Do you want an easy way to get up to speed on the proposed Vienna gym/pool complex?
The link below directs you to a podcast discussing the topic. It’s an audio (.WAV) file stored on Google Drive.
I disagree with a couple of minor points those podcasters made, but, by and large, I think they nailed it. Link to file, below.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OdvrQWcCJhUC4JxEEZJi28-IMnfOWeGG/view
But maybe you want to read the whole post before you listen to that podcast.
Background
Last month, the Town of Vienna mailed postcards to its residents, seemingly to drum up support for a proposed Vienna municipal pool/gym. On that postcard, they said the pool would be paid for by a small increase in the meals tax.
They somehow forgot to mention that, in addition, an annual family membership to the pool/gym is going to cost you around $1K/year. And that, on top of that, general tax revenues would still be needed to cover this facility’s operating costs.
So I called it as I saw it: The Town sent us a bit of taxpayer-financed propaganda (Post #2039).
But what can you do, if your own Town government has the wherewithal to generate a mass mailing that gives everybody in Town the impression that the pool will be free?
But now, via a couple of smart guys here in town, two may play, on the propaganda front.
The back-story on this podcast
I know this guy Ed. He’s lived here in Vienna for a while. Ed’s literally a rocket scientist.
Ed knows a guy Ray, via a local citizens’ organization (NEVCA). I’m not quite sure what Ray did for a living. (And, sometimes, in the DC area, don’t ask. Like, if the answer comes back as a bland “I work for the Federal government”, it’s best just to drop the subject and politely move on.)
Couple of sharp guys. That’s all I’m saying.
Ray fed my recent post on the proposed Vienna Pool into a Google AI product called NotebookLM. He asked the AI to produce a podcast that summarized them. And the AI produced 15-minute-long audio recording in podcast style (a .WAV file).
The result is a stunning piece of propaganda. Listen to these two nice young people, who are trying to help you understand what’s going on. Listen to them long enough, and you start agreeing with them.
I know I agree with them. Because I told them what to say, content-wise. All the AI did is make my words seem extremely attractive and believable.
That podcast is just an attractive re-packaging of the contents of my dry-as-dust blog posts on this topic. It is, in effect, the 21st-century propaganda version of my blog. Done with off-the-shelf, readily-available software.
Mwahahaha.
But wait, there’s more …
The AI did get a few things wrong, in the sense that, when fed my content exclusively, it garbled an issue or two, and produced a tangent or two that wasn’t mentioned in any of my posts.
At which point, Ray pulled another rabbit out of his hat, in the form of Descript. Another jaw-dropping tool.
- Feed Descript a recording of a conversation.
- Descript will spit out a written transcript.
- Edit the written transcript to remove something you don’t like.
- And Descript will modify the recording to make it look as if you never said it.
So I pointed out the errors. Ray fixed them with Descript fix them. I’ve replaced the original podcast file with the link shown above.
The current version that has now passed official Party censorship, and is certified to reflect nothing but the Party line.
I can now erase this part of the blog post.
And all those original errors will go straight down the memory hole. As should all unorthodox thought.
They never existed. Neither did this section of this post.
Conclusion: Postcards? We don’t need no stinkin’ postcards.
In the age of AI, anybody can play at the propaganda game. And, sometimes, it seems like everybody does.
While I’m not so sure that winning the propaganda war is a good thing, I guess it beats losing it.
I guarantee that, knowing what it is — this is an AI-generated summary of my posts, in the form of a podcast-style conversation — listening to it will be an eye-opening experience. Particularly when you realize that — as Ray seems to have indicated — if you know the right AI, anybody can produce stuff like this.
I’m not so sure that’s a good thing. Effective, sure. Good? Maybe.
In particular, if I’d purposefully written a lot of lies in this blog, that AI would have done its damnedest to package those lies into an equally-seductive podcast.
Anyway, I found the AI-generated podcast (link above) to be a jaw-dropping-ly good summary of the core issues. But, only as I see them.
It’s scary good. If good is the word for it. If hadn’t told you the back-story, you’d have thought you were listening to two independent voices, discussing this issue. Which is pretty much exactly the point.
