Automated News, Podcast Robots - by Hans Beers - May 15, 2026

Automated News, Podcast Robots - by Hans Beers - May 15, 2026 Description: Hans from the Netherlands shares his experience using AI tools like Gemini and NotebookLM to automate the generation of news content, particularly podcasts about AI topics. He explores the business case, workflow, and risks of AI-generated journalism, including the critical need for content validation. Slides on GDrive: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1dmj00iilSP-JYmriMUUaHCKz5X54e3UX?ths=true Slides on GitHub - https://github.com/lselector/seminar (click on pptx file, then on "raw" or download button on the right) ---- Takeaways: 1. AI tools like Gemini and NotebookLM can fully automate the news podcast pipeline, from sourcing articles on platforms like arXiv to scripting and audio/video generation, dramatically reducing costs and enabling a scalable business model. 2. There is a missing validation step in most AI content pipelines. Without it, misinformation, hallucinations, and retracted sources can pollute the output at the very first stage of the process. 3. The problem of unreliable content is not new or unique to AI. Even in scientific publishing, sloppy science, fraud, and non-reproducible research have caused real-world harm, making curation and validation essential. ---- Quotes: "We already start the pollution or the misinformation at the first step using information that is incorrect." "More than 50% of the experiments, the publications, were not reproducible." "If you can reduce the cost and if you can automate it, then you can make a cash machine out of it." ---- Summary: In this talk I share how I use Gemini and NotebookLM to automate the creation of daily AI news podcasts. I walk through the legacy manual workflow versus a modern AI pipeline that ingests sources, curates content, generates scripts, and produces audio or video output. I demonstrate a real example where Gemini built me an automated daily update from arXiv articles, delivered each morning to my devices. I also stress a missing step in most pipelines, namely validation, drawing parallels to Richard Harris's book Rigor Mortis and real cases of scientific fraud with serious consequences. Curation matters, whether for podcasting or science. ---- Keywords: AI, Gemini, NotebookLM, automation, podcast, news generation, arXiv, content pipeline, validation, curation, hallucination, misinformation, Rigor Mortis, scientific fraud, reproducibility, journalism, LLM, scripting ----