Antonym: The Undead Poet Society Edition

I predict an IP riot. Plus, I made an app and you can too. Maybe.

Dear Reader,

You might have seen Google’s NotebookLM and its ‘make-podcast-out-of-anything’ feature. If not, I’ll wait while you have a look - and then the follow-in existential crisis. 

Back? Good. 

Now imagine instead of the two chatty American co-hosts you can choose whoever you want to interview or be interviewed.

I predict an IP riot. 

Google won’t do it, and perhapss TV, but as Meta has proven, this amazing conversation-generating technology is actually easy to make. Expect a NotebookLM podcast clone soon. (I’ll lay a bet it already exists somewhere, so let me know if you have found it.)

Dead poet interviewed by undead radio host

OK, so we’re a little late for Halloween themes, but this story from the New York Times can be headlined in these gruesome terms..

A failing radio station Off Radio Krakow ran an AI experiment, featuring a simulated interview with a dead poet. It drew an audience - and then a backlash.  

In what seems like a last roll of the dice after running out of money, the station laid off all of its staff and tried running programmes with three AI personas, using ChatGPT and Elevensense. Things went wrong - wronger? - when they interviewed an AI version of a Nobel Prize Winning poet, who died in 2012, Wislawa Szymborska.

Apart from a lot of criticism about replacing human jobs (you get the sense there were no jobs to replace), the interview just wasn’t that good: 

Michal Rusinek, the head of a foundation that manages the late Nobel Prize winner’s literary estate, said he had given Off Radio Krakow permission to use Ms. Szymborska’s voice for the segment because the poet “had a sense of humour and would have found it funny.”

But he said the interview “was horrible” and put words in the poet’s mouth that she would never have used, making her sound “bland,” “naïve” and of “no interest whatsoever.” But that, he added, was heartening because “it shows that A.I. does not yet work” as well as humans. “If the interview had been really good,” he said, “it would be terrifying.” 

I made an app 

Just a little one. But it’s mine and it is real and alive on the internet. “Deployed”, “shipped” as techie types say. 

There are many ways to do this, but I ended up working with a website called Bolt. I decided to try and solve an irritating time-sucking task: Copying code from ChatGPT to Google Docs is tricky because formatting issues. This is frustrating when after spending significant time developing research or planning with AI it can feel deflating to applying styles to a document. Like driving to a city in a luxury electric car and then doing the last two miles in a clapped out diesel hatchback and not being able to find anywhere to park.

Making the thing was a case of telling it what I wanted in a chatbot, and then testing the results and telling it what I wanted changed. It was not a smooth experience, I ran into dead ends and had to keep taking things out and making things simpler to get something useful, but in the end there it was… 

The experience was not unlike this funny video that my brother - who very much can write code - sent me…

So what? 

I know that more technical friends, colleagues, and relatives have a very different experience, and are able to build impressive systems without actually writing code themselves. At Brilliant Noise, we’ve developed media planning, report writing and research apps that would have been out of our reach or taken days of developer time just a few months ago. 

• Will everyone make software?: The pace that these no-code tools are moving at means that the number of people who are able to build their own software to solve problems will grow quickly, just as developing AI literacy capabilities like image generation and prompt generation has spread through our mostly non-technical team, so will app development. 

• Very personal apps: The app I made yesterday was very specific. It does a task  in a way which will be used by me and my colleagues. We could adapt it for further use, but it would be unlikely to have much value – most people will be able to build their own. 

If you’d like to try making something yourself, Bolt is free. There are many others out there, but that’s the one that worked for me. I used this article from Adam Judelson’s newsletter as a guide. Just like working with AI on text or data, it pays to think through what you are doing first, rather than just diving in. Judelson used the Claude LLM, which I did at first, but got there faster with Bolt. Bolt also allowed me to publish the app to a website so I could bookmark it on my browser for whenever I need it. 

(NB: I’m aware there are some Chrome plug-ins and other workarounds for this use case, but none of them worked reliably in the way I wanted.)

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You can download the paper I wrote on AI literacy here, if you would like a more (gruff voice) serious look at the issues discussed in this newsletter. 

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Four-day week boosts Iceland economy 

Why are most of us sticking with five-day working weeks? Iceland's experiment with a shorter working week has added to the mountain of data about four-day week benefits and turned traditional notions of productivity on their head. Research shows that not only did workers maintain their pay, but the economy thrived, outpacing many of its European counterparts. Rethinking our work structures could lead to greater efficiency and satisfaction in the workplace. I hope productivity gains from AI will add momentum to this movement. 

Recommendations

Watch

Small Things Like These (In cinemas). 

Cillian Murphy is a coal delivery man in 1980s Ireland who witnesses the brutality of an institution that effectively imprisons and abuses young women who are pregnant outside of marriage. There’s a big issue here, but the film, based on a book by the supremely talented writer Claire Keegan, takes a small way into it. 

The big issue is the Magdalene Asylums system in Ireland, a scandal which continues to reveal crimes and tragedies by Christian organisations. The audience I watched it with gasped at a detail in a closing caption: the asylums – or laundries as they were sometimes called) only ended in 1998. 

The telling of the story feels at times like an organised crime thriller – warnings and incentives to silence from everyone – at others like The Zone of Interest, ordinary lives being lived next door to a terrible secret which is doggedly ignored by everyone around it. It seems to challenge the viewer: what terrible things do you “unsee” everyday?

See it in cinemas while you can. This is a dark gem of a film. 

For more on the Magdalene Asylums, The Economist has an article on why films like this are so important in spreading awareness about this story.

Sweetpea (NowTV/Sky)

This is a bit more upbeat than Small Things Like These, but also more gory. An ignored and bullied young woman snaps and becomes a serial killer. Hilarity ensues. And a spiralling, nightmarish plot. There’s about to be a second series, so a good time to rattle through the first six episode run. 

Read

The Siege, by Ben MacIntyre

Myth blurs memory. The explosive end to the Iranian embassy siege in 1980 and the sensationalist narratives in its aftermath exemplifies the phenomenon. The SAS became the most famous special forces brand in the world, Mrs Thatcher was re-cast as the Iron Lady, and British chests puffed with pride.

The Siege is a compelling exploration of this shocking historical moment, examined in detail and from multiple perspectives, deeply researched and well-written.

In a crisis, the over-reported drip-feed of facts can be as frustrating as it is captivating. Days crawled by before facts trickled out, months passed before fuller stories began to take shape.

I was 7 when these events occurred, but the news coverage was inescapable. In the following years, I remember less about the specifics than the evolving narratives and myths surrounding the event. It was a story I grew up with.

MacIntyre, drawing on newly unsealed records, SAS archives and four decades of accumulated evidence gives a balanced and compelling account. The book takes us inside the minds of embassy staff, the trapped visitors, the anxious negotiators, the soldiers poised for action. The book transcends mere special forces fandom, offering rich detail of the psychological and emotional experiences of the individual hostages, terrorists and authorities alike.

If you are curious about the history or the human experiences in an extreme situation, go ahead and read or listen to The Siege.

That’s all for this week, folks…

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Antony

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You can download the paper I wrote on AI literacy here, if you would like a more (gruff voice) serious look at the issues discussed in this newsletter. 

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