I recently came across a podcast episode that caught my attention, and I think you’ll enjoy it too. The show is called Legends & Lore, and in their 37th episode, hosts Mike Parker and Sarah Caldwell take a deep dive into the life of Texas Jack Omohundro—yep, the same Texas Jack I wrote about in Texas Jack: America’s First Cowboy Star. Give it a listen and see what you think:
Now for the rub. That's not a real podcast. In fact, those aren't even real people. The podcast—script, voices, image, and all—was created by AI. I did nothing other than upload a PDF of my book and let the AI run. I gave it no guidance at all. Creating this AI-generated podcast was an intriguing process that revealed the impressive—and sometimes unsettling—capabilities of modern technology. Using Google's NotebookLM AI, the system analyzed the source material of Texas Jack: America’s First Cowboy Star, which I wrote. It scanned through the PDF of my book, extracting key themes, historical details, and narrative elements. The AI didn’t just summarize the material but crafted a script based on those details, designing it to sound like a human narrative, as if it were a podcast written, recorded, and produced by real people.
After generating the script, the next step was to turn it into something that sounds like actual human voices. The AI used advanced text-to-speech technology, trained on enormous datasets of human speech, to create a lifelike narration. It didn’t just spit out words but modulated tone, pitch, and pace in ways that mimic real emotions and conversational flow. The AI-generated voice could add pauses, emphasize certain points, and create a sense of personality, all without a single human voice actor being involved. I asked a different AI to create an image of two podcasters and to give them and their podcast a name. I slapped the image and the audio together, and that's the video you saw above.
So here’s something I want to ask you: As you listen, can you tell this isn’t real people talking? If you found this podcast on platforms like Spotify or Apple Podcasts, would you be able to suspect that it was entirely created by AI? This is where things get interesting. The line between human and machine-made content is becoming so thin that it’s almost indistinguishable at times.
And here’s where I think we all need to be cautious. It’s one thing when you can notice AI around you, but it’s another thing—potentially even more unnerving—when you stop noticing it. When AI becomes so convincing that you can no longer tell the difference between something created by humans and something created by a machine, we’re in a new territory altogether. The question is, how will we deal with a world where it’s increasingly difficult to separate the two?
Comments