Coming to grips with an AI-generated podcast

I opened up Teams one morning and found a message from a colleague at work: "Hey, Bernard. Check this out and let me know what you think."

It was an audio file and it took me about 20 seconds to know exactly what I was listening to. My colleague had uploaded one of my recent articles to Google Gemini and turned it into an 11-minute podcast featuring two AI voices (link below). The result was pretty remarkable. As another colleague commented, "What is really good is how well they have put in the conversation mannerisms into each person.?It sounds so authentic compared to the robotic feel of older versions."

What struck me as being truly remarkable, however, was not so much how slick the podcast sounded (although it certainly did) but how accurately the algorithm stitched together the concepts, starting from an original source (my article) and weaving in other content to flesh out the "conversation".

I also found it quite jarring.

I'm a proud content creator and have written over 120 long-form articles over the years. As Mark Jacobsen recently said in an interview with The Economist, “writing is thinking, in my view.” I agree. Through the process of writing, I attempt to distill what I have learned over the years into something coherent and hopefully useful (to me, and perhaps to others). As for all of us, what makes my reflections unique is that they are the result of the unique life that I have lived.

The long-form article is fast losing ground on social media. Infographics, podcasts and short videos have taken over and I’ve been encouraged to get onboard with those other formats. My own reflection process requires writing. It may be different for others, but what I come up with when I take the time to organize my thoughts in writing is better—more thorough, more nuanced, more thoughtful—than anything I could come up with on the fly. To me, this matters.

Writing for an audience is a difficult process but – as things that really matter to us often are – it is also a source of meaning and purpose. The fact that there is an audience for the words I write helps define that aspect of my life. By way of analogy, I wouldn’t be a teacher if I didn’t have students. How many facets of our lives, in a similar way, are defined in relation to others?

Now, an AI can take an article I wrote an turn it into a pretty impressive podcast. Does it matter to you if the content was created by an algorithm? As my colleague said cheerfully when I shared my dismay after listening to the podcast he had sent me: "The human being still makes the difference!" He meant by that me, the author of the article used by the AI to create the slick podcast, and it made me feel good for a solid two minutes.

The AI-generated podcast: https://bernardletendre.ca/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/bernard-letendre-cognitive-apprenticeship.wav