AI Podcast 3.0: Dial M for Mechanization

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 29.8K Ratings

🗓️ 2 June 2023

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It's the thrilling conclusion to our three-part series on AI — the world premiere of the first episode of Planet Money written by AI. In Part 1 of this series, we taught AI how to write an original Planet Money script by feeding it real research and interviews. In Part 2, we used AI to clone the voice of our former colleague Robert Smith.

Now, we've put everything together into a 15-minute Planet Money episode. And we've gathered some of our co-hosts to listen along.

So, how did the AI do? You'll have to listen to learn what went surprisingly well, where it fell short, and hear reactions from the real-life hosts whose jobs could be at risk of being replaced by the machines.

(This is part three of a three-part series. Click here for part one and for part two of our series.)

This episode was produced by Emma Peaslee and Willa Rubin. It was engineered by James Willetts and fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Keith Romer edited this series and Jess Jiang is our acting executive producer.

Help support Planet Money and get bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:06.2	Hello and welcome to Planet Money, I'm Jeff Guau, and I'm Kenny Malone, and Jeff,
0:10.6	here we are, the big day, the third and final part of our Artificial Intelligence
0:15.9	series.
0:16.9	That's right, it is the world premiere of the first ever Planet Money episode written entirely
0:22.9	by Artificial Intelligence.
0:25.1	Now was it a good idea to see if a computer could do our jobs?
0:29.3	Well, we're about to find out.
0:31.6	Yeah, so a quick recap of how we got here at least.
0:35.6	So in the first part of this series, we used an AI language model to write an entirely
0:41.7	new episode of Planet Money.
0:44.1	In the next part of the series, we created a synthetic voice clone of our beloved colleague
0:49.8	Robert Smith to help narrate the AI episode, and then we are ready to pull it all together.
0:55.9	So we had synthetic Robert read his half of the AI script, the real Kenny, read his
1:00.9	half of the scripts.
1:02.3	We stitched it all together, added a little music, a little polishing and sound design, and
1:07.9	boom, the first ever AI generated Planet Money episode was finished.
1:14.2	And then we gathered a little test audience.
1:17.0	Okay.
1:18.0	Do you want to sit, you are sitting, is that the preferred thing?
1:20.4	I'm sitting, do you think it's going to cause me to sit down in shock?
1:23.2	I don't know.
	...

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