AI-generated podcasts: Synthetic Intimacy and Cultural Mistranslation in NotebookLM's Audio Overviews

Abstract

This paper analyses AI-generated podcasts produced by Google's NotebookLM, which generates audio podcasts with two chatty AI hosts discussing whichever documents a user uploads. While AI-generated podcasts have been discussed as tools, for instance in medical education, they have not yet been analysed as media. By uploading different types of text and analysing the generated outputs I show how the podcasts' structure is built around a fixed template. I also find that NotebookLM not only translates texts from other languages into a perky standardised Mid-Western American accent, it also translates cultural contexts to a white, educated, middle-class American default. This is a distinct development in how publics are shaped by media, marking a departure from the multiple public spheres that scholars have described in human podcasting from the early 2000s until today, where hosts spoke to specific communities and responded to listener comments, to an abstraction of the podcast genre.

This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement number 101142306. The project is also supported by the Center for Digital Narrative, which is funded by the Research Council of Norway through its Centres of Excellence scheme, project number 332643. Media, Culture & Society, online first (2026)

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