Comment by IdiotSavage
3 hours ago
Guys, this is not replacing your favorite station, you don't have to listen to it. It's an experiment.
If you scroll down a bit, there are various audio snippets of interesting dialogue the models produced. I think it's interesting to see in which ways the models fail and that they actually produce some good stuff once in a while.
> this is not replacing your favorite station
My favorite radio station was replaced years ago by an automated playlist. They just kept playing the same 5-6 songs that were popular on the station in the 1990s.
It was fun for about 2 hours before I realized the station was devoid of all the personality that made it worth listening to when I was younger.
Experiment: "We got AI to do things and it did weird stuff sometimes".
Brilliant! Amazing! I'm glad ~4 years down the line we're still re-discovering Ha Ha Funny Output.
At this point I think many of us are similarly exhausted by this sort of trite exercise. I really don't need some VC backed startup to show me this sort of output any more, especially when the output in question is obviously boring and substandard.
> I'm glad ~4 years down the line we're still re-discovering Ha Ha Funny Output
Four years or forty millennia? So a certain extent, all whimsical art is “haha funny” result.
Yea what are they trying to test? Where is the hypothesis?
They're trying to test if it's good enough to replaced the few remaining paid radio/streaming DJs yet.
How is this any worse than I Heart Radio? You can have your radio experience pushed to you by a major corporation, or an LLM.
iHeartRadio is not doing anything. A person at iHeartRadio is doing the work. Even if it’s automated, at some point a person handled it.
A person at IHeartRadio is doing the work the corporation tells them to do. do you think they want to play Hotel California on loop all day long?
2 replies →
The only way that anyone be worried about this slop replacing actual good human run radio is if they don't understand why people like radio & music in the first place.
And what hypothesis exactly is the experiment testing? Because it doesn't really seem like there is any new or interesting information learned from this.
I think you're talking about some Platonic ideal that just doesn't exist anymore.
Streaming services such as Spotify are increasingly filled with AI-generated songs and the average consumer doesn't seem to mind because we're not listening intently in the first place: it's just a background track we're not really paying attention to. I'm pretty sure that radio execs are looking at that and are taking notes.
For talk radio... if I had a penny every time someone on HN brought up that they're enjoying NotebookLM-generated slopcasts, I'd have a neat pile of coin. And I think it's the same story: most people listen to podcasts just to kill time. Soothing, zero-calorie LLM banter will do.