Authenticity Not Guaranteed

This week Ian and Michael discuss the increasingly uncomfortable feeling that much of the internet is no longer populated by people but by bots talking to other bots. From there the conversation wanders into reality television and its occasionally tenuous relationship with reality, before moving on to language learning through books, films, and sheer persistence. As usual, the topics may not appear to have much in common, but questions of what is real, authentic, or merely convincing seem to crop up rather more often than expected. Plus a few tangents into video games and German pastries, and a new instalment of Emma Williams' Artificial Reflections.(This episode features AI-generated content and speech)