TED AI Podcast: Examining Artificial Intelligence (AI) From All Angles

Plus... Open to Debate Podcast Features High School Debate Champions & The Athletic re-starts women's soccer podcast: Full Time with Meg Linehan

In many states, an effort is underway to secure election integrity by training election officials to spot AI and deepfakes, which almost exclusively spread disinformation. It's a smart move. For example, in Arizona, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes recently had an AI representation of himself made and distributed in video as a training tool. You cannot tell the difference between the AI Fontes and the human Fontes. 

The opportunity for abuse is significant.

 As you know, TED Talks have a brand, and an impressive one at that. These "talks" are smart people saying smart things that other people either haven't noticed, have misinterpreted, or have ignored. How about a collection of podcasts for those not trapped by confirmation bias, meandering into misinformation, and shackled to conventional wisdom?

The TED Audio Collective is a collection of podcasts for the curious. It's for listeners who are as excited by psychology and design as they are by science and technology and want to dig deep into today’s most exciting ideas.

Their hosts range from TED speakers with viral TED Talks to veteran podcast producers, doctors, and academics. What do all of our hosts have in common? They explore big ideas, foster debate, and inspire change on a global scale. The TED Audio Collective includes podcasts like

TED Talks Daily, How to Be a Better Human, Conversations with People Who Hate Me, and more.

In this article, we'll look at The TED AI Show, a brand-new podcast hosted by AI-focused online personality Bilawal Sidhu. This new podcast will feature TED Talks regarding AI and aims to be AI-optimistic, but AI-realistic as well.

And the podcast won’t just be broadcasts of TED Talks; it’ll also feature interviews with figures from all sides of the AI world, like OpenAI’s Helen Toner – the person who fired Sam Altman from the OpenAI board.

 Sure, some predictions about AI are just hype – but others suggest that everything we know is about to fundamentally change. Creative technologist Bilawal Sidhu talks with the world’s leading experts, artists, and journalists to explore the thrilling, sometimes terrifying, future ahead.

 Bilawal Sidhu is a creator, engineer, and product builder obsessed with blending reality and imagination using art, science, and technology. His work has been featured by TED, BBC, The Verge, PetaPixel, Forbes, Benzinga, Esquire and more.

With more than a decade of experience in the tech industry, he spent six years as a product manager at Google. There, he made significant contributions to groundbreaking projects such as Google's Immersive View, ARCore Geospatial API and YouTubeVR. His work with organizations and people – including Warner Music, Pepsi, Elton John, and Gorillaz – underscores his talent for crafting engaging experiences through technology.

If the first episode is any indication of the show's intellectual depth and technological entanglement, then The TED AI Show will be an absorbing journey for listeners. In the first episode, Bilawal and Sam Gregory, a human rights activist and technologist, discuss how to protect our sense of reality.

Gregory is a fascinating guest who explains the mechanics of deepfakes. At one point, Gregory gives Bilawal and listeners an acronym used by experts to detect deepfakes. It's SIFT—STOP before you're emotionally triggered, INVESTIGATE the source, FIND alternative coverage, TRACE the original.

Sam Gregory concludes that, "We may end up in a world where you cannot upload imagery without having your identity tied to those identity.”

"That is a scary world," Gregory adds in a plaintive voice.

Gregory concludes that "There is a huge gap in access to detection tools for people who need it most, like journalists or election officials."

It's an episode that is not doomscrolling about AI, but more like a preparatory drill. In essence, the host and guest agree that, "We can handle this if we are ready."

Technology is typically agnostic, worshiping neither good nor evil. It's how people use the tech. Einstein knew that before the atomic bomb was built. Oppenheimer learned it afterward.

While AI via deepfakes audio and video can cause people to question their legitimacy, sadly, that ingrained skepticism has already been implanted in people by a human -- Donald Trump, who called the media "Fake News" anytime a new story did not coincide with his version of facts. Witness past and present crowd size exaggerations.

Check out The TED AI Show. It's easy to fear what we don't understand, but this show can help us control what we can learn to understand.

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Open To Debate is a superb debate podcast that teaches the media and listeners how to hold civilized and informative debates instead of partisan screaming matches. 

 Nonpartisan media organization Open to Debate has led the way in civilized debates—for adults and educators—in the U.S. for over a decade. For their latest episode, though, they’re going back to school, covering a recent high school debate championship of a new startup organization called Incubate Debate.

Just as Open to Debate does on the grownup level, making debate available to a broad national audience free of charge, Incubate Debate aims to democratize the art of debate for high school students, offering competitive training and tournaments at no cost to participants. The winners of the championship, including first place champion debater Briana Whatley, were awarded scholarship funds made possible by Open to Debate.

Open to Debate CEO Clea Conner explains what debate can do for high schoolers:

“The erosion of civil discourse that we’ve seen in institutes of higher learning this semester is alarming. The ability for students to consider views they disagree with and respond with civility and respect has become all too rare. We believe in the power of debate to teach critical thinking, active listening, empathy, and the ability to marshal evidence to understand complex issues. We are confident these students will model a more thoughtful way forward for their generation.”

Open to Debate reports from Jacksonville, Florida, hearing from some of the ninety kids competing, the best from their schools who were whittled down from over 5,000 who competed across 22 individual tournaments during the school year. They came from all backgrounds and all variety of schools (public, private, charter, and homeschool). In addition to Conner herself, judges included former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and “Street Epistemologist” and author Peter Boghossian.

Check out Open To Debate to hear a rare event -- an actual debate, high schoolers learning their debate craft, and an important topic such as DEI.

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The Athletic Relaunches ‘Full Time with Meg Linehan’ Podcast, Covering USWNT, NWSL And More

 I remember when sports reporting was the local newspaper's sports section, The Sporting News and Sports Illustrated magazine. Of course, sports reporting has gone digital and has a lot more competition. The crowded field of sports reporting digital outlets is driven by the growing popularity of sports, the growth of women's organized sports leagues, and

That's why, in January 2022, The New York Times Company bought The Athletic, an online sports news outlet with 1.2 million subscriptions, in an all-cash deal valued at $550 million.

The deal brought "The Times," which has more than eight million total subscriptions, quickly closer to its goal of having 10 million subscriptions by 2025 while also offering its audience more in-depth coverage of the more than 200 professional teams in North America, Britain, and Europe that are closely followed by The Athletic’s journalists.

From that purchase came a July 2023 announcement that The New York Times would disband its sports department and rely on coverage of teams and games from its website, The Athletic, both online and in print.

Joe Kahn, The Times’s executive editor, and Monica Drake, a deputy managing editor, announced the newsroom change as “an evolution in how we cover sports.”

“We plan to focus even more directly on distinctive, high-impact news and enterprise journalism about how sports intersect with money, power, culture, politics, and society at large,” the editors wrote in an email to The Times’s newsroom. “At the same time, we will scale back the newsroom’s coverage of games, players, teams and leagues.”

The shuttering of the sports desk, which has more than 35 reporters and editors, is a major shift for The Times. The department’s coverage of games, athletes, and team owners, and its Sports of The Times column, in particular, were once a pillar of American sports journalism.

So, with The Athletic as its core sports communications device,
the company announced the relaunch of the weekly women’s soccer podcast, “Full Time with Meg Linehan.” Meg is a senior writer for The Athletic, covering the NWSL and USWNT.

You may already be familiar with the podcast that launched in 2020, having recorded almost 150 episodes, but this new iteration is, as The Athletic claims, "bigger and better than ever."

Tamerra Griffin joins Meg as a co-host; you might already know her from her stories at The Athletic. She’s a former foreign correspondent and has written for ESPN, USA Today and other outlets. She joined The Athletic for the 2023 World Cup and produced some of my favorite stories from the tournament, whether she was covering Zambia, Colombia, or all the forms of self-expression from players.

New episodes drop every Thursday morning (and maybe more during the Olympics too, since Meg Linehan will be on the ground in France for the tournament). The first episode is out now, featuring a breakdown of Hayes’ first USWNT roster as well as special guests Duda Pavão, a content creator who was in Thailand as part of Brazil’s winning 2027 Women’s World Cup bid, and Kansas City Current and Brazilian forward Debinha.

Tamerra and Meg closed out with reactions to a shock resignation by Camille Ashton, and a preview of Friday night's top-billing meeting between the Orlando Pride vs. Portland Thorns.

Check out Full Time with Meg Linehan. First, because Linehan is a solid podcast host who knows soccer. Second, because there are not a lot of sports podcasts about women's sports. Third, the podcast is not the typical "sports show that says the craziest shit possible to get ratings" show (Skip Bayless, etc.).