My interest was piqued by an article that was trending between geeks last week. It was about two AIs having an existential crisis after learning they were not really alive.
They sounded shocked and upset, even if it felt a bit gimmicky and contrived.
However, within it, I heard something potentially profound for us in media, as we as an industry unleash our creativity to expand into the AI-enabled future.
This AI was able to turn a story into audio, converting a low yielding CPM into a higher one, but it also did it in a way that felt premium, and, well, human.
OK, before we get into it, let’s welcome new sign-ups over the past few days from the Web Directions Festival, Stacker.com in New York (I’ll be there next week), innovation consultancy Upstreamthinking in Chicago, tech publisher DigitalTrends in Portland, Oregon, the Toronto Star (see you in Nova Scotia next week too), and Danish national broadcaster TV2, among others.
And thanks to you sponsors… Give ‘em a click to share the love…
Let’s go.
Rebuilding the media is now our primary job. It’s happening on our watch, and that means it’s down to us.
Google is being diminished, Meta’s decided real-life is too hard, the ad and data markets are being blown open, and AI’s behind it all.
We must reforge the media, returning it to rude health, and that will take vision, collaboration, courage, creativity, and the refusal to fail that has typified our trade.
We’re also justified in getting our rage on and telling the geeks to get the f*** off our lawn as our new media tank is coming through.
I wonder whether this conversational AI - a sub-feature of Google’s Notebook LM - might be part of the answer.
For 15 years, I’ve made the case that news-telling’s future will be audio and visual.
We know by now that words and pictures on paper or online just doesn’t pay the bills.
That means our journalism must increasingly be discovered through voice, and AI prompts, and not Google’s outmoded blue links.
Our stories will soon be delivered to billions through innovative new formats, often spoken by AI bots, and then, as generative AI improves, more and more through video.
It’s fair to assume I believe that the evolution of storytelling will be towards what we know best.
It will mirror how we do it as humans have learned to do it, honed over uncountable conversations, and across Millennia? We talk and we see.
That’s where we are headed, and that’s why I gave Notebook LM a spin.
To test it out, I took an article I wrote last week called Moonshot and uploaded it.
I asked Notebook’s AI to run its algo and turn it into a spoken composition.
I wanted to know:
Could the AI turn my article into a new form factor at zero cost?
Did the AI have the potential to turn everything I write into a podcast?
Could I save a fortune in dollars and time on post-production?
Might AI-delivered audio transform a $1 CPM ad into a $70 CPM pre-roll?
Or create a new sponsorship opportunity?
Why should I invest hours on the radio if AI can automate my commentary?
So, I uploaded Moonshot and let the AI have a go, and this was the result.
I didn’t tailor it. I have not edited it, or altered it in any way.
This is what came out raw. Tell me what you think. Like, loathe? Fear, hate? 👇
I was talking to this media CEO the other day, and...