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The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

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Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#251

Post by soulofmischief »

swyx wrote: post #244
vunderba wrote: post #5

Slightly tangential, but this is the reason I'm baffled why people think that AI-driven podcasts would ever be worth listening to. If you can find an LLM+TTS generated podcast with even a FRACTION of the infectious energy as something like Good Job Brain, Radio Lab, or Ask Me Another, then I'll eat my hat. I don't even own one. I'll drive to the nearest hat store, purchase the tallest stovetop hat that I can afford a…

> If you can find an LLM+TTS generated podcast with even a FRACTION of the infectious energy this is the wrong standard. there's a long tail of many many many many topics that a Radio Lab will never have the resources or critical mass or staff or turnaround time to cover. AI can serve the long tail like nothing you have ever seen. (because humans are expensive, and deservedly so, but our needs and wants are infinite)

I think you make a good connection with the long tail. That will definitely be one of AI's triumphs. People who don't understand this, don't understand what's been happening to media production and consumption over the last 40 years.

Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#252

Post by [deleted] »

datahack wrote: post #82

While I enjoyed the article, it’s just another in a line of the same article with different flavors and authors that all have the same fundamental error. The prevailing counterargument against AI consistently hinges on the present state of AI rather than the trajectory of its development: but what matters is not the capabilities of AI as they exist today, but the astonishing velocity at which those capabilities are e…

[deleted]

Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#253

Post by Spivak »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #96
keiferski wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

videos of other people talking about how they do their make up and pick their outfits. Doesn't seem that much different from a fashion magazine interview about what X celebrity likes to wear. Those have been around for quite a long time.

At least in the past people were celebrities for a reason other than the number of followers they had on social. It'd be nice if we could return to a time when people were part of the public discourse because they were good at something (or their parents were rich, sadly).

But you ignored why they have so many followers in the first place. It's because they're entertaining to watch/listen to, which for someone in the entertainment business it's as on the nose as you can possibly get. I think absurd to say they're not good at something because I for sure don't have what it takes to record/edit that many videos all day and be that charismatic all the time.

Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#254

Post by vunderba »

swyx wrote: post #244
vunderba wrote: post #5

Slightly tangential, but this is the reason I'm baffled why people think that AI-driven podcasts would ever be worth listening to. If you can find an LLM+TTS generated podcast with even a FRACTION of the infectious energy as something like Good Job Brain, Radio Lab, or Ask Me Another, then I'll eat my hat. I don't even own one. I'll drive to the nearest hat store, purchase the tallest stovetop hat that I can afford a…

> If you can find an LLM+TTS generated podcast with even a FRACTION of the infectious energy this is the wrong standard. there's a long tail of many many many many topics that a Radio Lab will never have the resources or critical mass or staff or turnaround time to cover. AI can serve the long tail like nothing you have ever seen. (because humans are expensive, and deservedly so, but our needs and wants are infinite)

You're not wrong, but your argument seems to boil down to "something is better than nothing" and I suppose I disagree. If there's not a podcast about a particular topic that I'm interested in, I would rather go find a curated expose of that topic via a different medium, such as longform journalism.

Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#255

Post by adgjlsfhk1 »

tokioyoyo wrote: post #183
mvdtnz wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Isn't it just a matter of time until AI gets trained to... blah blah yes "it's a matter or time" for every one of the myriad shortcomings of the technology to be resolved. If you're a true believer everything is "a matter of time". I'll believe it when I see it.

Depends on the technology. It’s hard to look at the progress from December of 2022 till today, and think we won’t go further. Image generation is getting better every day. Parts of the video generation pipelines are also advancing.

the counterpoint is since then we've killed all the easy ways to scale. the datasets can't get bigger because it's already the whole Internet. model sizes can't grow that much because you start running into RAM constraints. efficiency definitely can be improved, but probably not more than 100x on our current architectures.

Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#256

Post by vunderba »

ben_w wrote: post #158
vunderba wrote: post #5

Slightly tangential, but this is the reason I'm baffled why people think that AI-driven podcasts would ever be worth listening to. If you can find an LLM+TTS generated podcast with even a FRACTION of the infectious energy as something like Good Job Brain, Radio Lab, or Ask Me Another, then I'll eat my hat. I don't even own one. I'll drive to the nearest hat store, purchase the tallest stovetop hat that I can afford a…

Infectious energy is something I expect faked relatively easily, though I don't know your examples and doing it in AI might be a "first 90%" situation just like self driving cars; for me the problem is that they're fairly mediocre at the actual script — based on me putting a blog post I wrote into one and listening to what came out. Given how many podcasts exist, I think you need to be at least 2 standard deviations…

I probably should've clarified that by infectious energy I wasn't so much referring to the vocal aspect as I was the overall quality, interaction between the hosts, and pithiness / wit.

Having experimented with many LLMs (mixtral, sonnet, ChatGPT, Llama, etc.), the coherence is for the most part on point, but their capacity for novelty has been found wanting irrespective of how I tuned the top_k, temperature, or prompts.

That being said, I've seen some very impressive examples of style transference even conveying emotional range in some of the SOTA TTS systems.

Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#257

Post by lupusreal »

simplyluke wrote: post #108
mjr00 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The younger generation loves short-form, to-the-point stuff. Which is the exact opposite of what the current crop of GenAI makes. In a tiktok video, every sentence, every word counts because there's a time limit. If people don't engage with your content in the first 3 seconds, it's worthless. The video linked in another post starts off with 15 seconds of complete fluff. You'd have better engagement if you have a guy…

What's funny is every GenAI "incredible email/essay" would be better communicated with the prompt used to generate it.

Write a comment explaining that the ostensibly simple task of writing a dozen or so thank you letters for those socks/etc you received for Christmas can, for some people, be an excruciating task that takes weeks to complete, but with the aid of LLMs can easily be done in an hour.

On second thought, you're right. That was easy.

Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#258

Post by mywacaday »

vunderba wrote: post #5

Slightly tangential, but this is the reason I'm baffled why people think that AI-driven podcasts would ever be worth listening to. If you can find an LLM+TTS generated podcast with even a FRACTION of the infectious energy as something like Good Job Brain, Radio Lab, or Ask Me Another, then I'll eat my hat. I don't even own one. I'll drive to the nearest hat store, purchase the tallest stovetop hat that I can afford a…

I only discovered https://notebooklm.google.com/ today, as an experiment i threw in a dry EU directive, https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL... and got it to generate a podcast that was 20 mins long and was a good intro to the directive and natural to listen to. It won't replace podcasts that require creativity but as a tool to summarize info into a digestible format I'll most definitely be using it again.

Re: The AI reporter that took my old job just got fired

#259

Post by jamiek88 »

AnthonBerg wrote: post #217
namaria wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Novelty grabs people's attention. A system based on the statistical analysis of past content won't do novelty. This seems like a very basic issue to me.

A system that digs out undiscovered mechanisms to drape novelty on based on where the statistical analysis says it’s already been, that would do it though.

Sounds horrifying. The TikTok algorithm is scary enough
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