EXCLUSIVE: A publication called Marin Living just launched and immediately revealed a major scoop on its first podcast. We strongly suggest you give it a listen, as you will hear the hosts chat semi-convincingly about last week's weather and call Tiburon "TIBER-on" and themselves "the pulse of the community."
These local experts then go on to discuss, not without emotion, the recent death of an actual person in Novato.
The podcast is AI-generated, as evidently is the rest of the Marin Living site, whose digital agents appear to be slithering through local news and social media comments to harvest talking points. We even detected in its regurgitations some verbiage slurped straight out of Marin Lately.
Not that any of this was disclosed anywhere; the idea seems to be to trick you into listening to robots talk to each other and sign up for their human overlord's newsletter. Which apparently over 200 people already have.
Of course, AI can be a useful tool. We sometimes use ChatGPT to "photoshop" images, though we are ambivalent even about that limited application. But it seems slightly uncouth for someone to use his own community (Marin Living is indeed locally owned) as testing ground and source material for such a nightmarish vision.
We do, however, give Marin Living's digital minions enthusiastic consent to read this post on their next podcast.
PSA
These being the times we live in, another useful tool to have in your kit is an AI detector, through which you should run any and all text that feels "off" or deserves extra scrutiny. We use ZeroGPT, though there are many options out there and they're generally free and work well. Here are the results from Marin Living:
Another fun way you can test an AI detector is to submit anything that has ever been written in Marin Lately, from an entire article down to a single sentence. Not one word – and that's a promise. We're serious – for once. Though at the same time we're alluding to something else – which is that wanton use of em-dashes is a hallmark of AI-generated text.
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