AI-generated podcasts: Synthetic intimacy and cultural mistranslation in audio overviews from Google’s NotebookLM

Abstract

This paper analyses AI-generated podcasts produced by Google’s NotebookLM, which generates audio podcasts where two chatty AI hosts discuss whichever documents a user uploads. While AI-generated podcasts have been discussed as tools, for instance in medical education, they have not yet been analysed as media. By uploading different types of text and analysing the generated outputs I show how the podcasts’ structure is built around a fixed template. I also find that NotebookLM not only translates texts from other languages into a perky, standardised Mid-Western American English, it also translates cultural contexts to a white, educated, middle-class American default. This is a distinct development in how publics are shaped by media, marking a departure from the multiple public spheres that scholars have described in human podcasting from the early 2000s until today, where hosts spoke to specific communities and responded to listener comments, to an abstraction of the podcast genre. This paper contributes both to research on the use of generative AI in media and to research on cultural bias in LLMs.