This audio is entirely created by AI. I tasked the AI to analyse and humanise my recent article on Mark Zuckerberg’s change of view on social media, local news and politics.
Why on Earth am I doing that? Why would I let bot reconfigure my years of journalistic experience? Isn’t that what our industry is dead set against?
I get asked that a lot, and this is my answer.
Meta’s moving away from media, and while Google’s monopoly is being broken, it may still be years before the appeals are done and ads are meaningful again.
In the meantime, publishers large, small, and everywhere, need to keep the lights on. That means too few are focused on trying new things or experimenting with what comes next.
We need to reforge the media, return it to rude health, and that requires vision, collaboration, courage, creativity, and some occasional risk.
I have time to do that.
It’s why I am exploring whether the emerging technology of conversational AI - a sub-feature of Google’s Notebook LM - could be part of that future.
It’s not that I hate news and media, it’s that I love it. That’s why I need to try.
I’ve made the case that news-telling’s future will be audio and visual for more than a decade. Words and pictures on paper or online just doesn’t pay the bills at the moment.
That means our journalism will need to be increasingly discovered through voice, and AI prompts, and not via Google’s outmoded blue links.
Our stories need to be delivered to billions through innovative new formats, often spoken by AI bots, and then, as generative AI improves, more and more through video.
The best media will be that which most closely mimics natural human communication, which is via speech and vision.
That’s where we are headed, and that’s why I am giving Notebook LM a chance to create this podcast series.
To test it out, I took an article I wrote recently about Zuck 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 let the AI have its go.
Unlike my first go, I did go back to tailor this one.
I asked it to remove some repetition, prompted it to remain focused on local news and politics, and to write it as if a review of my article. This is what it came up with.
How does it make you feel? Like it, loathe it, fearful, hate it? Share 👇
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