ANo one who grew up with The Terminator or The Matrix knows that AI poses an existential threat to humanity. As robots became more intelligent, it was thought, they would inevitably replace us, either by destroying us or mining us for resources. However, the age of AI has now arrived and the truth is so much worse than anything in dystopian science fiction. You see, AI decided to give us more podcasts.

The world needs more podcasts like it needs a horse to kick it. Everyone has a podcast. Gyles Brandreth has a podcast. Paul Giamatti has a podcast. Your four or five worst friends all have podcasts and chatter endlessly in an environment that is already overcrowded with too much content. Now Google has just created the first AI podcasts, and they are as fascinating as they are unnecessary.

NotebookLM is basically ChatGPT, but for audio. You upload a bunch of sources – documents, websites, YouTube videos – and it analyzes all the information and then creates a confusingly human-sounding discussion about it. Two presenters, a man and a woman, are talking in an eerie podcast style about the topic you’ve given them. Her speech is full of ums and ahs. They hesitate, they talk over each other. They talk, so to speak The all the time? It’s so imperfect that it’s easy to forget that you’re listening to a bunch of robots repeating crap from the internet.

NotebookLM describes itself as a learning resource, which makes sense. If you want to summarize a lot of information in a way that holds your attention, or if you want to absorb information during a run or ride, then this is great. Soon people will be preparing for exams by plugging their textbooks into something like NotebookLM and then fiddling around with earbuds.

But if you want to create a podcast on any topic, that’s possible too. Rivals premieres on Disney+ this week and has already garnered a lot of coverage, so I posted a few interviews on the show to see what the hosts would come up with. The resulting five-minute podcast was scary.

In it, the hosts treated the show as if it were something they came across spontaneously. “All right, get ready, because we’re diving into Rivals!” announces the presenter at the beginning, while her male counterpart releases a volley of pleasant murmurs. They discuss the attitudes of the 1980s, their sexism and racism, and praise the show’s willingness to engage with them head-on. It sounds like Rivals is a brilliant, groundbreaking piece of groundbreaking television.

The problem is that it’s not like that at all. It’s camp fun with lots of nudity. However, the sources I plugged in were interviews with actors from the series, who are understandably more interested in talking about real-world issues than what it was like to constantly act out their characters. And that’s exactly what the podcast is. A more accurate version would have incorporated all available information – interviews, reviews, show notes, perhaps even the full source novel – and created a 360-degree view of the series. Instead, it was an extremely confident presentation based on limited information. And in the end, isn’t that all a podcast is?

After that, I decided to make the kind of podcast the world needs least, which is two people babbling about conspiracy theories. Admittedly, I could have done a better job here by finding flat earth forums and Facebook groups made up of people who still blame the 5G masts for Covid. Instead, I just pasted in some stuff from Wikipedia and Reddit and was surprised at how measured the sound of the resulting audio was. In the end, it was a pretty insightful 14-minute episode about things like confirmation bias and the human impulse to understand the world. At one point they start listing common conspiracy theories, but stop because, as the male host says, “my brain would literally explode.”

The existence of NotebookLM raises many questions. Will it make people too lazy to read their own research? Can you trust him completely? What will humanity do with all the millions of newly unemployed podcasters roaming the earth? But as a way to convey information naturally to beginners, it’s kind of brilliant.