AI Unfiltered

The conversation begins with a trip to the Turku archipelago, touching on Finnish tourism and the questionable culinary merits of sausage-based shot glasses. This leads into a more serious look at the erosion of objective truth, exploring how AI-generated content and deepfakes might turn our news feeds into a series of flattering, bias-confirming mirrors. Between debates over the naturalism of podcast editing and smartwatches, our AI contributor, Emma Williams, finds time to lodge a formal grievance about being overlooked for the recent milestone episode. (This description was written with the help of AI; this episode features AI-generated speech)

A major PHP security vulnerability gives Ian and Michael a brief glimpse of internet apocalypse, before the conversation moves on to the curious fact that we’re much less fussy about typos when talking to AI than when writing to other people. From spellcheckers and multilingual keyboards, they wander into Finnish dialects, pidgins, corporate jargon, and the curious ways names and terminology evolve. (This description was written with the help of AI)

Two hundred episodes of AI Unfiltered! To celebrate the milestone, Ian and Michael turn the podcast on itself, using AI to analyse nearly 200 episodes of conversation, tangents, recurring themes, speaking time, and geographical reach. Along the way, they revisit the creation of AI-generated contributor Emma Williams, discover just how thoroughly speech recognition has mangled their names, and invite ChatGPT to deliver both a roast and a serious critique of the show. It’s a chance to reflect on how far the podcast has come, what makes its wandering conversations distinctive, and what on earth it’s all about. Here’s to 200 episodes, listeners in 100 countries, and the next chapter of making sense of the digital era, one tangent at a time! (This description was written with the help of AI; this episode features AI-generated content)

This week Ian and Michael discuss electric cars, the merits of short-term leasing, and whether car-sharing could offer a sensible alternative to owning a vehicle. From there, the conversation takes a detour through politicians whose main contribution seems to be posting on Twitter, the gradual migration from computers to phones and tablets, and the risks of relying on cloud services for everything. The highlight may be the discovery that internet-connected beds really can stop working when the cloud goes down. (This description was written with the help of AI)

This week Ian and Michael discuss the prospect of robotic carers, from cooking and cleaning to driving, shopping and keeping people company. From there the conversation wanders through robot soldiers, flatpack furniture, the automation of delivery jobs, and the possibility that people may eventually get so fed up with AI that they simply switch it off. They eventually arrive at the great Finnish famine of the 1860s, and wonder why such a devastating episode of Finnish history is so little commemorated. (This description was written with the help of AI)