I've reached the point where if I see a Facebook group share an AI image, I report it to admins to be a pain in the ass, drop a snidey comment and leave the group. Okay maybe that's an exagerration, but it totally pisses me off. I'd rather my unbelievable things be real, thanks. Otherwise, where's the magic in the world? I'm also super reluctant to accept AI copywriting. It's so samey and it's clearly there to sell ads. Give me human stories, please. Human experiences.

But then, AI can be damn useful. Asking Chat GPT to summarise an article, for example, so you get the gist of it without wasting your time. Ask it to create a pros and cons list for say, growing corn or investing in stocks and it'll give you a good overview. Ask it to check spelling, create a travel guide for a city you're visiting. It's definitely a tool I use often - I just don't like it being used to supplant human creativity or pretend to be human creativity. As an educator, I also believe we should be teaching these skills so we can do them independently of AI. Otherwise, wtf happens to our brains?

Google LM's Notebook is on my list of 'hey, this is cool so far' AI tools. It really does what it says on the tin - a notebook that, well, helps you take notes about anything. It's perfect for students as you can add any sources and then ask questions of the key material or even create an audio summary in the form of a podcast conversation between two characters, a table of contents, responses to pertinent questions and so on.

Image Via Unsplash

So, the first thing you can do is add sources - on the left hand side. You're going to be pretty biased with only one link, so for a less biased podcast, you're going to need a few more links or articles.

If you want to check out the audio, try clicking this link. It's utterly fascinating. It sounds legit like two podcasters chatting about the HIVE blockchain. Forget ploughing through the entire Hive.io website - this presents it as a podcast so that you can listen - why, whilst you're hiving!

It's interesting that one of the things that they pick up on is 'user friendly'. The whole thing is pretty positive actually - but of course, there's bias - as I've only plugged in 'Hive.io'

This time I put in two positive articles I've written about HIVE - one about the quality of posts here and another on how Hive is more alive than the rest of the Internet here. Remember this is just an experiment - it would be great to add a variety of positive posts about how HIVE works, the user experience and so on.

What resulted is something a little more complex. If you'd like to listen to that conversation, click here.

Now, I only put these together quickly just to experiement with how it works. It'd be cool to put it to an animation or a video for youtube. But I can also see it's use in many other ways:

• Uploading medical research so you can listen to a summary
• Uploading various study guides and articles on a book for the podcast to discuss key themes
• Uploading legal documents to get a user friendly summary

And so on. It's kinda fun - and complete with banter and various intonations that mimic human speech.

Jamie, as I was experimenting with this, created his own audio podcast on LandRovers (of course), using various links. It was actually quite interesting. IN some ways, it's easy to research a topic by uploading a heap of sources and getting Google to create an audio from it so you don't have to read a heap of articles. You could do a range of topics and listen to them whilst you're gardening or driving. You do have to put up with a few errors - for example, they read '2A' as 'i i a', as that's how it looks on paper.

What's irritating is the same voices - it'd be great to select different accents or genders according to what you like.

But it's definitely worth playing around with - a really interesting tool.

I'm not ready to replace actual podcasters yet, that's for sure - but I like it.

At the moment it's still at the testing phases so it's free. Check it out.