Here are my artificial intelligence and journalism podcast recommendations, based on actual listening.
- Explained: The conspiracy to make AI seem harder than it is! by Spotify’s Gustav Söderström. For anyone looking for a good introduction — not a series, no storytelling, just 1.5 hours of solid explanation: This is the podcast you want. It’s from 2023, but still relevant. It covers generative AI, texts and images, and how it all works. David Bauer recommended it to me, thanks! One year later, Gustav discusses AI music, how generative AI is being used in recommender systems, and software.
- Newsroom Robots by Nikita Roy, a data scientist slash journalist who turned AI consultant. She interviews editors, prodoct managers, really all kinds of people in the news industry. The show features big names like Agnes Stenbom, Rune Ytreberg, Kaspar Lindskow, and Martin Schori, basically all the important players in AI and journalism. And it’s cool because it doesn’t just focus on American newsrooms, but takes a global perspective. (Just so you know, I attended Nikita’s AI Journalism Lab and was interviewed for an episode.)
- Shell Game, created and hosted by Evan Ratliff, an American journalist and author who has written for Wired, The New Yorker, and National Geographic. Ratliff investigates AI voice technology by cloning himself. His voice bot talks to customer service agents, both robots and humans, and even to his wife. This isn’t a mere joke or quick attempt, it’s a thorough investigation into AI voice technology. Shell Game is at times funny, but also provides an unsettling glimpse into our very near future.
- Good Robot, a narrative series by Julia Longoria for Vox’ Unexplainable. Four episodes exploring the ideologies behind the technology and the key people driving its development. It’s about money, power, and young college dropouts living in shared apartments who want to change the world for altruistic reasons. And it’s really good!
- Hard Fork with Kevin Roose and Casey Newton is the New York Times’ tech podcast and currently the best and definitely funniest overview of the week’s AI news. Not exactly a hidden gem, but still worth mentioning. The guest list is really impressive, for example: Anthropic’s C.E.O. Dario Amodei on Surviving the A.I. Endgame or Google’s Steven Johnson on building NotebookLM.
- Black Box by Michael Safi for The Guardian is a seven-part narrative series from 2024. It covers everything: the invention of the Transformer, AI relationships, deepfakes, medical research, predictive policing. It gives you the big picture view. Really well-produced, and at the very least a good snapshot of our current moment. We’ll see how well it ages.
- Two episodes of The Ezra Klein Show have stuck with me: There’s one from 2024 with Ethan Mollick, author of Co-Intelligence, who sees AI empowering average employees – a positive outcome. Then there’s an episode with Nilay Patel, the head of The Verge, discussing the future of the web and why AI-generated content could potentially make everything collapse.
- Robin Sloan on Dan Shipper’s AI and I. I’ve only listened to this one episode of the show. Robin Sloan writes clever books, and his current one, Moonbound, is a space fantasy centered around LLMs. Sloan finds them fascinating, although not particularly creative. In the episode, he talks about all the experiments he’s conducted and the programming he’s done himself.
