The latest innovation in artificial intelligence has made podcasting easier, but differentiating between humans and artificial intelligence even harder.
A new text-to-voice feature of Google's AI-powered software NotebookLM can transform written words, such as news articles or blog posts, into an artificially generated conversation between two AI hosts.
The result is "so natural and realistic that there is no way you'd believe you weren't listening to two real people talking", said TechRadar senior editor Graham Barlow, who generated an eight-minute podcast from a blog post. After listening, "the world simply wasn't the same any more; I no longer had confidence that I could tell what was real and what wasn't".
Google launched NotebookLM last year as a research tool, to help users summarise notes and other documents. It already uses Google's AI model Gemini 1.5, said The Verge. This latest experimental feature is "like an audio version of that", having AI hosts "summarise your material, make connections between topics and banter back and forth".
But the rapid emergence of AI-generated audio has sparked fears that it could upend the human industry. "I am not at all religious, but when I discovered this tool I wanted to scream 'this is the devil's work!'," said ZDNET contributing editor David Gewirtz. The "voice fidelity", the appropriate use of colloquialisms, the "completely organic nature of their banter and the fact that there even was banter" … the final product is "indistinguishable from a real broadcast". |