time either.
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.
I've been really thinking about lawns lately and how much time men and women spend maintaining them, how much pride many of them have in such activity... lawns aren't real tho, it's just a personal park nobody ever uses that we all thought we wanted bc rich ppl had them. Front lawns especially, just for looks, nobody normal ever sits on them even.
Case in point is all the people that live in an apartment - they don't do lawns. They might think they want to and some might even enjoy up keeping a lawn but it's not an activity that's "worth it" in fact there are many reasons not have a lawn, it isn't an activity that justifies itself as so many pretend.
Everything is like that. Almost nothing any of us do adds to humanities' general progress or improves our own situations even.
Mowing a lawn and watching TV are incredibly similar activities if you have a nice lawnmower.
Agreement to eat said head apparel is predicated upon "infectious energy" (i.e. quality) - NOT success. I'll draft up a more officious document later.
Note: I am the sole arbiter of what constitutes quality.
I think so, too.
I guess quality was a property of interest in the old days, because the path e.g. for commercial music was: Maximize profit -> Maximize sales -> Maximize what the target audience likes -> Maximize quality.
For TikTok etc. they bypass the market sales stuff and replace it by an 'algorithm', that optimizes for retention, which is tightly coupled to ad revenue. I imagine the algorithm as a function of many arguments.
Just relying on quality is an inefficient approximation in contrast to that.
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What blew my mind was that there would be a market to watch other people play video games. You never know what catches on.
So like supermarket magazines in video form? I think people would get it.
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.
For the most part, I'm listening pretty actively, but if I'm just sitting there listening without a fairly mindless activity going on, I'll get distracted pretty quickly and find myself looking at my phone...
I find the format of "Dumdum Host A read some articles about something last night and Dumdum Host B asks questions about it" especially grating, unless it's purely opinion-driven and then I still probably won't care unless I read about the hosts and find out they are probably people with opinions worth listening to.
I'd rather read a book or be with my own thoughts without having them be even more crowded by some randos telling me stuff they think they know
I don't see why that should be true. Podcasts are great when coupled with mindless work like mowing the lawn, weeding the garden, stacking firewood, walking to the shop, driving etc. You can get virtually 100% out of a podcast while performing tasks like this.
I also think AI podcasts could become popular one day for people who just want some background noise and bits of trivia every once in a while. I would argue that a lot of YouTube channels I sometimes have in the background just summarize Wikipedia articles and don't have much of a personal touch anyway, so an AI could do the same thing.
Hey Riddle Riddle, Hello from the magic tavern, Artists on artists on artists on artists are my picks for now.
Tbh tho, there is nothing that we are supposed to be doing in this world rn anyways, nobody was born to work any of these jobs, we didn't evolve to flip burgers.
This is the old world, don't place too much stake in it, everything will change and then what?
If you want to listen to a podcast, do it. If you want to do something else, do that.
Don't do what you don't want to do, that's all there is too worry about.
Or you know not everyone is the same. Just because you struggle with something doesn’t mean that it is not easy and effortless for others.
I can’t dribble a basketball and walk at the same time, still I won’t make the claim that everyone who claims to enjoy playing basketball is somehow fudging it.
Dead Comment
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.
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.
The elements that identified a painting as human to me had nothing to do with appearance but everything to do with feeling.
Be passionate about what you present - if you can't be, don't bother. Passion is what will distinguish us from the AI - stuff like personality is almost immediately replicated, vocal inflections, funny comments, unusual spoken delivery - that's all within the realm of AI capability. Talking about micro blogging like it's God's gift to the world, not so much an AI thing, it won't feel right with AI.
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.
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.
To me that's absolutely unlistenable, but to them its interesting and engaging. I find NotebookLM replicates that perfectly. Its not at all the issue that the OP encountered with the Hawaii news service, as those lacked tone and pronounciation, which NotebookLM would not.
Regarding the outcome being a long winded summary, yeah thats what I see about the aforementioned 2 hour podcasts as well. They take the intro paragraph of a wikipedia article, pretend that the topic is a novel mystery they just discovered through hours of scouring microfilm at a municipal library, and then interject each other every other word with nonsense, before getting back to the point for just one sentence.
Edit: looks like the subreddit is still called Bard. Well played, Internets. https://www.reddit.com/r/Bard/comments/1g0egad/gemini_vs_not...
cough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Fooling people with the promises of AI is pretty simple. People are easy to fool. They like shiny objects.
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.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41693087
It's kind of horrible.
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.
The accelerationism argument made a little bit of sense two years ago, but now, after two years of marginal improvements at best? Really?
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.
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!
Infectious energy. Interesting.
Would you eat it raw or would you have to boil it down to soften it up and then drink/eat its hat soup?
I was thinking I'd just unhinge my jaw in the style of 90s Reach Toothbrush commercials or like a human pez dispenser.
Isn't it a stovePIPE hat?
If anyone has suggestions for podcast collation sites that are for non American content that would be fantastic.
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.
the only real people that believe in that that I’ve seen are ones who are heavily invested in it succeeding
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> 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.
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.
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.
It doesn't take much to entertain a substantial population of imbeciles. Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYkbqzWVHZI
Now for the hat...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aa7Q2S7VWUk
They do a lot right. There's interaction between the bots. They look kind of professional but not Los Angeles/New York quality, which is what you'd expect from a smallish market. Their movement is also kind of stiff and amateurish, which I believe is intentional.
Am I also incorrect that they appear not to be looking directly at the camera? Looking back after your comment I still think it feels like they aren't.
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1040710730435452
There is a kind of aesthetic immanence to whole thing, everything is right on the surface. The voices are only just embodied "enough," their unearned confidence, their "affectations." The deadpan delivery on an absurd stage. The colors all feel like a cake that is too sweet. Like approximating a memory of a broadcast.
It is hilarious and beautiful. No notes.
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They mention right up front they're "powered by AI" but to me that implies they had help with article writing. I would not immediately assume from that statement that the actual newsreaders themselves were AI.
To me this illustrates a common cognitive mismatch when evaluating AI, it can be confident in a way that most humans can't, and that misleading social cue is another reason we trust its output.
The problem with such "videocasts" (as opposed to "podcasts") is that there is another channel that the AI has to control: the video. Generating convincing video is much harder than generating convincing audio.
Honestly the whole thing is so off-putting and lazy.
The video was even worse than the audio. The lip sync was off. The girl looked like someone else’s mouth was mapped onto her face.
But I guess it will become better. TV will turn so soul less, even when compared to today.
Imagine Rakuten Dog Does Funny Stuff channel with this added as some filler. Dystopic.
You can call me Al.
The prevailing counterargument against AI consistently hinges on the present state of AI rather than the trajectory of its development: but what matters is not the capabilities of AI as they exist today, but the astonishing velocity at which those capabilities are evolving.
I'm surprised that tech workers who should be the most skeptical about this kind of stuff end up being the most breathlessly hyperbolic. Everyone is so eager to get rich off the trend they discard any skepticism.
1 Unless you’re aware of near term limits you think AI is going to the stars next year.
2 Architectures change. The only thing that doesn’t change is that we generally push on, temporarily limits are usually overcome and there’s a lot riding on this. It’s not a smart move to bet against progress over the medium term. This is also where the real benefits and risks lie.
Is AI in general more like going to space, or string theory? One is hard but doable. Other is a tar pit for money and talent. We are all currently placing our bets.
It reminds me of seeing headlines last week that NVDA is down after investors were losing faith after the last earnings. Then you look at the graph and NVDA is only like 10% off its all times high and still in and out of the most valuable company in the world.
Advancement is never linear. But I believe AI trends will continue up and to the right and even in 20 years when AI can do remarkably advanced things that we can barely comprehend, there will be internet commentary about how its all just hype.
We're not.
You mean exponential! No one gets out of bed for linear these days.
No, the prevailing counter argument is that the prevailing argument in favor of AI taking over everything assumes that the acceleration will remain approximately constant, when in fact we don't know that it will do so and we have every reason to believe that it won't.
No technology in history has ever maintained an exponential growth curve for very long. Every innovation has followed the same pattern:
* There's a major scientific breakthrough which redefines what is possible.
* That breakthrough leads to a rapid increase in technology along a certain axis.
* We eventually see a plateau where we reach the limits of this new paradigm and begin to adapt to the new normal.
AI hypists always talk as though we should extrapolate the last 2 years' growth curve out to 10 years and come to the conclusion that General Intelligence is inevitable, but to do so would be to assume that this particular technological curve will behave very differently than all previous curves.
Instead, what I and many others argue is that we are already starting to see the plateau. We are now in the phase where we've hit the limits of what these models are capable of and we're moving on to adapting them to a variety of use cases. This will bring more change, but it will be slower and not as seismic as the hype would lead you to believe, because we've already gotten off the exponential train.
A wise institution will make decisions based on current capabilities, not a prognostication.
It was unclear if the current wave of AI would be an exponential, or for how long, or if it would end up just being another S-curve. The potential upside hooked a lot of people into action on the VC-maths of "it doesn't matter if it's unlikely, because the upside is just too good".
It is now becoming clear however that we aren't getting AGI. What we have now is fundamentally what we're likely to have in 5-10 years time. I do think we'll find better uses, figure our shit out, and have much more effective products in that time, I think we're entering the "LLM-era" in much the same way as the 2010s were the smartphone era that redefined a lot of things, but in still the same way, a phone of ~2010 isn't materially different to a phone of ~2020, they're still just internet connected, location aware, interfaces to content and services.
> the astonishing velocity at which those capabilities are evolving.
This is what is repeated ad nauseam by AI companies desperate for investment and hype. Those who’ve been in the game since before this millennium tend not to be so impressed — recent gains have mostly been due to increased volume of computation and data with only a few real theoretical breakthroughs.
Laymen (myself included) were indeed astonished by ChatGPT, but it’s quite clear that those in the know saw it coming. Remember that those who say otherwise might have reasons (other than an earnest interest in the truth) for doing so.
If you tell me AI newscasters will be fully functional in 10 or 15 years, I'll believe it. But that far in the future, I'd also believe news will be totally transformed due to some other technology we aren't thinking about yet.
AI allows us to see everything we track the data of rn - and see in a useful way and in real time. It also allows all the tedious and repetitive tasks done by everyone, no longer needs to be done by anyone - creating a static webpage or graphics for a mobile app, a mobile app, or game development - a of those are the easiest to do they ever have been.
AI isn't for millennials or even Gen z - it's for Alpha, they will be the first to truly understand what AI is and to use it as it will be used forever after. Til they adopt it, none of this really matters.
the prevailing argument against using AI is its current lack of potential.
Those things are inherently in tension, think of it as hiring a new employee straight out of undergrad. You are hiring them based largely on the employee they will become...with increasing expectations over time balanced against increasing variability in outcomes over time. However, if one year in that employee continues to suck at their current job, their long term potential doesn't really matter. Moreso, the long term potential is no longer credibly evidenced by the inability to progress at doing the current job.
This is an investment gone bad in the current state of things. It doesn't matter what might happen it matters what did. The investment was made based on the perception of astonishing velocity, and it seems that we may need to calibrate our spedometers.
https://xkcd.com/605/
It's really missing the point, the point is whether or not exponential growth is happening or not. It doesn't with husbands, it does with covid, time will tell about AI.
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The aspect of AI that isn't discussed enough is not what are those formerly employed going to do next, but rather that it will potentially represent the largest transfer of wealth in history as money which was going into employees' salaries is instead going to shareholders via those large companies who have the ability to produce the AIs (even if there are a host of small companies who act as an intermediate layer, such as the Israeli firm in this case).
I do think there is going to be a backlash because of our need for and desire for human connections, which AI won't provide. But that will become more expensive, and not the norm. Just like we can still buy farmer-fresh food but only a minority segment of the population can afford it because it costs 3x what is pushed as "food" at Walmart.
I encourage you to have a conversation with ChatGPT's advanced audio for a taste of what's to come. If you can, have someone talk to it in a relatively unpopular language like Afrikaans or even Icelandic--they will shit their pants.
People saying that this version is flawed but still amazing, so the next version is going to be perfect and mind blowing are going to be disappointed I think. The next version will be slightly better but still flawed. The version after that will be a touch better but annoyingly still not quite there. Constantly teasing you that full success is just around the corner while never quite getting there.
I think this is the key part.
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And by basic I mean grammar structure that was taught in like first chapters of a textbook.
Is ChatGPT any better at it? My take is that there simply aren't enough training materials.
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It doesn't help that the value of the news has been so thoroughly diminished by the news industry itself already. The trend lines of AI performance going up, and trust in journalism going down, are going to cross sooner than you think, and that's the point at which James and Rose will be back to stay.
> Carpenter Media Group announced earlier this month it had acquired another group of newspapers, Pamplin Media Group, in Oregon. The company now owns and manages 180 newspapers in the United States and Canada.
> “We are committed to Everett, The Herald and all who have a stake in its success,” Chairman Todd Carpenter said. “We have deep sympathy for those affected by these changes and will work hard with each of them to see they are well-compensated through a transition period that helps them move forward in a positive way.
“Our responsibility to the community and our readers requires us to make difficult business decisions, and then invest in and organize our team to move forward to produce a product that continues to improve and serve. Our track record in this process is good."
https://www.heraldnet.com/news/this-breaks-my-heart-roughly-...
would be very interested to see todd carpenter's data on that last point.
edit - the carpenter media group does not have a wikipedia entry, but the companies it owns do. interesting
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamplin_Media_Group
Any ten seconds of that clip will do though, really.
And yes, it's really bad. No idea how someone could think this could replace a human.