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Steve Shives roasts A.I. "audio overview" [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-06-18
You have to use artificial intelligence, whether you want to or not. And if you don’t use A.I., companies will find a way to use A.I. on your behalf.
A couple of weeks ago, I got an e-mail saying that podcasters had created a podcast about a paper I wrote. I was skeptical, but also curious. So I started to listen. The podcasters seemed genuinely interested in my paper and the topic of my paper. Very flattering, right?
Something was off, though. There was no promo code for some potentially irrelevant product, for starters. There were also some fairly glaring missed opportunities for including existing audio excerpts, or at least placeholders into which I could edit in such excerpts.
I started to suspect that maybe no actual human beings had read my paper. Instead, an A.I. was told to read my paper and create a podcast about it.
On a purely technical level, the podcast was impressive. The voices sounded good and natural, much better than anything that was available to Stephen Hawking. For the most part, the A.I. seemed to understand what I had written and presented it fairly accurately.
But this was not something I asked for, this is not something I thought I needed, and this is still something I don’t think I need. I can think of a couple of use cases for other people, but I can’t really think of any reason why I would want A.I. to summarize something I wrote and package it as a podcast that ultimately feels very generic, like an average of existing podcasts minus the promo codes.
I forgot about this whole business. And then I saw this video from Steve Shives last night.
x YouTube Video
What’s your take? Can you see yourself using Gemini AI’s audio overview feature? If not, can you think of any use cases for anyone else?
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