ST. JOHNS COUNTY, Fla. – St. Johns County District 1 Commissioner Christian Whitehurst described an AI-generated podcast discussing county news as “deceptive and cowardly” during a recent commission meeting.
Whitehurst expressed concern that the podcast uses AI-generated voices that sound like humans, making it difficult for listeners to tell that it is not a real person speaking.
“If you’re going to raise concerns about what’s happening here, then we’d like to have that conversation with somebody. But because it’s AI, it’s a faceless bot essentially leveling these accusations,” Whitehurst said.
To better understand the issue, News4JAX spoke with Alex Mahadevan from the Poynter Institute, a nonprofit media organization. Poynter is the director of MediaWise, Poynter’s digital media literacy project that teaches people how to spot misinformation.
“The podcast you mentioned was absolutely generated with Notebook LM, which is a free Google tool.” He noted, “The thing that is wild is it sounds absolutely realistic. Anyone could fall for it.”
Discussing First Amendment rights and AI, Mahadevan said the legal landscape is still evolving. On copyright issues, he said, “The way an AI podcast like this works is the voices have to come from somewhere. And they’ve been trained on the voices of potentially actors who you know, need to get paid for their work or voice actors.”
Beyond copyright, Mahadevan emphasized concerns about factual accuracy.
“They just fill in the gaps, you know. It is like playing a game of telephone. The Notebook LM actually doesn’t hallucinate as much, but you still won’t get the full context that you would get if a real journalist like yourself sat down and recorded a podcast,” Mahadevan said.
Whitehurst hopes the creators of the AI podcast will reveal themselves so he can engage in a direct conversation about county issues.