A Different, Perhaps Scary, Sort of Deep Dive
Once again, the Boston Globe Ideas section has led me to dabble in the world of AI. Readers of my poetic musings may recall that I posted an AI-generated song about an Iceland vacation (hear it again by clicking on this link to that post and then scrolling to the bottom of the page). This newest article in the Globe outlined concerns when an AI bot hides the fact that it’s not human. Should the reader or listener believe that the bot is indeed human, the empathetic connection which arises could lead the actual human seduced by the bot down some horrific path.
The Globe article went on to provide a vivid example, not so much of the horrific path, but certainly of the seduction. Google now allows you to feed its AI engine with any text and it will generate what it calls an “Audio Overview” of the text’s contents. In actuality, the audio overview sounds for all the world like a podcast, with two “human” co-hosts.
Intrepid me, I just had to try this out for myself. I can report first of all that the process of creating the podcast couldn’t have been simpler. I visited a Google site called NotebookLM, uploaded a text file of another prior Substack post of mine, responded positively to the prompt to generate an Audio Overview, and voila, a 10+ minute podcast was the result. The post I picked was one I thought might challenge the AI. In it, I took a random journey through a number of ideas that loosely centered upon trying (and failing) to find a word for a small book of poetry by a single poet as opposed to a collection or anthology.
Below, you can hear the podcast for yourself. The good news for us humans is that the AI makes just enough wrong wonky AI-type errors that we can still feel one step ahead of it. The much more mixed news is that it’s pretty fascinating to hear two “people” having an animated conversation about my article. Finally, I’ll leave it for you to find out whether the podcast actually attempts to provide a word for the small poetry book.
As always, I invite you to comment below.