My, how the world has changed since I last posted a note here!
Recently I was alerted to a podcast called “The Dead Scientists”. The first 57 episodes feature intriguing summaries of The Feynman Lectures on Physics. Subsequent episodes feature Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein — or is it “Einsteim”? (See image below — the more I look at it, the more strange things I see.)
I am impressed — and perplexed. The series was created with AI — and it appears that no human checked the final product. It features a chatty conversation between a male and female voice (extraneous voices sometimes intrude), and does a commendable job of summarizing each lecture that it covers. The conversation also brings in interesting analogies and related topics, some of them contemporary, that sustain one’s interest. But then, out of the blue, embarrassing errors pop up that any human with a passing knowledge of the material would catch. A qualified editor could eliminate such bloopers.
One example: the lecture on harmonics (October 12 2024) features Pythagoras’ discovery that simple ratios create pleasing sounds. But the voices say an octave is a ratio of “two-point-one”, misreading 2:1 (“two-to-one”). This misreading undermines the key concept of rational fractions creating pleasant harmonies.
If anyone can put me in touch with the creators of The Dead Scientists podcast, I’d love to meet them, and learn how the podcast is produced. In the meantime, enjoy the “deep dives” and having your “mind blown” — but remember that it’s impressive-and-perplexing AI at work.
