The Crisis of Narration
Reflections in audio of Byung-Chul Han's Essay: an AI Podcast
After writing my review of Han’s Crisis of Narration, I performed a little Notebook experiment and went into Google Notebook Studio to create an AI-generated podcast. This may somewhat at odds with the reflection piece, and Han’s critique on the demise of narration.
However, we live in a time of AI exploration and the opportunity to remedy the erosion of the story and only our experimentation may bring us the reinvention of and remedy for narration and ‘the story’, multi-modally. So why not start with taken a written piece into a little AI podcast experiment?
Keeping prompts succinct and extremely simple and going through a few refinement cycles started off by:
Having prompted for a male host and female speaker, Notebook LM couldn’t help itself and reveal its bias openly, reverting to the opposite.
I requested a British accent and manner of delivery, rather than the exuberance of Notebook LM’s US, white speaker, preference. Although the list of languages in Notebook LM is exhaustive, British English is not fully embraced. I had to give up after a few tries. I did not pursue other flavours of the English language.
The first attempt attributed the whole piece to Han. I’m sure he would not have been too happy about that. I had to point out that Han was not the author of this reflection piece and that the attribution needed some attention. Notebook LM did comply without any struggles.
The included podcast, based on my TrAIN Of Thought substack post by the same title is the result of a dialogue with Notebook LM.
Whilst not perfect and still biased to US speakers and culture, the result was not entirely disappointing.
Here to listen
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