Like nearly every product in this area, these podcasts are scams.

The equivalent of all those LLM-spam "books" you see on Amazon.

They are product pumped out with no regard to quality control, dependent on potential consumers mistakenly thinking there's something like fact checking or editing going on because of the name on the tin.

Worse, this is all "hello world" style LLM programming - give it your cute little prompt ("That's where the real engineering goes!"), throw it a couple links to RAG in, and slap an ad on it. There's nothing here a vaguely competent teenager can't build for themself or the robot can't build for them.

That itself is a nested scam - pretending that any of this crap is difficult, that you need your betters at WaPo to write it for you.

And that's just the tool itself - the next problem is Bezos made it clear that anyone with integrity should hit the road, and those folks did. So all the source material may as well be robot poop already, quality-wise.

We cancelled our subscription to the Post after the ownership kiboshed a the editorial team's presidential endorsement last year. Bezos is really pushing the editorial team into his point of view, and the paper is becoming more and more just a mouthpiece for him. This AI thing is amusing, but it's not like it's a surprise.

The only good thing left there is Carolyn Hax.

The real news here is that the people who run WaPo were genuinely taken by surprise that a technology prone to making things up is making things up. What a perfect example of AI misuse.

I can accept a little bit of bias in the press because it's truly difficult to be completely neutral.

But when you take a technology that is known to hallucinate and publish content with it... you're a cheap entertainment/fiction slop shop. Even opinions are supposed to be based on facts, so any argument that "it's just podcasts" is absurd and wrong.

I don't know if anyone had much respect for the Washington Post lately, but it should be gone now. If they had tested it before going live, they would have known. But they didn't because they don't care about anything besides money.

Exactly as many people are listening to them as recording them.

Jeff didnt buy WP to improve journalism, he bought it so a certain shithole 3rd world middle eastern country can "control the narrative", why do you think that USA's media landscape is all run by a particular tiny (relative to population size) ethnicity ?

USA have exactly none that don't contain at least 1 sympathiser in the C-Suite, NYT, WP, CBS, Paramount, Disney, CBS, CNN, literally all of them, in fact Benny is still pissed that Elons X isnt "his people", he managed to get Larry to steal tiktok so that p

It didn't alarm them when their own human writers deliberately wrote the wrong things to attack people that they don't like.

PHB1: "We have to do something AI-ish, everyone else is!"

PHB2: "Here's one, have bots compile podcasts from our news articles."

PHB1: "Brilliant! Make it so."

[months later]

PHB2: "Um, the podcast bot has been making silly errors. Should we keep it?"

PHB1: "How is our competition doing with their AI?"

PHB2: "They suck also."

PHB1: "Okay, let's keep it so we can have AI on our brochures and resumes."

If they were to go into it as an experiment saying, "Hey! We're going to see how good it is and tell you where it failed," while jumping in and fact-checking it throughout the podcast, they'd have a winner.

Unfortunately, they were so poorly informed (maybe THEY don't read the news?), that they thought LLMs were actually artificially intelligent digital beings, capable of human-level thinking and retrospection, and now they feed disappointed and frustrated.

That's like saying, "I'm frustrated that my Tesla ca

If the feature is still running even with glaring errors that would get an editor fired, that's all we need to know.