THE SPLIT: AI Podcast, Part 4
How is this even possible?
At the risk of sounding like Donald Trump proclaiming that no one knows what a smartphone app is, we, the authors of The Split, hereby admit that until not too long ago we did not know that it was possible to feed a document into a free program called NotebookLM (an Alphabet product) and, in a few minutes, be listening to a “podcast” about that document, “hosted” by two “human beings,” a “man” and a “woman.”
We couldn’t resist, and here we are doing it for the fourth time, this week feeding chapters 41-50 of The Split into NotebookLM.
Chapter 52 will be the final chapter of The Split—we started serializing the story last November, with the aim of posting the final chapter just before the election, and we’re sticking with the plan. Of course, way back when we started we had no idea we’d be able to enlist the aid of artificial intelligence to generate podcasts about our dystopian satire, but here we are in the future doing just that. Until now we’ve done blocks of ten chapters at a time, but there are no more 10-chapter blocks; we’re fresh out of chapters. So what we’re going to do is to skip next Friday’s podcast post, wait until Chapter 52 is up on Wonkette, then do a podcast in which the “man” and the “woman” talk about nothing but the last two chapters. And that will be The End.
You’ll notice that this current one is labeled “The Split Chapters 41-50 Take 3.” That’s not because the first and second takes contained several errors apiece—which they did—but because they were really, really long. One was about 22 minutes, the other something like 26. Too, too long! For the third take we instructed it to stay under 13 minutes, which it mercifully did. As is customary, there are a few mistakes in this one, but we’re giving it a pass. Hey, it’s just crazy-ass computer program, what do you expect?
To hear it, click on or copy this too, too long link and see what you think:
https://notebooklm.google.com/notebook/b0d6e887-db92-41c4-964c-27a5ead771ca/audio
Wonkette's THE SPLIT is a reader-supported dystopian novel.