from Hacker News

HackerFM – An AI Generated HN Podcast Using the New ChatGPT API

by thewarrior on 3/2/23, 12:13 AM with 156 comments

• by TaylorAlexander on 3/2/23, 2:41 AM

  "I'm glad OpenAI is committed to refining its API terms of service to better meet the needs of developers."

  "Yes, it's important to make sure developers have the tools they need to create innovative products with these models."

  "Oh look, I found an interesting article on thoriumsim.com about a star ship bridge simulator called Thorim Nova."

  "Hmm, sounds interesting let's read it."

  Absolutely painful. I would love something that summarizes the articles and discussion without pretending to be a conversation between two people. I mean it says it is AI generated but they are adding all this conversational fluff which really does not work for me.

  It is interesting to see these pieces come together but I want to tear my ears out of my head when I hear things like "Yes, it's important to make sure developers have the tools they need to create innovative products with these models." or just repeatedly adding the word "interesting" to summaries of articles.

  Please just give me a bog standard summary in audio form without this faux commentary. I do not find the "insights" of ChatGPT worthwhile.

• by ryandrake on 3/2/23, 12:59 AM

  I would love to hear the podcasters accept "phone calls from listeners" which are also AI generated but trained from the HN articles' comments :-)

• by breakpointalpha on 3/2/23, 12:27 AM

  The quality of the voices here is striking.

  If I wasn't clued in, I probably wouldn't know these weren't human. At least the male voice sounds slightly more natural to me.

• by sublinear on 3/2/23, 1:55 AM

  This is technically very impressive, but it's worth pointing out that podcasts much better than this fail to build an audience all the time.

  I also feel like every application of ChatGPT seems to completely miss the point of the media it mimics. Podcasts are not merely coherent voices talking to each other. Getting rid of human presenters is literally soulless. People already don't listen for much subtler reasons. Entertainers get canceled, media companies get boycotted, bias divides audiences, etc.

  That's not going away with or without AI. There is no "tweaking" the training without putting humans right back into the equation and probably making production way more expensive than it's worth. There is no scalability payoff either. Who wants to listen to the same podcast cloned a million times with just replaced voices? We already have this problem with podcasts today and it kills any interest to consume it.

• by pcvonz on 3/2/23, 4:36 AM

  There is a great Miyazaki video where some students showcase some AI tech that generates animations. He ends the talk really disheartened by the experience -- saying something to the effect that he thinks people are losing faith in themselves. I'd never listen to something that is AI generated.

  When my favorite podcast ended it felt like I lost touch with a group of friends, this ain't going to have that sort of impact on me. Pass.

• by jacobsenscott on 3/2/23, 1:03 AM

  Fun, but hard to listen to for more than a few minutes. Slow and repetitive, and full of factual errors.

• by saurik on 3/2/23, 1:19 AM

  Is there a reason the voices are so slow? This is even slower than people who are trying to talk slow, and it feels so out of place... there is the speed setting, and 1.2x makes the speech sound way more like an actual human.

• by marcodiego on 3/2/23, 12:40 AM

  Looks like automated news is finally achieved. I remember in the early 2000's how I became impressed by Ananova and it wasn't even close to fully automated. This one seems to work really well.

• by narrator on 3/2/23, 2:11 AM

  It's funny how these two can talk about "starship bridge simulators" or "gnu poke" like they are super enthusiasts. I think one of the key personality characteristics of ChatGPT is its endless enthusiasm for stuff that can be incredibly geeky, niche, weird or boring to most people.

  "Sounds like super useful pickles for those who work with binary files!"

• by fogleman on 3/2/23, 1:06 AM

  lol, she pronounced GitHub like git hoob

  Someday the AI will introduce mistakes on purpose to seem more human like.

• by gfody on 3/2/23, 1:57 AM

  Laura and Zod sound remarkably similar to the narrators in this audible I recently listened to called After On: A Novel of Silicon Valley (not recommending it!) and I seriously wonder if the whole book wasn't narrated by AI.. it's not the first audible that made me wonder.

• by pondemic on 3/2/23, 3:28 AM

  Reading the submission headline, I thought this might generate the podcast using comments.

  I've found myself wanting to listen to HN comment threads, as I'm one of those people who derives more value and entertainment from the comments than I do from the actual submissions a lot of the time! I envision a voice-controlled way to navigate through threads too. Basically an accessibility narrator on steroids.

  I wonder if anyone else has ever been interested in something like this. Getting good voices to read like this podcast would make it that much more fun, so thanks for getting me really hot and bothered :)

  Guess if no one does it soon I'll have to build it myself!

• by consumer451 on 3/2/23, 12:53 AM

  Nice!

  I would really like to have a timestamp to click in the story listing.

  This would begin playing the audio at that story.

• by xtracto on 3/2/23, 12:33 AM

  This has a lot of potential. It becomes a bit repetitive after the 3rd or 4th article. But overall I think I could listen to it every day for 20 mins.

• by nico on 3/2/23, 6:06 AM

  Amazing! To make it more fun, you could use famous fake hosts with very good voices, take a look at the stuff people have done on this Reddit sub: https://www.reddit.com/r/AIVoiceMemes/

  There’s some really funny stuff there, the voices are not perfect, but have a lot of expression.

• by sasas on 3/2/23, 4:42 AM

  I can't help but think that there will be almost certainty that in the near future it will be near impossible to distinguish the difference between human generated and machine generated media.

  While this technical demonstration is a long way from replacing "real podcasts", it's just the very beginning.

  What are the implications here?

• by TOMDM on 3/2/23, 1:45 AM

  I'm so close to liking this.

  If I could choose a preference for personality and voice, I'd probably be sold.

  Any affiliation with https://old.reddit.com/r/airadio/ ?

• by tkgally on 3/2/23, 7:25 AM

  Overall I was impressed. I would have no resistance to listening to something like this regularly if there were less banter and if it were better tailored to the eclectic variety of Hacker News stories.

  I enjoy reading Hacker News even though I don’t have the background to understand most of the stories, because I can easily skip to stories I am interested in. With the podcast, I got stuck listening to everything, including quite a few stories I didn’t understand. Either the podcast needs to focus more on stories of general interest, or it needs to explain the context and significance of the technical stories better.

• by issung on 3/2/23, 12:56 AM

  Takes everything I enjoy about HN away, bravo!

• by programmarchy on 3/2/23, 1:04 AM

  This is pretty wild. Eerie how relatable the hosts are, talking about where they’re from, etc. There is an uncanny valley feel to it though. For example, Laura said GitHoob breaking the “illusion”.

• by dentalperson on 3/2/23, 2:44 AM

  How do they get ChatGPT not to hallucinate stuff about the articles? Everything seems fairly accurate, which is not my experience with ChatGPT when talking about technical things. Is it heavily curated/edited by humans? I noticed that the text often comes out verbatim from the articles, perhaps this indicates a clever prompt that keeps things closer to the truth by requiring verbatim output.

• by indigodaddy on 3/2/23, 1:43 AM

  This is kind of incredible and groundbreaking tbh. Perhaps it’s just mostly the quality of the TTS. 1.2x does sound perfect..

• by doodlesdev on 3/2/23, 1:02 AM

  Want to see this appearing tomorrow in HackerFM

• by snickerer on 3/2/23, 8:47 AM

  Dear HackerFM developers, this is an entertaining project. But please don't simulate brain-dead dialogues from US commercial TV, but a critical discussion of the articles. With different points of view. You already have two panelists, why don't you use that for an exchange of arguments?

• by klondike_klive on 3/2/23, 10:35 AM

  I wonder if this could be a good thing to have on in the background for mild mental stimulation while I'm working - not too interesting or I'll be too distracted to work, but realistic enough to fade into the background without feeling I missed something and have to rewind (again).

• by d4rkp4ttern on 3/2/23, 2:02 PM

  What none of the text to speech generators seem to get right is — the aspects that make real human podcasts easier to listen to: hesitations, rephrasing, pauses, variation in speed, intonation etc.

  I have yet to see something like this. Something less “perfect” sounding than say the google maps voice.

• by harvie on 3/2/23, 9:14 AM

  Maybe they will soon be able to give some emotion and randomness to the text-to-speech engines to make the tone less boring... I think models like GPT can now detect different emotions in the input text, so it might be used to tune different tone for each sentence.

• by thefourthchime on 3/2/23, 1:01 AM

  Nice work! can you detail a bit about how you made this? Do the models actually talk to each other?

• by signaru on 3/2/23, 8:15 AM

  In case I missed it, I just wish it had a volume control.

  I'm listening on a laptop and would rather not adjust the system volume and affect all other apps with sound.

  Otherwise, the convenience of audio format makes it among the interesting uses of AI that I've seen.

• by sberens on 3/2/23, 3:20 AM

  I guess it's time for me to put prompt injection attacks into my submissions

• by rezonant on 3/2/23, 2:21 AM

  This is mindblowing, to be honest, even if it makes perfect sense that it should be possible to do, the result is quite impressive.

  It's basically a headline reader with some fluff, but it does a great job at that and there are whole teams of real humans providing such podcasts today, so that's saying something.

  It can get weird or even a little broken though. See timestamp 09:50 of the Feb 23 2022 episode:

  Laura: So, we're gonna talk about an article called Generic Dynamic Array in 60 lines of C that can be found on gist.github.com.

  Zod: Alright, shall we read the article?

  Laura (voice 2, almost a different voice): Sure, let me share it here.

  Laura (voice 1): "Laura reads the article." <this is verbatim in the podcast>

  Laura (voice 1): OK, so that was the article. What do you think about it?

  Zod: I think it's interesting that you can define a generic dynamic array in such a small amount of code...

• by bandyaboot on 3/2/23, 1:47 AM

  Interesting in theory. The world’s best cure for insomnia in practice.

• by lxe on 3/2/23, 12:43 AM

  What are you (they?) using for text to speech? Elevenlabs? Azure TTS?

• by neoecos on 3/2/23, 2:00 AM

  I'd love to see tomorrow episode about themselves

• by LegitShady on 3/2/23, 3:53 AM

  the reason podcasts got so big to begin with is because traditional media have started having issues with authenticity. This exacerbates the problem. While it might save money over actually having a podcast, it removes everything thats appealing or interesting about podcasts, and starts with zero authenticity and goes down from there.

  Like, cool technical implementation, but a failure from concept.

• by collsni on 3/2/23, 1:23 AM

  The end of the news world as we know it.

  Will be very difficult to detect in the future and will result in trust issues / rampant fake news.

• by fortran77 on 3/2/23, 3:23 AM

  At least the AI reads the articles! That's more than the humans on the flesh-and-blood "Hacker News"

• by korroziya on 3/2/23, 3:35 AM

  Man, they're even taking jobs away from podcasters. Most of those people don't even make money from it.

• by kyriakos on 3/2/23, 4:53 AM

  What text to speech is used for the voices? They are quite impressive, making no mistakes with acronyms.

• by KerryJones on 3/2/23, 9:24 AM

  Very impressed you managed to do this day of the release -- are you open to sharing your repo?

• by totetsu on 3/2/23, 3:50 AM

  I just want something that reads real HN and makes and remembers unique TTS voices for each user.

• by schemathings on 3/2/23, 3:02 AM

  No RSS feed on the subscribe page?

• by LoveMortuus on 3/2/23, 10:32 AM

  It would be cool if there was an option to change the voices of the hosts.

• by abledon on 3/2/23, 5:13 AM

  The male voice is just like my audible book narrator, R.C. Bray... amazing!

• by hgarg on 3/2/23, 6:02 AM

  The voices are really good. Wonder what are they using for Text-To-Speech?

• by eppp on 3/2/23, 2:23 AM

  Are there any of these voice models that I can run locally?

• by thomasfromcdnjs on 3/2/23, 1:23 AM

  Just gotta comment on how cool this idea is.

• by born-jre on 3/2/23, 2:35 AM

  It pronounces GitHub as git-hu-b

• by pknerd on 3/2/23, 9:47 AM

  This is totally brilliant!

• by born-jre on 3/2/23, 2:32 AM

  damn, do know what will happen when we have multi modal large models ?

• by endisneigh on 3/2/23, 12:52 AM

  what a world - nice work

• by hbarka on 3/2/23, 7:43 AM

  So Kevin Durant is Zod?

• by quantum_state on 3/2/23, 12:11 PM

  It’s so boring …

• by yieldcrv on 3/2/23, 1:21 AM

  reminds me of Delamain