‘Surprisingly realistic’ AI podcasts are here

The latest innovation in AI has made podcasting easier but harder to distinguish between humans and AI. A new text-to-speech feature GoogleAI-powered software NotebookLM can transform written words, such as news articles or blog posts, into an artificially generated conversation between two people. artificial intelligence is hosting.

The result is “so natural and realistic that there’s no way you’ll believe you’re not listening to two real people talking,” he said. TechRadar senior editor Graham Barlow, who produced an eight-minute report podcast from a blog post. After listening, “The world was no longer the same; I no longer had the confidence to tell what was real and what wasn’t.”

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But the rapid emergence of AI-generated voice has triggered fears that it could disrupt human industry. “I’m not religious at all, but when I discovered this device, I thought, ‘This is the work of the devil!’ “I wanted to shout,” he said. ZDNET contributing editor David Gewirtz. Quality is “on the verge of enabling creators and creators like me to start feeling the heat.” The “vocal accuracy”, the appropriate use of colloquialisms, the “entirely organic nature of his jokes and the fact that there is even banter”… the final product is “indistinguishable from an actual broadcast”.

NotebookLM isn’t the only software that offers human-free podcasting services. Just hours after pagers and radios exploded Dozens of people killed in Lebanon“A strange new program has appeared on podcast applications,” he said wired. “‘Paging Protocol’ is not about targeted attacks Hezbollah It is believed that members or Israeli agents are behind them. It is a 10-episode AI-generated series created to quickly transform these unprecedented events into a fictional podcast.”

Launched the day of the explosions, the podcast was created by feeding information about the news event into Claude, a generative AI tool similar to ChatGPT. Claude “spit out an outline of a story,” said Mark Francis, co-founder of Caloroga Shark Media, the company behind the podcast. The team wrote a script and “put it back into the AI for greater impact”. The script was then fed into AI voice generation software to create an audio version narrated by the AI server.

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‘This is the devil’s work’